Few games and studios are as groundbreaking as id Software's Wolfenstein 3D. The game was a PC game masterpiece from the early 1990s, and many of the industry's major products were derived from it, including first-person games, episodic content, and parkour concepts. GameDeveloper collated what the studio's founder and game design icon John Romero shared at this year's GDC 2022 conference, introducing the game's development history and revealing the key takeaways from careless ideas to the completion of the development of the game.
The first part of Romero's talk details the slightly shabby origins of Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D, from a small team in Madison, Wisconsin, to the near-acquisition of Sierra Entertainment, to the studio's relocation to Dallas, Texas, after the game's release. His detailed description of the composition of the different parts of the game is a good case study of the FPS category.
Here's the full content of the GameLook compilation:
The birth of FPS
In the early 1990s, id Software was a very busy company because Romero told us that in the second half of 1991, the studio started and released 5 games. After months of working on the Commander Keen series (4, 5, 6) and having just finished a creative prototype, Remero announced to his team, "I don't want to make another series of games."
Adrian Carmack agreed with his idea, and after realizing the problem, creative director Tom Hall came up with the idea of "Hover Tank 1 upgraded, but can walk around in the first person", which Romero said immediately brought him a new idea: a new version of the classic 1981 game Wehrmacht HQ, "the idea was immediately approved".
Development began in mid-January 1992 using the Catacomb 3D engine, which uses a 16-color EGA model. Studio artist Adrian Carmack set out to work on 16-color sprites, quickly realizing how big the project was, and that the characters in the game as sprites in 3D space might need to be depicted as full rotational animations, meaning that all their faces needed to be displayed in multiple dynamics.
For help, they approached Apogee Software developer Jim Norwood, who did all the art and programming for his game. Six months before wehrmacht 3D began, he had just gotten his hands on id Software's Commander Keen engine to develop his own game, Bio Menace.
Jim began doing 16-color sprite spins based on Adrian's work, but after a call from publisher Apogee Software founder Scott Miller, the company quickly turned in a new direction. Miller was very interested in Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D, which would be Apogee's first 3D game. At the end of the call, Romero said, Miller suggested they use the 256 VGA palette instead of the 16 EGA, a huge change that doesn't seem to have brought much change to programmer John Carmack, who said he could program "cleaner" and "faster."
Artist Adrian Carmack then decided to handle the transition from EGA to VGA himself, choosing the "Perfect Palette" because "unlike EGA, which uses a fixed palette of only 16 colors, VGA's 256 palelet slots could each be one of 16 million columns."
The team decided that each chapter would have 10 levels, and their plan was to do a shared chapter and two additional paid chapters, and John made a shader within a week, slow enough to test the early stages of the game. Levels are presented through a 2D matrix, Romero says, like the Ted5 level editor he made for Commander Keen. At a time when the game resolution was generally 320X200, Romero began working on treading Ted5 to create levels for Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D.
"We used Commander Keen's level loading code and set up the level to add walls to the editor's background layer, and we had characters, items, and paths on the front layer." Hall, meanwhile, was designing enemies and made four types: Killer, Dog, Guard, SS, and Boss, and set out to make icons for them within Ted5, including enemies, items, wall types, and doors. He also gave Adrian conceptual art as a sprite model, which Adrian quickly began to do, textured all the objects and walls, and rotated the enemy's whole body to create a spinning effect, "Each spin requires walking an animation loop, including being hit, designing, and dying, which requires a lot of work." ”
Chapter 1 Level 1
However, doing so means that Hall will start working on levels in Ted5, starting with the first level of the first chapter. Romero said, "We want the audio of Wehrmacht Headquarters to stand out, and the SoundBlaster sound card performs a lot better than Adlib FM synchronization because it has digital audio playback, so we can recreate the Enemy Speech at Wehrmacht Headquarters and add real gunfire."
The music format is still MIDI, and all marketing has a MIDI version and a compatible PC speaker version, mainly to prevent players from not having a SoundBlaster sound card.
As the team began to build gameplay, they initially sought to redo all of the stealth features in the original game, "searching for corpses, dragging these guards so that enemy soldiers could see them and become suspicious, trying to break into shops or lockers, or things and equipment." ”
But while they added these features to the game and played them often, they noticed that the more interesting part of the game was still "running and shooting." Stopping to drag the guard or opening the treasure chest drastically reduces the innovative high-speed running and shooting Nazis, which is the core fun of the game. ”
"The whole time you're making a game, you're trying to find fun as quickly as possible, and sometimes the fun doesn't exist in the features you think might be interesting, so you have to listen to what the game says. The fun of "Wehrmacht" is running at high speeds and very exciting shooting gameplay, and Gatling's gunshots and enemy exclamations, pain, and death are the core of the game." Romero said that removing speed actually simplifies game design, everything that slows down the game is abandoned, and in order to maintain the rhythm of the game, the stealth function was cut from the beginning of development.
Fly south over the winter
By February 1992, the team was already working on "all parts" of the game, the enemy design was progressing well, knives, pistols, and machine guns were being used, visual clarity was improving, and Adrian had created wall textures that made the first level look like a castle prison. By the end of February, the engine was very powerful, "We added several Nazis to the game, and we added SS and Demu, and we added the control path so that they could move back and forth, making the game feel more realistic." ”
As Romero talked about the session, Romero spent several minutes talking about how it all went, and id Software sent a copy of Commander Keen to Ken and Roberta Williams, founders of Shelley Mountain Entertainment, who invited the team to their home to talk about business.
The talk was legendary, but ultimately unsuccessful, and Ken wasn't particularly impressed with Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D, offering an offer after hearing that id Software had generated incredible monthly revenues. But when Romero and the team asked for a signing bonus in addition to the stocks offered, Ken gave up entirely, and id Software eventually released Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D without Schönberg Entertainment joining.
An innovative feature they added to enhance the suspense of the game was the sound zone, which allowed them to isolate the noise created by the player in a particular room so as not to alarm enemies in other areas. When the player shoots, they want certain types of enemies to hear the gunshots, but they don't want all enemies to be activated and all of them flood into the room to attack the player. As a result, they added background maps, formulated special areas, and assigned them according to the type of map map used, while maintaining a uniform look and feel within the game. These areas are planned with 36 special colored stickers, and if you make noise, all the guards with the same type of stickers can hear it, even if it is within a room far away from the map. Opening a room also triggers a "sound area" that allows noise to flow into the next room, turning the player into a self-destructer based on the speed of sound.
At this point, the team decided they needed more help with game development, so they approached Kevin Cloud and hired him as an assistant artist for Adrian Carmack. After successfully passing the interview (and discussing how bad the Wisconsin winter was at one o'clock in the morning), Romero, Adrian, and John thought Dallas might be a better place to finish the project.
They quickly decided to move south, with Romero being the first to move in, along with Apgee Software publisher Scott Miller and George Broussard, hoping to find five suites for the team, one of which would be used as an office.
In the move, they also recruited another person from Softdisk, Jay Wilbur, whom Romero has known since 1986. He and Cloud began working on April 1, while the entire team worked on the game during March, crafting levels and enemies, making game menus, and working with composer Bobby Prince to create game music. It was at this point that they discovered that something was missing from the game, namely the mysterious areas that often appeared in other games.
"Because we couldn't hide a secret room, we decided the best way was to create a 'push ball' where the player could press the spacebar on the wall, and if they could push, you could hear the stones sliding and then you could unfold a new area."
John Carmack doesn't want to add to these because such a "backdoor" could infringe on his code "sanctity." But the team insisted on doing so, saying they needed to push the wall of gameplay to give players more things to find, "we needed something extra, something hidden, something mysterious." By April, John Carmack had "heard this request countless times and finally added the wall-pushing game to the engine," which Hall was excited about and added a lot of mystery passages to the first chapter.
With Kevin Cloud and Jay Wilbur joining in early April, the team was nearing the finish line, and one of Wilbur's missions was to find out who currently owned the trademark rights to Wehrmacht Headquarters and how to buy it. In 1981, When Wehrmacht Headquarters was published by Muse Software, a company based in Maryland, Wilbur had to look for a trademark owner in the Baltimore area due to the lack of development of the Internet at this time, and a woman bought ownership of the game after Muse went bankrupt. They bought back the trademark for $5,000, and after brainstorming, they decided to name the game Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D.
Brilliant marketing
In mid-April, they thought it was time to add audio to the game, and they had already got a couple of tracks that Bobby Prince had created remotely, but they needed sound effects, and thought Prince needed to experience the game himself to design the music that felt right. So they let Prince fly to the office and gave him a lot of equipment, including a sample keyboard and a high-quality microphone to record all the sounds in the game, and the dubbing work was done by Hall and Romero.
