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The Door Manifesto
(a brief user’s guide)
Index:1. The Door: Overview
2. The Regular Door
3. The Trap Door
4. The Locked Door
5. The Stacked Door Glitch
6. The Glitched Door: Overview
7. The Glitched Locked Door
8. The Glitched Trap Door
9. The Glitched Regular Door
10. How to make a vertical glitched door
11. The Horizontal Glitched Door
12. How to make a horizontal glitched door
13. Using Glitched Doors to glitch tiles
14. When to use a glitched door
1. The Door: Overview
The door is, in my opinion, one of the most versatile objects in the game; however, they are often either misused or underused, for reasons which I still don’t quite understand. There are 4 common types of doors; the regular door, the trap door, the locked door and the Exit Door. As well as these there are another 4 types of less common doors, the glitched door, glitched trap door, glitched locked door and the horizontal glitched door. These unique objects can be used to either impede or assist a player in his quest for gold/freedom; however, their effectiveness is completely reliant on the map-makers understanding of how these objects can be manipulated, and their ability to implement the required doors.
2. The Regular Door
The regular door is a fairly well understood object...you run at it, it opens...however, it has come to my attention that many people don’t actually know all the known ways that these objects can be manipulated.
The regular door, like all non-glitched doors, comes in two different alignments; horizontal and vertical. At first look it may appear that these doors serve only one very basic purpose...providing a safe haven from enemies, however, they in fact have another, less obvious and somewhat explored function: A platform.
This platform is extremely easy to make, however, it is hard to integrate into a map, as special conditions must be met for the door to act as a platform. To make this platform, all you have to do is place the door parallel to the surface that you want the platform to be perpendicular to. That is, if the platform needs to obstruct the player running along the ground, place it horizontally, whereas you would place it on the vertical alignment if you need to obstruct/provide a platform for a player moving vertically. The interesting thing about these platforms is that they operate by the door staying closed when you hit the top/bottom of them, however they open when hit at a specific speed or greater. This speed is equal to the velocity that you reach after falling 1.25 tiles + 2 pixels.
Another interesting feature of the regular door, is that if an enemy begins its attack through a door whilst it is open, the door closing will not impede the attack, and the enemy will continue as though the door is not there. The easiest enemy to observe this behaviour with is the laser drone; however, it is also a noticeable behaviour in the seeker drone.
Play these maps to see what I mean:
3. The Trap Door
The trap door is a very often seen object in levels, and is fairly well understood by mappers. However, having said that, I do not often see them utilised in anyway other then the most obvious, as a triggerable impasse. The trap door does, primarily exist for this function; however, they are, in my opinion, far more useful as triggerable platforms, as this is a far more practical use for the object, as it essentially becomes to a non-linear level, what a trap door is to a linear one: A way to get from point A to B, via a side route taking us to C.
This map illustrates what I am talking about here:
4. The Locked Door
The locked door is again, another very commonly seen object, possibly the most common off all the doors, but again variety is lacking when it comes to implementation. The locked door is almost always used in the simple way of creating a kind of “sidequest” that must be completed before access to the next area is granted, however, there other ways of using this object without being restricted to the norm; for example, a removable platform.
Play these to see what I am ranting about in this section:
5. The Stacked Door Glitch
The stacked door glitch is a simple one, based on the principle that closing a trap door or opening a locked door will change the player and enemies’ ability to travel through an area. This, whilst mostly true, is somewhat inaccurate, as it is also completely dependent on the order that you place the doors in. The glitch is caused when you place alternating locked and trap doors on top of each other, activating the switches in the order of the doors, bottom upwards. This will cause the pile of doors to grant access after you hit a locked door switch, and disallow access after you hit a trap door switch.
Play this:
6. The Glitched Door: Overview
A glitched door is a door which has been edited outside of ned to change its properties. A glitched door can be made from a trap door, a locked door or a regular door, and each has its own individual properties.
7. The Glitched Locked Door
The glitched locked door is the most commonly used of the glitched doors, often found being used in dda’s as a form of propulsion.
This image is the closest I can get to a visual aid. In fact, it is mostly right, however, there are a few things which cannot be shown in the image. These are:
- The launch-pads propel you at a speed and direction which appears random, based on your speed, trajectory and where you hit upon impact with the glitched area.
- The one-ways act more like pixel thick tiles, stopping most enemies, allowing you to tilt off the edge of them, and disallowing the use of regular one-way glitches, however they are like one-ways in the way you can travel through them.
- The door will not stop any enemy. Or you for that matter.
8. The Glitched Trap Door
The glitched trap door is, as far as I know, the next most common type of glitched door. I label it this having seen it used in a couple of maps.
Glitched trap doors act in a very useful manner, as they have no effect on game play when inactivated, however the frame that you hit the switch, it acts the same way as the glitched locked door.
9. The Glitched Regular Door
The glitched regular door is by far the most interesting of all the glitched doors. It is a very unused object, and certainly the rarest of the glitched doors. In fact, up until I began to experiment with glitched doors, I had never even seen this...and I still haven’t seen it used in a map.
The reason the glitched regular door is so cool is that, unlike the other types of doors, this one opens and closes when you get close, so the one-way effect will exist, as long as you don’t get too close to the door, as it will open. However, when it closes again, the glitch will continue. Unfortunately, as interesting as this is, it does make them fairly unusable. It should also be noted that you are unable to land on the top of a glitched door to use it as a platform. This is because there is no collision with the door itself, something easy to forget since the door is usually open when you collide with it anyway.
Remember:
- All glitched doors act like regular doors when opened.
- All glitched doors give no protection via the door itself
- All glitched doors give one-way protection from the areas that are represented by one-ways in the diagrams.
10. How to make a vertical glitched door
Fortunately it is extremely easy to create a vertical glitched door. The map data for a door is as follows:
9^x,y,rotation,doortype,?,?,regularity,?,?
x,y: X and Y co-ordinates. For trap and locked doors, it is the coordinates of the switch, however, for regular doors, it is the coordinate of the centre of the door.
Rotation: Defines whether the door is vertical or horizontal. If set at 1, the door is horizontal. When set at anything else it is vertical.
Door-type: Defines whether it is a trap or locked door.
Regularity: If set at 0, ignores door-type and sets as regular door.
?: related to doors distance from switch.
To make the door be glitched, simply change the 3rd variable (rotation) into NaN (not a number). This is the reason why glitched doors are always set as vertical using this method, as the base value is vertical, with a 1 acting as a modifier in the rotation variable.
11. The Horizontal Glitched Door
Up until very recently, it was believed that a glitched door could only be made in the vertical alignment, however, the Horizontal Glitched Door was discovered, showing itself to be an even more unusual and inexplicable occurrence then the Vertical Glitched Door.
The Horizontal Glitched door is unique from the Vertical Glitched Door in the way that its glitched areas are oriented. While the Vertical Glitched Door has two glitched areas, both of which are perpendicular to the actual door, the Horizontal Glitched Door has only one glitched area, running along the door itself, however, when you hit the door switch, the glitched area flips, at the same time the door “opens”.
These areas that are represented by one-ways also provide one-way protection from enemies, whilst at the same time disallowing access to the player, but it should be noted that none of the one-way glitches will work on the glitched areas, as the one way is a crude representation at best.
Play this for a demonstration:
12. How to make a horizontal glitched door
The horizontal glitched door is actually really simple to make, and it’s a bit surprising nobody stumbled upon it earlier. A horizontal glitched door is created by combining two glitches, the stacked door glitch, and the glitched door, and thus, to create a horizontal glitched door, you must have a fair understanding of both. But that shouldn’t be a problem, because you’ve read everything else up to here, right?
The horizontal glitched door is made by placing a horizontal door over one of the glitched areas of a vertical glitched door. It is important however, that you always remember to place the vertical door first, otherwise the glitch will not work. From here, all you need to do to convert the horizontal door to a horizontal glitched door, is open the vertical glitched door. If you want the horizontal glitched door to be glitched from the very beginning of the level, it may be a good idea to place the switch for the vertical door at the same coordinates as the ninja at the beginning of the level.
It is also important to know that when making a horizontal glitched door, the original orientation of the glitched area is dependent on which glitched area of the vertical door you used. An easy way to remember how it will work, is that the floating dot left when you open the vertical door will always be on the propulsion side of the unopened horizontal glitched door. As well as this, it should be remembered that the horizontal door only flips when hitting the switch of a locked door. A trap door or regular door will never propel you off more than one side, due to individual properties.
13. Using Glitched Doors to glitch tiles
Through code editing, it is possible to create glitched tiles, however, using this method, it is impossible to make these glitched tiles any shape other than a 5Q tile. Fortunately, there is another way. Using vertical glitched doors, it is possible to glitch any tile, regardless of shape or placement.
To glitch a tile, all you have to do is place a vertical glitched door in such a way that one of its glitched areas border the tile that you want glitched. Now if you’ve just tried this, excited to make a glitched 8 tile, I have news for you. It’s not that easy. Fortunately, it’s not much harder either. You see, for some reason, a single vertical glitched door with only glitch half the tile, so, to glitch the other half of the tile, you need to make another glitched door, on the other side of the tile, so that each glitched door has a different glitched area over the tile. The last step to glitching your tile, is to open both of the vertical glitched doors. I’d suggest placing the switches on the same coordinates, so you don’t get confused with half glitched tiles.
Watch this for a demonstration of the aforementioned techiques:
14. When to use a glitched door
Glitched doors are extremely useful tools to the map-maker when used correctly, and most importantly, sparingly. There are very specific times in which a glitched door is appropriate to be used, and when used outside of these situations they become frustrating and distracting. Unfortunately, there is no definite time to use, or not to use; it all depends on the mapmaker, however that said there is one golden rule which should never be broken when using glitched doors. This is:
Remember, when using glitched doors, if you do not have a specific purpose, do not use them.
As long as you abide by this simple law, none of your maps should suffer comments on the fact that glitched doors were used.
For example of maps which have been tailored for gitched doors, play these:
