Zombie Survival in Doomenstein 3D

Timeline: 3 months

Description: Create a mashup of Doom, Wolfenstein, and Call of Duty Zombies in a home-grown 3D game engine.

Blinn-Phong Lighting

I added point lights and spotlights to my engine. I added lighting to data-driven level definitions with options for radius, intensity and different linear and radial attenuation curves. The set of lighting utilities I created for this project I’ve used in several subsequent lit 3d projects in my engine.

A point light and a spot light shown with different settings and used by the map geometry’s Blinn-Phong material.

Rendering Optimization

Alongside this development came a more flexible Material pipeline and new graphics optimizations for rendering a large scene.

The blocked scene geometry was built into one simplified mesh by welding vertices that were nearly identical. This technique would become the basis of first-pass graphics optimizations in later projects.

A view from above of the indexed consolidated mesh of an early map.

Zombie Survival Shooter

On top of classic Doom and Wolfenstein mechanics, I added a zombie wave survival mode comparable to the Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies mode. In this mode, the player collects points by killing pinkies which they use to buy a variety of new weapons off of the wall or unlock doors. Map geometry is generated from an image file and actors are placed according to xml. (examples below)

The main map of Doomenstein 3D. Each texel in this represents a specific 1 meter x 1 meter block (e.g. Green = Grass). This image is fed into the map generator to make level geometry.

An excerpt from an XML document describing the locations of actors on the map.