Ismo's Quest

There is a softlock in the living room here:

There is a softlock after the window breaks in the kitchen by jumping outside. I don't think you can get back in, at least I couldn't:

The keyboard has no collision:

This table in the "otherworld" has no collision:

This light switch in the otherworld attempts to call a script that doesn't exist. None of the other light switches here did this:

• The horror elements left me bewildered, especially with how they appeared without warning. It was very jarring to see "hyper-realistic" Quake enemies used along with faux-realistic weapon models and then Wolfenstein-3D-based sprites for some of the enemies. The colossal juxtaposition of assets used once the overall tone shifted made the grandeur of what was a delightfully-constructed "myhouse.wad" (in the conventional sense) fall apart. It broke kayfabe.
• I get that the storyline of this, particular regarding its humour, is inspired by your kids, but by some measure it definitely felt... lacking in grace. The pee and poop jokes fell flat for me personally - and I certainly didn't feel comfortable playing the part of a child who needed to go pee-pee 30 seconds after drinking coke. Then once the Kingpin weapons appeared in my hands and I started shooting zombies and leaving blood and poop and viscera everywhere... things started to look like they might take a slight turn for the surreal.
  • Overall, I felt that the story you've tried to tell here seems to be far too wacky for it to mean anything, but maybe that's what you (or the kids?) wanted to begin with, so I won't begrudge that. What felt unsettling about it was, on top of the pee and poop jokes, there were themes of things like home invasion, murder and abandonment throughout, all of which felt far too serious for the story being told by the in-game characters, whom I'm led to believe are real children from your real life. It feels like a glimpse into your personal life that is in fact TOO personal. Clear though it may be that you love your kids and want to immortalise them, the overall product here has wound up confused and unmoored - and the way they're represented, as 2D heads atop weirdly stretched Wolf3D sprites - seems so poor-quality compared to the way you've rendered the house itself that I almost wonder if their appearances in this was added against your creative will. I reckon that's a reach, but when anyone sees clashing assets like this I think you have to bear in mind the conclusions that they will leap to.
  • Let's remove the elephant in the room, as people WILL inevitably draw comparisons to this - My House by Veddge also has deeply dark themes throughout, but the story is definitively told by an adult who has gone through an extremely serious (if perhaps a little more vaguely-defined) emotional journey. Involving kids - real kids - in such sordid undertakings feels very bizarre.
• Please I beg you give Mauno a towel when you see him in the sauna. I do not want to see a sprite of a tiny human without outer layers on, even if you've pixel-censored the crap out of it. I'm dead serious when I say that it made me viscerally uncomfortable. Aside from the issue of taste, I think you have to consider the issue of consent. There's no way anyone that age can legally consent to having their image used like this. This could be extremely bad news for you in some parts of the world - so I implore you to rework this one sprite if you make no other changes.

But I did wonder if some of the things in here are maybe best kept to yourself rather than shared with the world.  I felt a little bit like I was missing context for a lot of the personal jokes and references, and without this crucial context, what a stranger playing your map is left with is confusing and sometimes disturbing.  In particular, I found the bit where you have to kill a child (who I think is actually not one of your children) by locking him in a sauna.  The zombies and demons and even the guns I think I can easily brush off as jokes, but that one feels so ordinary and realistic that it made me very uncomfortable.  Jokes like that are the sort of thing I would get in big trouble for as a child because parents were rightly afraid that treating situations like that so lightly could result in accidental death.  At least part of my discomfort with the whole thing was that you got your own kids involved in being active participants in this joke.

I don’t know you or your family, I don’t know how you raise your kids.  And I think that is actually part of the problem here.  Without any of the context for who you are, all I am left with is disturbing implications.  Perhaps you and your family had a lot of fun making this and have a lot of fun laughing about it.  And I think that is totally reasonable! I certainly have inside jokes in my family that are on the darker side.  But I also think it’s inevitable that sharing this with strangers could raise some eyebrows.

Creating a story with input from your kids is a great idea! But if the plan is to share it online with strangers, I think maybe you need to be a more careful editor.

The puzzle to get the code for the music room took me forever though! Three of the numbers are found on the children’s drawings, so I was looking everywhere for a fourth drawing somewhere.  Hiding it behind the shelves in the bathroom felt a little unfair, especially since the white shelves in the white bathroom make the white prompt to interact with the shelves very difficult to notice.  And the combat sections felt much harder than they needed to be.  Dodging attacks is very hard with such a slow movement speed, and some of the 3D models still let hit-scan attacks through even if they look solid!  Getting shot to death by your son so frustrating that I almost forgot how weird it was that I was trying to murder your son.

Let's talk about how it all began, when the kids found out I had created Doom maps and learned how to make their own games with them. They became really excited and wanted me to create a house based on our home where they could walk in. After that, they wanted to create their own game with ideas like getting Ozzy's Ben 10 toys. They started giving me some tasks for the game, and I liked the idea of working on something with my kids using the Doom engine so they would have something to play when they are older. Ideas started flowing, like wanting zombies, adding Mauno's store (Mauno actually had a store on the upper floor when I began this project), and creating a portal like in Minecraft. A few months later, many things had been added, and the challenging part for me was figuring out how to merge it all together into a final product. Some aspects might seem a bit illogical, like the portal and all the zombie stuff, so I added a book that Ozzy had read after waking up again to make it more logical.

Initially, this project was just for ourselves and our relatives. When it was nearly complete, I allowed some friends to test it in my basement, and they really enjoyed it. They said it was very original and too awesome not to be released, which made me think, "Why not?" So, I decided to share it with other members of the Doom community. After receiving some feedback about players not knowing who is who, I realized that I had overlooked providing more information about the characters, which could be confusing.

I want to clarify that this project is purely a product of their imagination, and I incorporated everything they wanted. It was never intended to be disturbing or uncomfortable for anyone.

I understand the point about the sauna scene. The sauna reference is a Finnish joke that Swedish people can't tolerate being in a sauna with their heads in, and Timmy himself wanted to be part of the game, even recording his own sounds for the scene. Would it be better if he simply faints from the heat instead of exploding?

Regarding Mauno's sauna scene, I thought blurring him out, as in The Sims games, would be acceptable. I will replace it with a black screen instead.