Skulldash: Expanded Edition
Skulldash: 9 Years In The Making
What is Skulldash, exactly? Well, I’ve commonly described it as “the fast-paced speedrun arcade mod For Doom II”. The objective in Skulldash is to collect the Skulltokens scattered around each level to unlock the exit, all while doing battle with the usual forces of hell (and a few beefier additions) while racing against the clock! If you fail to obtain enough Skulltokens before the time runs out, you explode into a pool of blood and guts… Charming!
Complete with bosses, bonus maps, unique gimmicks and over 50 levels, Skulldash is sure to give you hours of entertainment if you enjoy your Doom with a little bit of a twist.
The First 7 Years of Skulldash
Skulldash started its life as a secret map for the TEN Community Project, which you can read about here. When I’d finished making the secret map I felt that the map I’d created didn’t do the idea any justice whatsoever – the map was a rushed effort and reasonably uninspired, if I’m totally honest! After talking with Remmirath (who was known as ‘Morpheus’ back then) it was clear there was mileage in the idea itself and could easily be expanded on to make a full project out of it.
At this point I began a ‘private’ community project version of it, which generated a lot of interest, but received very few actual submissions. I worked on a few maps from the beginning (More or less all of the 1st and 2nd episodes) and in this time only Capt.J3’s Water Station was completed by external mappers. Slyor64 had sent half of an ice map which was beautiful, but sadly disappeared shortly after, which left me to complete the map for myself. Remmirath sent through an unfinished techbase map which didn’t ever see the light of day sadly.
There were some members (all the testing team!) who kept my interest active and were instrumental to getting the project as polished as it is today; however I was demotivated with the ‘community effort’ on the map side of the project so I closed off the development and it became private. It was around this time I stopped being an active member of the Doom community and lurked, rather than posted. I had on-and-off periods of interest for the project, which continued for years with endless support from the testers and HexaDoken who was willing to assist with coding issues I had from time to time. Without these people the project may never have been completed!
After a few years, the project was coming near to a close – it was at this point I started to rejoin the doom community, and socialise more with the Skulldash Team – this sparked a huge amount of motivation in me as people seemed interested in what I had to offer. After a few months of ‘grinding’ on the project, Skulldash’s initial release was completed and released to the world at large!
Community Interest
Following the release of Skulldash a few issues that had been missed by the testing team were found, nothing game-breaking but enough to make me want to make a patched version. While contemplating the idea of improving it, people contacted me asking if they could make a map, and seeing that there was a renewed interest in making maps for the project, I decided to re-try the idea of community map submissions, and creating a large ‘community tier’.
During this time, Remmirath was an immeasurably large help for me, committing a LOT of spare time for the project. Between the time it took them to contribute six whole maps for Skulldash’s new expansion pack, Remmirath also helped me port all of the Skulltag data to GZDoom. Now that Skulldash was ported to GZDoom I personally took the time to improve every single level in Skulldash. I reworked bosses, I added dynamic lights to all maps, I fixed every little bug and misaligned texture that we could find, deleted large portions of level geometry and rebuilt them…
On this ‘improvement rampage’ I deleted one of the old bonus maps which was frequently referred to as a bad level and created a new, very difficult but unique map, called “Gotta Go Fast” which took Skulldash’s core concept up a gear. I was becoming a “Doom Streamer” around this time, so to see people becoming interested in the project while I built it was good fun.
I also produced several maps and an entirely new boss for the Skulldash expansion tier, while becoming great friends with the new mappers on the team, all of which made fantastic submissions to the project. Thank you Remmirath, Dreadopp, Xyzzy01, Jimmy, Bauul, Poohlyash, AtroNx, Tormentor667 & Kyle2959.
In Conclusion
Skulldash became a project I lived and breathed for a long time. In the end it is a product I can say I am truly proud of!
- It’s helped me develop my skills from a rookie mapper to where I am today.
- It allowed me to meet some great people along the way.
- Skulldash has taught me that if I put my mind to it, I can do a lot with my time.
- Being awarded a Cacoward in 2015, published in the 2015 PCGamer Magazine, published in 2017 on “Rock, Paper, Shotgun” and appearing in several streams and youtube playthroughs has been very, very rewarding.
Release Date
October 22nd, 2015 (Initial)
October 22nd, 2017 (Expansion)
My Contribuitions
- Project Management
- Main Codebase
- Hub Map
- Level 01 – Yellow Submarine
- Level 02 – Ancient treasure
- Level 03 – Clifftop Base
- Level 04 – Frostbound
- Level 05 – The Citadel
- Level 06 – Abandonment
- Level 07 – Time Warp
- Level 09 – Jungle altar
- Level 10 – To Hell & Back
- Level 11 – Liquidation
- Level 12 – Black Death
- Level 13 – Feelin’ Blue
- Level 14 – Heated Heights
- Level 15 – Divider
- Level 16 – Maltreatment
- Level 17 – Medieval Madness
- Level 18 – Sector 13.37
- Level 19 – Treetop Tokens
- Level 20 – Strength
- Boss 1 – Lava Golem
- Boss 2 – Inquisitor
- Boss 3 – The Gatekeeper
- Boss 4 – The Overlord
- Bonus 1 – Gotta Go Fast
- Bonus 2 – Vibetech
- Bonus 3 – The Shocker
- Bonus 4 – The Nightclub
- Bonus 5 – Invasion!
- Community 1 – Cliffside Carnage
- Community 2 – Tefnut’s Tomb
- Community 3 – At The Mountains of Madness
- Community 4 – Diavolo Chapel
- Community Boss – The Promised Lands
- Scrapped Map – 50/50
- Scrapped Map – Punch Out!
- Various Graphics
- Various Sounds
Tools Used
- Doom Builder 1
- Doom Builder 2
- GZDoom Builder
- XWE
- SLADE
- MSPaint
- Adobe Fireworks
- Audacity
- Trello