Arrogant Erratum/The Kuras Stronghold | mari@macintosh.garden
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| Release type | Build time | Monster count | Secret count | Download |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mod | June 24, 2020-August 15, 2020 | 154/216/241 | 6/9/9 | ZIP |
The Inspiration
I quit mapping for Quake in September 2018 after I failed pretty spectacularly to make friends or integrate into the community, but I kept ahold of a single contact, NewHouse, who I get along really well with. He contacted me out of the blue in June 2020 to map for, well, Blue, his custom episode that I'd played an early build of back then and really enjoyed. The idea was to originally contribute a secret speedmap for the episode in two weeks of development time—which became two months and change building two maps, both of them main levels for the pack. I was happy to let NewHouse do whatever to my levels after the fact, so long as I could publish my original versions separately, and he likewise let me go nuts with the concepts.
I came up with the idea pretty quickly: presenting the player with a carrot they couldn't immediately eat. The ending, an incredibly difficult battle arena the player would almost certainly die in (though I've been able to beat it—hint, use the return teleporter frame to block the Shambler bolts), would be accessible from the start, though if the player went the long way around, they'd be rewarded by being allowed to blow through it completely overpowered for the monsters that lay inside. It took me a couple false starts to get going, but after starting over with the goal of simply playing with abstract shapes and strange level construction, things started to come to me. (I also got him to kill the deadline for it—Blue wasn't gonna release soon anyway, and I don't do well with deadlines.)
The Construction
A big theme of Blue is dreams, and given that I have a history of revisiting weird places from my past in my dreams, I got into recreating older Quake levels, both stock and custom, for "Arrogant Erratum". There's of course the start map at the very beginning, the infamous Anoxia and the less-remembered The Forsaken Citadel in the sewers with the teleporters, and several of my own levels, finished and scrapped, throughout. My ambitions grew grander as I went along; I built what I called the "plunge section", where players are required to nuke Zombies underwater with the Thunderbolt (normally a deadly no-no), and I decided to resurrect an old level idea based on my old fantasy world Elinar, a stronghold once held by a race of now-extinct underground-dwelling aardwolves named the Kuras, for the second half.
"The Kuras Stronghold" became the far more experimental of the two levels, revolving around getting three keys in three gauntlets each homaging a different favorite trap of NewHouse's, spikeshooters, crushers, and enchanted floating boxes over voids (maybe that last one's just one of my favorites). There'd be no combat in any gauntlet aside from an optional hidden passage where you could use the traps against the monsters. Once you were done gathering the keys, you could ascend the final staircase to the battle arena, the end of which teleports you into a gold-textured rocky section that was meant to provide a jumping off point for the sequel episode to Blue (though I'm not sure of NewHouse's intentions on that now). This new ending came in the round of polish in November; the original ending is lost to time and sucked anyway.
The Retrospective
"Arrogant Erratum" was a marathon, not a sprint, and I stuffed it full of ideas with the thought that if I never returned to Quake again, I'd be happy I got at least some of it out of my system. It wound up not sitting too well with everyone; I've heard lots of positives, I've heard it's very difficult, and I've heard some people outright reject it because it doesn't really do the traditional Quake thing. Given my goal was to use a lot of my own random ideas and some of NewHouse's and do something different, I'm okay with the middling reviews. It's also still fairly amateurish in construction; the stronghold facade in particular is pretty shit looking, though I do like the big watery cavern I built for it still. In my various attempts at building levels since then, I've tried to pay more attention to making things look nice and believable.
I think the big takeaway was just learning to love Quake again. I had a lot of bad memories and regrets from back when I was active modding it and playing it, but really, I'm nobody in the grand scheme of things and most of the feedback I got came from people I didn't recognize, so I doubt anyone remembers it (and Quake has a fairly cantankerous modding community anyway at times). I would like to come back and build some smaller, more normal levels still, but now that I'm working and I got like five other hobbies, it's on the backburner. I do still love the game, though, and I do hope to do more with it. Working with NewHouse especially was a good experience again, I'm glad he recruited me into making this.