3 Likes
i seem to be stuck on the level âamong the deadâ; no silver key anywhere and using noclip + ironwailâs wonderful new âr_showbboxes_filterâ feature reveals that the only way to get to the 1 silver key in the level is to uh⌠go through the silver key door. 
shame cos everythingâs been cool until now. iâll skip the door and continue i guess.
Thereâs some weird, but functional scripting throughout the episode. I canât remember that part, but Iâm gonna play after work anyway, so Iâll check to see whatâs the deal.
i found the problem by looking at a letâs play: one of the keys just didnât spawn, lmao.
EDIT: i played with the key bounding box displayed and it revealed that the key spawns just fine but the explosion that opens the grave which contains the key actually destroys the platform that the key is standing on, causing the key to fall into the void hahahaha
whaaaaat! I wonder how I never had that problem playing that level. what an adventure to figure that out. games sure are interesting!
1 Like
finished zer today. real good stuff, but that last level had me running around for 30 minutes before i found the door out, definitely needs some better directing (which is a shame cos i was really enjoying it until that point).
honestly i think the best addition was the auto shotgun. significantly cooler feeling than basically any other weapon. it made me wish for a warframe style trigris shotgun (click to fire one shell, release to fire the other) and then the weird kinda-sorta grenade launcher plasma gun thing right at the end had just that!
zer looked really cool, i wish iâd got to fight it, even if it was a doomed battle.
2 Likes
after some testing i decided to lower the profile of the floor details and remove collision altogether. it doesnât feel weird at all and i think the space is better for it.
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nice. thanks for providing an update. Iâm curious about your progress, so please post more when you have more to post!
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iâm done with that map for now; iâm trying to keep pace (or slightly ahead of) with my students by doing the same assignments that iâm giving them, so my next task is to make a small (5-10min) single player map with custom wads (and iâll try to use doors and trains and the progs_dump features too). iâm v excited.
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Designing something so vertical that I worry the engine just wonât be able to support it. I just donât have the knowledge and Iâm scared Iâll find out only after hours of building 
Weâll seeâŚ
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i think u should probably be ok, especially given the scale of the levels in sm222, but if you do end up being too vertical thatâs kinda impressive, iâd love to see it.
Oh, good. Looks like I should be alright.
I found a YouTube playlist of someone playing all those maps btw⌠Quake SP - SM222 "Towers" - YouTube
ANOMALY REPORT
The aesthetic of this one switches between âreal worldâ levels and abstract industrial zones like DooM 2 (and then more hellish one later), both being very detailed, well-designed and interesting. My main problem early on is that it took too long for them to throw me a backpack (i found all the early secrets so i didnât miss one, THANKS) but for the most part this was fantastic. In the last quarter or so it starts to get more slaughermappy and less interesting, but still solid overall.
REVOLUTION
Another one that starts with âreal worldâ locations, this one begins a lot weaker. The levels lack the detail of other real world mods, and the design is very eh. fine, but a bit boring. it really picks up in the second half though with more abstract hell levels where they were more free to do more interesting things with the design. doesnât get slaughtermappy too, but still challenging. so, weak start, but overall had a good time with it
oh it also has a goofy story about using the demons as workers after the last games which I got a kick out of, and it tries to tell some of it through the levels with mixed success
one memorable moment is being eat by a giant snake then fighting inside their guts, but you teleport out instead of getting pooped out so lost points there. also flesh giant boss.
HARMONY
first a note, this is a cut down version to work in standard doom since the original release was built on ZDoom, but itâs still impressive what they pull off. Anyway this is an 11 level TC! I love the aesthetic, especially since they scanned in their own clay models for enemies which gives it a really cool look. it plays more like a build game, both in the âreal worldâ level design and mechanics (the latter is not a compliment because doom engine games are a million times more fun than build engine games imo). the level design is really top notch, but there are some problems that made me enjoy this way less than i could have
for one, the max amount of ammo you can carry is way too low, and i was constantly running out which was really tedious. second, too many enemies are bullet spongy, and there is one big giant enemy that takes forever to kill and shoots grenades at you and they keep throwing this dude at you again and again, often in groups, and itâs so annoying. in most cases i just ran past them all since that is usually an option (and probably the one youâre meant to take) but it was never a fun time when i encountered them
so yeah, really if it wasnât for that one enemy and i could carry more ammo, i would have enjoyed this a million times more. i still played through the whole thing though
10 Likes
gah this thing looks so messy!!! my next map is gonna be neurotically clean. I am embracing fast production methods like actually greyboxing stuff and doing layouts. But I am also just wildly drawing things how I feel like they should be whenever an idea comes over me. So itâs just a big trash heap that, maybe, with time, will be playable and cool looking again.
5 Likes
The artistic process is beautiful and mysterious. What was going on in the above screenshot was an attempt at executing on a Good Idea I had. I made it quickly and with too little care, so it came out poorly, which made me think the Good Idea was a Bad Idea. So I scrapped it and tried a bunch of other ideas, which were always Bad Ideas, but I was desperate and lazy. Itâs a good thing struggling through the experience of creating something artistic tend to result in the development of, if anything a kind of intuition. I am glad I wrote a bunch of bad fiction over the past decade, because if I didnât then I would probably hold onto Bad Ideas for longer, instead of having faith in my Good Ones and turning back to them even if it means doing a lot of work to execute on them correctly.
Yeah, this morning I threw out the Bad Ideas and started over on building the Good One, and I am already pleased and much further along and working happily.
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For months, this author has been teasing through the idea of beauty as a stunning insight into truth. That moment when you get a creative breakthrough or get an experience of sublimity is because youâve seen something true compressed and crystallized into a perfect expression. And then comparing that between poetry, crystallized language, and machine learning, crystallized data. Unfortunately as the models have been pushed to be more user-facing they actually quash a lot of what is interesting about them - their ability to represent broad statistical information about their corpus through their aesthetics. The artifacts are often more representative of how concepts relate underneath, and more informative.
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I absolutely believe the comparison holds. Excited to read this.
I relate to it through games as a creative medium because games are a confusing mash of direct and indirect intent. Values absolutely get teased and expressed through game mechanics and the barrage of micro-decisions is overwhelming without a clear perspective. But it has to be constrained within rule sets that can be communicated and produce effective learning and challenge. And the game maker isnât creating the signal but the machine to produce the signal, an entire level of challenge and freedom offered to the audience who needs to work the machine to make the output.
I used to hope think architecture would have similar answers to these aesthetic questions but Iâve found its aesthetics too airy and subjective and its technical concerns too distant to be useful. Poetry, as both a hard technical matter and a soft dreaming one, does feel more right.
2 Likes
If you havenât read or heard the contemporary philosopher C. Thi Nguyen talk about games and agency, I think you would really appreciate his perspective. You should read Games: Agency as Art if youâre interested and can stomach academic, philosophy texts.
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