Arrogance Pays Off
- Posted by mariteaux on November 2nd, 2020 filed in Modding
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Happy November, lads. While the world has its butthole clenched and men everywhere are holding their needy, saturated balls in pain (two days in!), I’m on a crusade of my own. I’ve been thinking of a catchy title for it–NoFEMBR is about the closest I’ve come, FEMBR meaning “fucking everything must be released”. (Drop the expletive to your own tastes.)
My goal is simple. I’m at the cusp of having accomplished pretty much everything I’d like to for this year, and this month, I’m getting as much of it as possible all wrapped up nicely and out there for the world to see. That way, in December, I can just fool around with music again and relax with more vidya (which I’ve been enjoying every night now lately). This all roughly leads up to the one-year anniversary of the Scratchpad, and I have a ton of thoughts saved up for that, so hold tight. November 27.
So what’s the first thing I’m getting done? Quake. Aside from quick updates to VDU to get those finally-resurfaced Quake LBM texture sources posted (I had these back in 2017, but not the foresight to save them), I’m working like hell to finally get “Arrogant Erratum” out the door and all patched up for release. After that, I’ll be finally dumping all the WIP screenshots and video I saved up into a YouTube video for the occasion.
Of the now two levels, the first one (the “Arrogant Erratum” bit, or as it’ll be in Blue, “The Dreamscape”) is pretty much completely finished. I had a play with rebalancing it, so hopefully NewHouse doesn’t run out of ammo when he replays it, the plunge section has been reconfigured so you can zap and explode enemies all throughout (very good call, playtesters and also me), and important for me, I’ve rebuilt one of the two “dream level” sequences to be just a bit more accurate to the source material. Let’s discuss that.
Now, there’s no requirement in-engine that the space the player can visit needs to be contiguous; you can have the player appear in 20 different sections of the level, all separated by void if you so choose. Since the sewers area was already fragmented and full of teleporters, I had the idea of making the player teleport into other, much older custom Quake levels as a point of both confusion and tribute.
The two levels homaged? The infamous “Anoxia” (which I’ve always loved in the perfect “so bad it’s good” sorta way) and the lesser-remembered “The Forsaken Citadel”, both of which came out in August 1996, two months after the game itself. The “Anoxia” portion was real easy because “Anoxia” is two rooms and some really fucking wonky brushes (and the bizarre water “lifts” gave me the perfect opportunity to play with some different kinds of movement in that section). Kill ’em all.
The “Forsaken Citadel” bit was a bit rougher. I got supremely lazy the day I had to build it and what came out was…less than recognizable. Still, it stuck around through pretty much all the demo builds, even though I always intended to rebuild it.
Fast forward to yesterday. I had gotten maybe three hours of sleep because I still can’t seem to stay asleep, and since I’d already started to work on bugfixes and rebalancing, I figured it was finally time to rebuild the Citadel. Here’s some shots of the original level next to the rebuild:
This is about as close as I care to get it, really. It’s also reworked a bit to make the mari secret hidden a little more obviously and a little more cleverly than before. Overall, a pretty big improvement. Whether or not anyone will recognize it is another matter, but I think I pretty accurately captured its jankiness, so it fits the bill either way.
The other level (“The Kuras Stronghold”/”A Rook’s Pawn”) also needs a bit of rebuilding alongside the general texture fixes and tweaking–namely as far as the ending goes. I was pretty much out of gas by the time I got to the ending when I was first building it, and I don’t think it really works how I want it to. Again, with playtester’s insight and another of NewHouse’s unused ideas, I think I’ve got a much more satisfying ending in the pipeline. Remember–this is ostensibly the way Blue ends as well, not just my contributions.
I expect all that to be done within the week, and the writeup and collecting everything to both post for the id1 version and hand over to NewHouse for the Blue version won’t take long either. I’ll still need to get versions of the tracks Immorpher wrote that I ended up using for these levels–as far as I’m concerned, not only are they better than the original, kinda weak soundtrack, but they match these levels perfectly and they’re basically inseparable in my mind. Anyway, soon.
Funny how the air in this house feels different, even with all the windows closed. Is a quiet, peaceful atmosphere. Is how I want the end of the year to feel, really.
