Before DOOM

The August 2019 Challenge on GameDev.net has been announced and it is about recreating DOOM with current technology. I missed the original DOOM craze in the 1990s although I had developed some computer games in the decade before that. So I first had to look at the Wikipedia entry on DOOM to see what it was all about.

What a coincidence that the story, created in 1993, begins in 2019! Mars is supposed to be colonised by now with experiments being done on teleportation between Mars and its two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos. One interpretation of the plot is that the teleportation machines are subverted so that they spew out horrible creatures from some unknown origin - hell? The creatures are determined to attack us and they must therefore be exterminated, which forms the action of the game.

As I have not seen the original DOOM I am not qualified to respond directly to GameDev.net's challenge but it set me thinking tangentially. What about a prequel to DOOM, where the teleporters are being tested before being installed on Mars and its moons? Let us imagine that the testing was not thorough enough, leaving vulnerabilities to be exploited by hackers.

Pre-DOOM is thus about the laboratory in which 3 teleporters are to be tested before being set up in their intended locations. The player will try each machine out and complete a test report. If all seems satisfactory we then have to consider what could still be wrong. Perhaps there is something outside the testing lab?

My little game is written in JavaScript with an HTML5 front page. It is entirely client-based. It uses the HTML5 2D graphics context but no other libraries or frameworks. I have adapted it from another HTML5 game of mine, The Forest, an explanation of which can be found here. Pages after that describe the history (from 1982) and programming details. Pre-DOOM uses my own photographs for some of the graphics, just like The Forest.

The game is available completely free here: https://www.grelf.net/predoom  There are just some untidinesses to be addressed.

www.grelf.net
August 2019