Player

The player is, of course, a person playing the game, either alone, or as one of several in multiplayer mode.

Since the game is in "first person", a player does not see himself or herself on the main portion of the screen, except for his or her own hand when certain weapons are selected.

A marine face is shown on the status bar, where it reflects the player's health and reacts to events such as being attacked, stepping in nukage, or finding a weapon or powerup.

In a multiplayer game, the other players appear as space marines in different color space suits. In vanilla Doom, the colors are brown, indigo, green and red. Source ports typically permit more choices of color, and sometimes more than four players. The sprites for a player have the prefix PLAY, and are rendered in a green suit. To draw a different color player, the Doom rendering engine remaps the shades of green to shades of the desired color.

A player spawns with 100% health, a pistol and 50 bullets. The fist may also be used as a weapon. When respawning in vanilla Doom, everything else (armor, other weapons, ammo, powerups, and keys) is lost. Exception: in deathmatch mode, players spawn with all keys. Some source ports permit respawning to other states.

In order to be playable in single player mode, a level must have a "Player 1 start" Thing. Player starts 2 through 4, typically located close by, enable cooperative play. Deathmatch start positions are usually located far from each other; one is chosen at random each time a player spawns.