Seconding this. That map is incredible.
Thief seems like a likely touchstone. But also I was thinking that probably American McGee (duh) and Alice must be influences too, maybe moreso.
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once again the world is telling me i should play thief
it’s an uneven experience but very much worth it, it can be one of those games that changes how you conceive of actual spaces for a little while. you start to associate shadows and thick carpeting with safety, and walking on tile starts to seem a little risky
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I’ve thought it would be fun to get involved in the mapping scene for Thief, though mapping for that game seems more complicated than Quake.
Less user friendly. Trenchbroom is genuinely the best mapping software I have ever used
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glad my post inspired other people to try the mod and seem to be enjoying it!
SLAVE ZERO X
this is how i found out there is a prequel to the 1999 game slave zero coming out?? which was a third person action game in a giant robot?? and the new one is a 2.5d scroller?? and this is a FPS??
well whatever, it’s nailed down the biopunk aesthetic really well, it looks great. it’s pretty fun too, with balanced weapons and enemies. the levels are mostly very straightforward and linear, with lots of warping in enemies, so it feels a bit like quake mixed with an arena shooter like painkiller or the like. kinda disappointed there were no giant robots though.
i should really play the original game, i’ve been curious about it for so long. i hear it is ok. this mod is probably better, because it’s a fun romp even if i doubt it will blow anyone away. really feels like a new 90s FPS though so mission accomplished i guess! i would play a full game like this, i think.
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best part of this mod is when the character says “beloved by the bullet” lol
gonna contest this (with love) and say that no 90s shooter has gun feedback as good as this. all the weaps in enyo have very contemporary-feeling animation. this is good; it’s like basically my one complaint about quakes weapons; the grenade launcher is the only one that really feels good and i wish more mods improved the weapon feedback.
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I’ve written long form about my work on embodying a better practice here on my personal site, and there’s lots of details and pictures from the development of InchPractice and InchRevision too. Things are coming along really well and I am excited basically everyday I get to work on it.
I have also shared a ton of these pics and offered some explanation in the new devlog thread here.
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really good to read about your process and journey in this project; especially as someone who is also working on their first “proper” single-player map (and also as someone who has been forced to stop development on that map because of life stuff getting in the way 
).
i’d love to hear more about your brainstorming and encounter design process; i personally find that i tend to work in a very iterative fashion – always adjusting and re-adjusting encounters 10 or 20 times before i move on to the next section. i feel this way about secrets too; i just kinda let them happen when i encounter an area that feels like it should contain a secret.
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speaking of secrets: i replayed spiritworld map 5 “the family tree” on normal cos i wanted to see if it was as good on a lower difficulty, and to play it more thoroughly to find more secrets. my conclusion is that it’s not as good on normal, but that it’s still excellent. the spatial intimacy demanded by the higher difficulty is extremely valuable imo. especially in a level as swiss-cheese-like as this one. normal isn’t a cakewalk by any means, but i think i only died like once instead of the 30 or 40 times on hard (obviously familiarity plays a role here, but still) and my clear time was 30 mins instead of 45.
discussion of secrets:
i also found the secret exit! which i’m very pleased about because i knew that there was one more newhouse map and i wanted to find it by myself. i haven’t played it yet cos it’s late but i’ll give it a try probably tomorrow if i have time. i wanna set aside a good long sesh to really dig in.
i didn’t actually find much more in the way of secrets though. at least not secrets that were explicitly acknowledged by the game. i think in total i’ve only found 4 out of the 9? which is kinda crazy. but not surprising. there are so many little nooks that you can completely miss.
i think the thing that i appreciate most about this map is that every single inch is an encounter, and a unique encounter at that! there are so many ideas and none of them is ever re-used! that’s crazy! the consequence of this design paradigm (or perhaps it’s the other way round) is that there is basically no dead space anywhere in the level. it’s not that the action is non-stop, but you’re always doing something while moving through the space; avoiding traps or spike pits or wrangling lifts or peeking through gaps in the level to see what lies ahead. the section before the final stretch (jumping on the broken platforms over the lava, and then on the undulating rock pillars above the slime pit) feel extremely strange because they’re like… so normal by contrast (and made all the more obvious by being at the end of the level)! i know it’s kinda silly but, i feel like this level (and newhouses other levels in this pack) have like… made me retroactively like other levels less because they’re not a dense colourful knot of intense spatial palpation. it’s like discovering the name of a genre of music i’ve always liked but never been able to look up. this one level might be my goty 2023 lmao.
Realised far too late I technically posted this in the wrong thread.
This is my process too and I embrace it because I think this kind of working is a unique affordance of Trenchbroom. I haven’t caught myself tweaking things so much that it feels like a problem, but could see how that might happen if I was like pursuing Makkon levels of detail.
I really enjoy falling into one of these bouts of focused attention. Things do tend to improve when I work on them like that, but sometimes they get worse before getting better. I also wander and go work on things I’ve already ostensibly put down and walked away from.
I’m still displeased with Quake’s cast of monsters and haven’t figured out exactly what I am doing with them. I like certain configurations of them, but I can’t comprehend how people make such engaging modern Quake-style encounters using just vanilla cast. Actually, as I think about the Hyrule field influence on InchPractice, and consider that as much as I love Quake, I would rather make a map with minimal monsters and more exploration… and I consider making a map with few encounters, few pickups, many secrets, and many neat spaces and dangerous inanimate traps. I basically want to make a Dungeon over what is typically made in the current Quake mapping scene.
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new trenchbroom version dropped a couple weeks ago and i’m only just now noticing. it’s got a nice feature that lets you disable (hide) certain wads in the texture viewer (something i’ve wanted a lot) but with the caveat that now in order to add new textures you need to do it through the worldspawn entity’s “wad” property; a little clunky but not the end of the world.
while exploring this feature i had the funny experience of discovering that one of the textures i’d been using just today was actually one i’d made myself; it seemed too good to be mine!
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who is the cutest quake monster i vote fiend
shambler close second
edit: ohh VORE DUHHH
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Holy crud!! Nice work on the visuals with this one. I have to admit, seeing this I felt a pang of insecurity about my own work. But then I thought I’ve never tried to make a map in the base theme yet. I was reading your post over in gripes about teaching students to stay on grid and I also had a moment where I thought maybe staying on 1, 2, and 4 grid-size for most of my work is probably a contributor to why things take me so long 
Gonna try to learn from you and your excellent example work here.
In your testing of the map, do you think it’s fun to play yet?
I have to agree with Fiend and Shambler. Vore is cute when it lies down to die, it’s like nap time : )
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opinions on spawns
- love em
- hate em
- depends how theyre used
- hi im todd mcfarlane creator of spawn
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voters
i am personally not a fan. i think theyre annoying and visually/behaviorally boring for how lethal they are. Kind of a damp spot on episode 4 which i otherwise really like & is probably my favorite Sandy P id levels
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“Nothing goes in, nothing comes out bud.”
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