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Design Heretic
By Corvus | October 9, 2005
To put the upcoming revelation in historical context, the first computer game I purchased with my own money was Archon for my Atari 1200XL*. I was going to tell you why I felt the need to preface the next paragraph, but I’ve decided to leave the inspiring incident shrouded in mystery.
The first game I played extensively online was Heretic II. In fact, it was because of Heretic II that I became one of the first 100 people in the Twin Cities, Minnesota to purchase DSL service. It was also the Heretic II crowd that shortened my handle, Praetor Judis, to PJ, and thanks to my involvement in a fan site that PJ wound up with an attic.
Not satisfied with participating in the tempestuous community forums, or with establishing myself as a “Blade Snob”** of note, I turned my hand to mapping. After my first dull, in all honesty, beyond dull, map, I realized that I wasn’t content to just make more blade duel maps, but that I wanted to change the method in which people interacted with their game environment, to use environmental factors to force a change in approach upon the player… without frustrating them, or causing them to disengage from the game.
All four of these maps were, according to the date stamps on the files, were created in March of 1999. Two of them actually showed up on server rotations, one of those people actually liked and the other… well, when server admins realized that the appearance of the map caused people to leave, they pulled it from the rotation.
The first, and still my favorite, concept map was Cogz. I used a minimum of textures in an effort to make up for the fps hit of the stack of three, counter rotating, platform in the center of the map. The lighting was overblown and created high contrast in an effort to catch the eye and slightly disorient the player. The blade duels took place in the center of the arena, where the three rings spun at different speeds, altering your trajectory and making it more difficult to pull off your signature moves with grace and aplomb.
Fascinatingly, this map worked a little better than I intended. Heretic II is a third person perspective game. This means that fewer players developed vertigo while playing, as their eyes were primarily fixed on the back of their avatar. The spinning rings, plus the eye-drawing lighting, caused nausa in people who normally had no issue with it. Cogz made it onto several server rotations, but was pulled within a week.
Despire the apparant un-playability of Cogz, it would seem that I considered func_rotate to be important enough to give it another shot, but along the X axis this time. This time, I knew that “funhouse” maps (as one reviewer referred to my work) were not going to end up in server rotations and I didn’t spend as much time on making Logjam a pretty, nor to mention multi-player friendly.
A few friends graciously tested the play of this map, which was based on the lumberjack competition, log rolling. I can now think of ways, mostly involving scripting, that would have made this a more successful map, but as cooler heads often prevail, Logjam sank into quick obscurity. Still, my reputation for making… er… interesting maps was pretty cemented at this point.
Still, I wanted to design a map that people enjoyed. A map that changed the way people interacted with the game somewhat. A map that put things in a new perspective.
I abandoned environments that pushed the player around and thought big… or rather, I thought very small and I created my next map. Billiards was, in essence, a very simple map. An enourmouse pool table provided space for two simultaneous duel matches, a whiskey glass and smoking cigarette butt in an ashtray gave people something to play with while waiting. Players spawned in under the table and jumped up through the holes along the sides of the table. There was even a coin slot box next to a ball return tray and a rack with a couple of cues on a nearby wall. Blocks of cue chalk lined the sides of the table, providing power ups.
Instead of a typical, factual, readme file, I included a short piece of fanciful fiction with the map and the reponse to both the map and the readme file was very gratifying. The map made it into server rotation and stayed in rotation for quite some time. This was, far and away, my most popular map. I shudder to think what I’d make of this map now, were I to open it in QuArK and examine it. Of course, I’m used to UnrealEd now, along with the higher poly counts, better effects, etc.
I wasn’t done with pushy maps, however, and with my final submission, I took that term a little more literally. Romper Room met the inferred challenge of the term “funhouse” head on, including multi colored lights, a small arena for frantic gameplay, and a grid of large floor tiles which raised or fell when stepped on. One or two of the tiles would raise the player into the effect of a func_push, sending the player sailing back out into the foyer, or through a slowly charging armor shrine. I saw this map on, maybe, one server a time or two. The server admin liked it and didn’t much care if anyone played on her server.
I worked on two further maps, but neither one was actually released. One of them, a full out death match map (with full weapons and everything), used an alien spacecraft as its theme, with an engine room that would have been delightful to see… had H2 been able to support all I wanted to do with it. Sadly, due either to my inability to figure out the challeng, or inherent engine restrictions, I abandoned this map when the engine room wasn’t working out.
The next map I created after a bit of a hiatus from the community and I put into rotation on my own passworded server for a while, although I can’t find my archive of it. It was set in a pinball table, with bumpers, paddles, and some fun teleport effects. The people I showed it to actually seemed to enjoy this map, but a “promotion” at work required me to begin traveling and my obsession with the game came to an abrupt end, much as this post it about to.
*Also purchased with my own money in… 1985, I think. I would have preferred an Apple IIGS, but I couldn’t begin to afford it. Had I purchased a IIGS, suspect my life would have gone in its current direction about 20 years sooner.
**People who participated in structured one on one duels using only the melee weapon, a blade staff. I actually became known for never using any other weapon, even on death match servers. Held my own most days, too. The aforementioned DSL, I’m sure, helped with that.
Tagged:Design, Games. | 1 Comment »
October 10th, 2005 at 9:12 am
In college we had a couple of guys who worked at a local computer store. Around the time Doom was really peaking, they liberated some old networking hardware and wired up the smaller fraternity house (the annex as it were).
Days would go by without some of us seeing the light of day, and soon mapmaking became a hot commodity. The first map I made would be best described as a cross within a square, with each room having various themes (dark, tons of barrels, etc.)
Later down the road, when I got my first job in Chicago, I made a map of the office in both Half-Life and Unreal Tournament … our two LAN games of choice. It was admittedly creepy to be able to call out “I just fragged Chris by his desk”.
Now, though … it’s … the games have gotten too production intensive. I never had any success playing with UED for UT2003/4 … even after several attempts making even simple custom maps and simply poly meshes with gameSpace. Hobbyist mapmaking seems to be dying as to make really fun maps is slowly requiring at least two, if not three people.