FRESH

Hacker News

Home

Quake 1 Single-Player Map Design Theories (2001)

77 points by Lammy

by divan

2 subcomments

Does anyone really get something useful from this text?
I thought it's something at the level of "Designing Virtual Worlds" by Richard Bartle, but it's just a set of statements like "level should have an entry and the exit" and "don't do bad maps", for some reason labelled "theories", heavily pierced with phrases like "ummm, hard to explain".

by binary132

0 subcomment

This is an interesting historic artifact. It seems this community effort must have gotten popular and attracted a lot of neophytes who didn’t know what they were doing. Otherwise why would the author feel it was necessary to specify that submissions should be of reasonably good quality, complete and lit, not broken, and have both an entrance and an exit? Seem like the subculture curse of popularity isn’t a new problem.

by paulryanrogers

1 subcomments

> The level should be completable without "trick" moves or gameplay:
Someone should have told makers of Quake Rally! Their menu level alone had a trick jump before you could do much of anything else :)
Still, I think there's a place for tricks in levels to provide novelty or sport like maps, such as jump trick levels. Ideally there would be some kind of tutorial or sign posting if it's not a commonly known trick.

by markus_zhang

0 subcomment

Similar article but for Unreal engine:
https://www.unrealsp.org/articles/level-design/conceptual-gr...

by egypturnash

3 subcomments

1. When a mapper is learning to map, and indeed learning to make a good map, they shouldn't publicly release a map until they've made a good quality map. When they make test maps to learn mapping, or to try to make a proper map, those maps should be kept on their hard drive, or perhaps privately released to acquaintances and more experienced mappers for testing and feedback, until they manage to make a good map - the good map is the first one they should publicly release.
2. Being a first time mapper is no excuse whatsoever for releasing a bad quality map. Some mappers mistakenly think it is, and try to make such excuses in their texts - sorry, but that excuse simply isn't acceptable. Firstly, the reason above, bad quality maps that one makes while learning to map should be kept on the hard drive until a good quality map is achieved. Secondly, there are plenty of people, from all genres of mapping, who have released good quality maps as their first released maps, some of these have indeed been excellent maps.
Is the entire Quake modding scene this hostile to newbies or is it just this one dude?
This attitude may have made sense back in 2001 when Quake was only about five years old and you could presumably get your friends to check out your first attempts at levels when you hauled your computers into one room for bi-weekly LAN party but when we're talking about a thirty-year-old game I somehow suspect most of your friends are gonna be playing something slightly newer most of the time.

by hgs3

0 subcomment

Tangentially, if you're interested in Doom mapping, John Romero has some interesting tips [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptHurafdCoQ