With the Quake 30th Anniversary, the Quake Mapping Community has been organizing slew of new jams. I participated in a few of these.
Solid Colors
This first one wasn’t part of the official “Q30” set, but had some overlap with the timing. The Solid Colors Jam is hosted by Wons, with a restricted set of textures that were all blocks of solid colors, aside from button textures, and some others. I chose to lean into the solid color aesthetic fully, and use simple red buttons with fading light styles to try and sell the effect.
Titled Holding On To What I Am, my idea was to build a skate park in Quake. The title is a reference to the song Superman by Goldfinger, which was included as part of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater soundtrack.
The map features use of ramps and half-pipes, which the player can use to launch themselves over further distances. I wanted to build a map that would feature collectables of some sort, a bit like how there are video tapes, and tasks such as collecting the letters S-K-A-T-E in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, so the weapons became optional pick-ups in some sense. Aside from the very first weapon available, a detour, and maybe a small “trick” must be performed to collect them.
As far as the layout goes, this is also one of my first attempts at considering deathmatch mode alongside single player from the beginning, so I make use of Quake’s func_walls, which can be toggled on or off depending on the gameplay mode. As a result, the map tends to loop around on itself quite a bit, with areas only offering a single path in single player becoming hubs and potential chokepoints in multiplayer.
9630
Another jam, titled Q30 Quickie and hosted by Spootnik, involved constructing a map using only 96 brushes and precisely 30 monsters, over the course of a maximum of 30 hours.
I built my map for the event in exactly 6 hours, since I pretty much just stopped as soon as I was close to running out of brushes. I had a lot of fun building something in such a short time — this is actually the quickest I’ve ever finished something like this! It was also somewhat aligned with how I have already learned how to construct maps, since I tend to reuse brushes for many things already, with walls for one room becoming floors or a wall somewhere else.
Limits
This one, hosted by h4724, uses Quake’s original mapping limitations: the map file cannot exceed 1.44 mb (the size of a standard floppy disk), a maximum of 600 world polygons viewable at any time (with an average of 350), and a maximum of 64 textures. It had to be compatible with Quake’s original releases for DOS and Windows.
I approached this with a very iterative type of process, where I frequently play-tested the map as I was building it, to check the number of polygons being rendered at any point. Of course, while constructing it, I had to consider what the player could actually see at any point of time, but I also had to sometimes add walls or other obstructions in the way after the fact, so that too many polygons in another room weren’t being rendered all at once. This also lead to playing with odd angles for some of the connecting tissue between areas, since sometimes, a simple 90 degree turn wasn’t enough.
For how the map looks, I chose to focus on a green and brown color scheme. I didn’t want to use Quake’s original textures for this, just to set it apart a little, so I used a blend of textures from LibreQuake (sky, windows, buttons, etc.), along with a set called “Apocrypha,” which was created by Kell, who is the author of Quake mods such as Contract Revoked.
While the maps for Quake From Memory were tested in WinQuake and the original DOS release, I didn’t necessarily test them that way myself. This is the first time I’ve played my own maps from within the original executables. As such, the difficulty balance accounts a little bit more for awkward mouse movement and keyboard-only controls.
1024
There used to be something of a yearly tradition of making “1024” maps for Christmas. That is, building an entire map inside of a 10243 unit cube. Moko brought the tradition back as part of the Quake 30th Anniversary jams. Prior to this, I’ve actually never finished a 1024 map.
My map in this event, titled Solutions for a Small Platform, uses the Rubicon texture set. I felt it was a good fit for building small, yet dense, industrial spaces. It also came to mind to use this set since I wanted to build settings such as metal beams and catwalks in order to utilize the vertical space of the small box more. Since this uses Arcane Dimensions, I also got to include more “base” type enemies, such as more types of enforcers, soldiers, and robots. This includes my good friend, Floyd.
I had a bit more planned for this, but I had a setback when my basement flooded, so I was suddenly spending time ripping up wet carpet and damaged tile. Thankfully, I didn’t lose anything else important. I have my home office, TV, and sound systems in my basement, so it could have been a lot worse. After an exhausting clean-up, I actually wasn’t sure if I would finish this map either, but I eventually pulled it together into an acceptable state.
I have more stuff planned, including comics I’ve drawn but haven’t posted to this site yet! Let’s say I’ve been having adventures with home-ownership at the moment.