For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on a map (or maps?) for Quake Brutalist Jam 3. The project includes exciting new weapons and monsters to play with! Because of this, I had to re-assess goals I wanted to accomplish for the project, since I had some ideas stewing in my brain for quite a while.
Playing with Blocks, a map that was released with Antigravity Jam (hosted by bmfbr), and which I didn’t get around to making a write-up for, was actually an early concept for what I originally wanted to do for the next Brutalist Jam. I had ideas for a tower that would wrap around on itself, that the player would have to climb from the inside.
Since that was already done & released, it was time to come up with something new. This is something that just kind of happens when you have scraps of ideas sitting around that end up getting used elsewhere. The new map would be titled Whisked in the Pan.
After participating in Quake From Memory, I had ideas for making something a little more traditional, but with the new weapons, enemies, and power-ups. My goals for this map were pretty simple: to build something highly interconnected (similar to many of Quake’s original maps), and to start with small spaces.
My initial build started with this small room (pictured above), with an elevator, two soldiers, and a grenade launcher. I wanted to toy with the progression a little bit by giving the player the grenade launcher first, before they find any other weapons. This way, I could introduce monsters like zombies and the ogre early on. This is also where I began toying with ideas for shapes the map would feature, starting with angled pillars that would sometimes join into triangles. These shapes would get carried over into just about every other area in the map.
To contrast the tighter, closed in spaces, I wanted to break it up a little with larger spaces that would give the player a view of the sky. Some of these areas were slated to be completely removed if I ran out of time, but thanks to generous deadlines and extensions given, I was able to comfortably fit in everything I had planned.
The first outdoor area I built into the map would also introduce a hazard I wanted to feature throughout the map: lava. The idea started as hot slag that would be leaking out of pipes here and there, but I ended up preferring the standard orange/red hues since the overall map started taking on a black/gray/orange color scheme, and the orange hue of the lava would add a bit of contrast and a potential added light source that I could use. Some of the shapes in the above screenshot were influenced by the Geisel Library.
Lava would also serve to spice up some of the combat encounters as I continued to build out areas, since I wanted the player to be forced to traverse across it via the hazard suit. This is a feature that shows up in the Copper mod, and in this project as well.
As the map filled out more, the location the player would start would shift as well, since I wanted to utilize some areas more than once. The player begins in the shadow of four large towers (featured at the top). This area was actually on the chopping block for if I ran out of time, since it would have been easy to cut out this portion of the loop. Because it ended up getting preserved, it would pull double-duty as a shortcut to some other areas, if the player chose to back-track and explore later on.
The ending for the map was put together as just a zone where I wanted the player to use all of the weapons that they would have gathered up until that point, so it was time to introduce larger hoards to annihilate with the new missile launcher and rebar launcher. A secret berserk power-up didn’t hurt to include either. The building the player would enter to reach the exit portal was influenced by the Museum of Archaeology building in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Other Features
I wanted to do something special with some of the secret areas, so the map also features drawings of some of my comic’s characters. These were put together by scaling down the original artwork and palletizing in Krita, followed by a little bit of clean-up in Aseprite. I then put together my own custom wad file and included them into the map, rather than rely on external textures.
Resurfaced
Also included is a remix of my map from Quake Brutalist Jam 2, More Sand Than Oil. This version of the map mostly just includes some texture updates and the inclusion of the new weapons, power-ups, and monsters. I wanted to change up the textures to fit the theme of the enemies, so I leaned on more of an industrial look overall, replacing many of the tech/sci-fi textures that appeared in the original. Another thing that felt nice to include was a highly-transparent waterfall texture to serve as rain.
The biggest change to the map is the basement area, which I felt needed to have some adjustments, since sometimes I witnessed people walk right past the grenade launcher without picking it up. Also, the invisibility ring power-up wasn’t that useful, so it got changed to a Pentagram (invulnerability).
Because of how the new weapons function, the monster count is beefed up considerably for this version.
Download
Quake Brutalist Jam 3 includes a couple of download options: a mod version and a standalone version that is packaged with LibreQuake.
It was fun participating in this, and I hope everyone has fun checking out everything the project has to offer!