I finally managed to finish and post my latest update on how my level design work is proceeding. The gist is that I have abandoned some cumbersome projects in favor of pursuing a work process that lets me make things, iterate on them, and learn from the whole thing much much quicker. I’ve abandoned two map projects and started on a separate iteration of the last one, which is progressing excellently. The post is long so I’ll let you chose if you want to read it or not, but I’ll share pictures of my map and an excerpt as well.
This is from my year-long map project, Nameless Revenge. It was the last bit of progress I made on it after reaching alpha. This bit is a bridge that the player would have been able to return to so they could access powerful weapons with keys they retrieved much further into the level than when they initially arrive to this bridge/castle. My inspiration was something like Yarnham bridge and Mensis Nightmare from Bloodborne, which was always the inspiration for this project from the very very beginning.
After that was completed the only thing to do was begin blocking the level. The first session was promising a refreshing break from bad habits and a grappling with new challenges as well as my known limitations. Establishing a sense of scale was the first thing to really push me. Somehow I never had to fuss over it while making Nameless Revenge, probably because I lacked the level of care I am now trying to instill with my practice. I also left that session with my mind set on tangible problems that I could mull over while away and which I could jump right back into. Terminating a day’s work with a sense of what to work on next has proven very helpful in any ongoing project I’ve taken up. Working on Nameless Revenge only confirmed this, but through the negative. Too frequently would I start work on that map without any clear goal, merely hoping that I’d have a productive day, only to walk away having accomplished not too much at all. By correcting that habit I hope to establish as much as I reasonably can a sort of rhythm for the work that is ever ahead of me.
And just when my blockout was cohering into something that may one day possess the quality of a place, and scale, perspective and the dynamics of movement were finally implicating each other and I was beginning to register during my playtests the first pleasurable impressions of space, I had to learn a lot about a problematic thing called off-grid geometry.
Instead allowing myself to let time pass and a valuable learning opportunity, after researching ways I could avoid creating off-grid geometry, I committed almost immediately ending this project to start a new one where I would redo all my work but quicker, better, and with more joy.
Thus I abandoned InchPractice and became a newby working on the second iteration of his fourth or fifth unreleased first map, which I called InchRevision. And things are going extremely well. All the work I’ve redone is better, more viable as a Quake level, and looks nicer too. It only took a week or two to catch up to where I was in InchPractice, and now I am approaching having a third of my initial design playable in-game. Though there’s still lots of work ahead of me, it seems the care I am affording through this practice is paying off in just the ways I hoped.
InchRevision is designed to be a semi- non-linear experience with a central Hyrule Field kind of hub with three dungeons connected to it. The third dungeon is locked by a key set in the house that’s in the hub, which is locked by a process that will require the player complete two other dungeons. The design totally works and the work is coming along great.
