In the Quake thread I post about my ongoing level design education and Quake map making work. I’m just a newby working on the second iteration of his third unreleased ‘first map’ which I am now calling InchRevision. I have a larger update blog post about my recent work that I’ll share maybe end of this week, but I’d like to share a snippit of that post to get things going.
So I abandoned Nameless Revenge in its alpha state to start a map project which I called InchPractice.
My number one goal with this project was to work as much within a process that would be sustainable. To me this meant that the process which would carry me to completion must be able to accommodate the incremental pace that I am relegated to due to having a full-time job and also must involve as little monotony as possible so as to remain fun enough for me to desire working on the thing for as long as it takes me. To this end I reflected on things I did wrong or outright did not do with Nameless Revenge.
The first thing that I decided to change was to build into my process a period for pre-production. What does this mean with level design? Well, according to my research (Yang & co-author; Steve Lee) it differs for each level designer, some focus more on architectural sketching while others only need a sense of experiential narrative to begin with. I needed something between the two just to get going, so I drew sketches for a while trying to discover an emotion that I could make into some kind of adventure. This was something I actually did with Nameless Revenge, as well as many of the ttrpg games I’ve acted as GM for, and it’s a tool that I by this point trust quite a bit to help me discover a direction.
After only staring at that image for about a week I noticed myself no longer exploring its emotion but thinking instead through the logistics of drawing out the space in brushes. It was time, then, to transition from an early-early dreamy interval to drawing my level layouts as a step in the direction of finally creating something stable and solid-seeming. I suspected that setting down my design early on would have made finishing Nameless Revenge much quicker. It was good to wander but always proved incredibly challenging, and destructive, when I felt satisfied by my whims and then had to stitch portions of my level together and integrate them into the adhoc design I was continuously updating. So in the last weeks of 2023 I ended pre-production on InchPractice after pushing myself to sketch out the entire map in a detailed but still usefully abstract level of fidelity.
In the larger post I’ll talk about how I actually left InchPractice behind and started up a second iteration called InchRevision. The last picture I shared from that project was from more than a month ago and its come a long way since then, so I am excited to be show off some of what I’ve done in hopefully just a couple days.