Prison Station 353

A level I made in DOOM Snapmap. Environment Art, Visual Scripting and Level Design done by me, so more or less everything you see. It’s a single player level and you play as a prisoner that wakes up after something has gone wrong at their Prison Station.

If you want to play the map yourself the map ID is: P7PH47GU

Prison Station 353

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I wanted to make a level with an easy to understand objective. So I chose the objective to be “Escape!”, but you don’t know where the exit is. This is both an easy to understand objective and allows for some exploration and discovery of the world, which let me use some environmental storytelling to tell the story of the Prison Station. I also really wanted to test to have some exploration opportunities which I rewarded heavily. So progress would be a lot harder if you didn’t find time to explore.

Layout

The player goal is to find the exit. It’s a linear level with some backtracking and exploration. The path to the exit is not known to the player so it’s a lot of exploring forward. Encountering enemies along the way and having to de-activate a gate in the mid section of the level to continue.

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I tried to keep the pace a mix between exploration, easy combat, challenging combat and re-suppling. I also mixed in some light platforming elements in the game to break up the pace even further.

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Focused Pace Breakdown

Below is a smaller focused pace breakdown of the middle part of the level. Where you go and turn off the reactors.

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The difficulty was also steadily increased, usually by introducing new harder enemies as a reaction to something or a “moment”, for instance when you open the security door and the Imps are introduced. Where before you had only faced lesser enemies.

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Environmental Storytelling

I wanted to tell a story in the world, how people had struggled to get out or tried to activate the stations defences. What had been the last moments of the people on the station.

In the pictures below, you can see some Engineers had been attacked, one had survived with a pistol and crawled through the prison and eventually died agains a wall. The blood also helped me guide the player towards the location of the pistol.

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Guiding Player With Light

I kept the level dark to get the feeling of an abandoned station and that the power had more or less went out. This allowed me to use lights to guide and focus the players attention.

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Rewarding Exploration

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To reward exploration I put most weapons in sections of the map that requires some exploration. After the player has acquired a new weapon I have a scenario where they can immediately use it. For example getting a grenade and then using it to do damage to shileded enemies.

Pace/Tension Control

DOOMCloserToHell_01To increase the tension but still having a slower pace I added a lot of Hell assets to make it look like you were getting closer to where the Demons had their lair, more fire, gore and guts on the floor.

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Final Word

I had a lot of fun creating this map, and I also learned a lot. There are a couple of things I would like to change in the map. I think an interconnected level design would go a long way in a corridor shooter like this, so having paths you can see but can’t access, and then later in the playthrough when you can access those areas you recognize the surroundings. Thats a really powerful effect and makes for very belivable worlds, Dark Souls does this very well.

It was an interesting challange to create a level with a limited toolset. Since I can’t create my own rooms or themes, I need to fit the story into what is already there, which is very fun and challanging. All in all I’m pretty happy with how the level turned out.