More soon - if you're curious about anything, fire away! And I've never developed anything in the dark again. Hence, the gamma slider was added which literally saved us. To us, it looked great! Then, when it went to QA, in their florescent bathed room light, they couldn't see anything. The reason Doom64 is so dark, is because we (the Level Designers) were developing it in our offices, which had no windows and we kept the lights off. Also, the original pitch (the mayan stuff) was scrapped because I think the theme was too foreign to Dooms lore and ID wanted it to be more based in the current lore. In Doom, this would look bad, but in Doom64, the sky was drawn behind everything, and we realized we could fake lower ceilings (by having a sector behind it go up past it to be the 'wall') to give that impression of 3d. We had an outdoor sector who's height was lower than a neighboring sector, but had sky. The reason we could 'fake' 3d was because of a happy accident during the initial Doom64 pitch (those mayan/etc looking levels first shown). It was much like Basic - linear list of functions based on line numbering. As fast as we could come up with ideas, Aaron (the coder) got them in. Every idea we had, from copying a sectors floor/wall/ceiling texture tags, lighting info, to timed delays (spinning lights, etc) that could all be bound to one function, made D64 what it is.
The scripting system made Doom64 so unique. We (the D64 LD team) were already editing Quake levels in our spare time by then, but were not part of the Q64 team (politics mostly). Doom64 did do pretty well, but the thought was Quake64 was going to do much better than another sequel. The reason it wasn't completed is a bit of politics, but mostly, we (Midway) had been tapped to do Quake64 and resources went there.
We were getting better with abusing our custom scripting system and had some cool stuff in the works. The levels we had done, if memory serves, took place on the moon (or some planet) surface. It was great, despite the whole 'can see you on the same TV' thing. We had a fair number of levels done but the top priority was multiplayer, which was already in and fully playable. There was a Doom64 sequel, called Absolution, in the works. Here's some info I can recall that I don't know if we've shared (beyond the fact there was a sequel). Doom (as a player/LD) and Doom64/Doom PSX (as Dev) hold very special places in gamedev memory for me (and the LD crew even still - Dan Lewis is my best friend to this day). Glad these unseen levels got out there (good or bad!) - thank ImpieEyez95 for finding me and inquiring! Thought I'd hop in and maybe answer some random questions and wax nostalgic.
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