What's the smallest a Doom IWAD can be while still being vaguely playable? An exercise in minimalism.
The result is a WAD file less than a quarter of a megabyte that can in theory be used to play any WAD from the idgames archive.
Features:
- Flat-shaded walls and floors
- An assortment of identical looking enemies that look like creepy silhouettes
- Nine variations of the same gun
- Two sound effects
- No music
- No real levels (Bring Your Own Levels)
- Usable menus!
- Minimalist status bar
For a similar project that's a bit more playable, check out Squashware Doom, which shrinks the Shareware Doom IWAD file to below 2MB.
The whole WAD is built to take advantage of wadptr's merging features, specifically:
- Multiple copies of the same lump are merged. The textures are reduced to a very small color palette so that many of them will look identical and be merged. Similarly, the same two sound effects are reused for many different purposes.
- wadptr can merge identical columns within a Doom graphic. To take advantage of this, many of the graphics are deliberately simplistic or mirrored in appearance so save space.