Adrian made all the shooting sounds for the SS guards, and they had a lot of fun designing them. However, when they were doing the first chapter (free sharing chapter), they suddenly fell into a time-critical situation: it was already the middle of the month, and the team still had to record all the sounds of the three chapters, because Bobby Prince needed to leave before the game was released in June.
Scott Miller of Apogee is also asking when they can finish the shared chapter, and his new idea is to release the game as soon as it is ready and start accepting orders for the full game. However, at this time, the work on the second and third chapters has not yet begun, but the form of game design has been determined, and they can quickly complete the rest of the level production.
"The idea was that he would upload the shared version and start selling it, and we needed to quickly complete the remaining two chapters, which was 20 more levels so that the full version of the game could be sent to customers." It was then that he had begun to think about the pricing model for the game, and Miller had another idea, thinking that if he could sell another 3 chapters of The Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D, he could make a game guide and add to the game pricing.
For $35, players can get 30 levels in the three chapters of Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D, plus $15, they can get another 30 levels, and for another $10, they can get a guide to 60 levels, which was very practical before the internet became popular, and this idea inspired a marketing method that continued to introduce content for several years after the game's release.
With three more chapters to go, the team went into overtime mode at the end of April, and in order to emphasize the amazing magnitude of the violent elements of Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D, Hall and Romero made a fake rating interface, making Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D the first self-rated game.
As time moved into May and the game was barely released, Romero began the release process, including placing the game files on a floppy disk for distribution. Until then, their game had always been on a 1.44 MB disk, but Wehrmacht 3D was much larger, and Romero had to think of a new way.
"I also need two tools, one as the entire Zip file of the game and split it into different pieces, so that I can distribute it to multiple disk vendors, and then I need an installer that aggregates all the game data scattered across those disks, puts it on the player's hard drive, and unzips the game."
He adds, "I had to speed things up and in just six hours I wrote a tool for splitting Zip files, which I call ICE, which stands for Installation Creation Editor, and then we needed to build a de-ICE program that fused and decompressed all the data from different disks." I also hope that players will not accidentally mess up the order of files, so this program also solves the order of fragmented files. ”
Romero said the installer took 2 days to develop, but over the years, he gave the tool to Apogee so they could distribute bigger games in the future.
On May 4, the team worked overtime again until late at night, the clock was set to May 5, Adrian's birthday, and all of them continued to test the game. Jay Wilbur made sure all the files were correct, such as the order of readme and server distribution; Apogee founders Scott Miller and George Broussard stayed there until 4 a.m., Romero said, logging into the Software Creations BBS forum created by id Software to distribute all of their games, moderator Dan Linton used ASCII textual art to show players The Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D, and Romero said that this time was exhausting but jubilant, "We are very tired but also very sure that everything has changed." ”
As Miller and Broussard prepare to make disks on a large scale, id Software also begins to develop the next three chapters, despite the challenges of Fatal Fury and Street Fighter 2, and the next 20 levels are finally completed before the end of May. When submitting the main disk to Miller, Romero found that the first three chapters didn't sell well, with the $60 set, including the game guide, accounting for 99 percent of the order.
By the end of the month, they had 4,000 orders, securing $250,000 a month in revenue, a fivefold increase from their previous earnings. Romero quipped, "That's what drives us," and he and Hall decided to work overtime to get it done as soon as possible. At the same time, Kevin Cloud also began to make game guides, which Romero called the creation of this game guide a "highlight moment" throughout the development of "Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D", because it was challenging to tell players in a fresh and interesting way to "kill the guards and get the keys".
In the process of creating the game guide, Romero and the team also suddenly got parkour inspiration, because the game is very focused on speed, Romero made a quick playthrough record during the game's run, and these scores uninstalled the guide part of each level. Their next game, Doom, adds a more formal ability to record and replay gameplay, a feature Romero says existed at least two years ago but has never been able to experience.
After the test was completed, on June 15, Romero made the main disk with ICE and handed it over to Scott Miller in Apogee, the first time he had handed the game over to someone else, as copies of the game had previously been emailed. In general, the development of "Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D" took four months, and the other content development took 2 months, a total of six chapters of content, for a six-person studio, it is inconceivable to do six chapters of content in six months, Romero said in summary, "You all know the story later".
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