Process Journal - SyFySkyE/Quake-SP-E1 GitHub Wiki

I'll be documenting my design and development process throughout this project through this journal.

4/21/20

Hello world! Got the project and repo alll set up. Also wrote out a first version of my manifesto, describing what I wish to accomplish on this project.

This is the manifesto for "Castle Siege", a new single player map for Quake 1.

As the title mentions, I chose a castle theme for this level. I chose this for a few reasons. One of them being that I knew it would fit with Quake's aesthetics and I wouldn't spend much time fighting the engine in that regard. The other being that the castle idea comes with plenty of affordances. It allows for diverse environments, room size contrasts (small, claustrophobic corridors and open courtyards) to be believable and fit the aesthetic. This makes the design pretty open-ended. It was the only idea on my list that generated countless different ideas. And hey, I never made a castle level before, so this is exciting!

I really want to explore a level comprised of different sections, but all being connected in a meaningful way. There's going to be a big focus early on about getting through this main gate, this should be visibly from all other major rooms in the level as the player works toward opening it. The level will give the player a sense of space and scale by being able to see the main focal point, the main gate, from other major areas across the map. The level will offer differing challenges between combat and puzzle-solving, and allowing players to solve at their own order. I want to have a main hub area the player can come to that breaks up the action, but the level should sometimes play with player assumption, such as having an enemy wave spawn in the main area just before the gate opens.

Truthfully I struggled a bit trying to find an idea that excited me. While Castle is the one that got me most excited in terms of thinking about endless possibilities of where I can go with that, it also felt a bit overdone. A lot of base Quake levels can be described as "castles". This meant part of my ideation process involved how I could make it more interesting, so I went with a "right of passage" approach where the player must pass three challenges (and get all three keys) is order to challenge the King of Hell or however it'll end if that doesn't work.

I also wrote down a simple list of events I want to touch on. This will definitely change throughout the project as some things are not fleshed out, and I have a habit of going out of scope during preproduction. I also left some of my own personal comments in there.

Player comes from open clearing to see a castle wall before a large gap with lava. Player finds two guards walking to and fro. Once players kills them, two or three enemies spawn in on top of the wall, shooting at the player. Once the player kills them, two doors open on the sides of the walling, revealing some more enemies to shoot, plus more enemies to shoot on the top. In both of these rooms reveal two shootable switches. One (the right) opens the door revealing some more enmies waiting there. The other draws the bridge. Walking through a small to medium small passage way with incresingly manolvent textures. The player finds themself in an open arena area with a few more enemies to kill. Once the area is clear, the area forward has a biiig focal point, the king's lair or whatever. The path forward is blocked off and needs three keys. The main area has two paths to the left and to the right and one below. The left path leads to a maze of teleporters. The player walks along a path to the armory. As they are presented with tons of goodies, they walk forward And the ground beneath breaks away leading to a teleporter. The player gets teleported to a fairly sized sized. The room has three teleporters. Walking into one teleports to another room. The secret is to find the teleporter that takes them to a darker, more macabre room. Maybe there's a message. Once they do, they grab the key and end Up back at the main area, which is still empty. ( HOW DOES THE TP ROOM FEATURE THE FOCAL POINT. WINDOW, BELOW? ) The right area leads to a series of passages and rooms. The player keeps ascending until they find themselves look out toward the focal point. ( WHAT'S SPECIAL ABOUT THIS ROOM? ) The bottom room leads to a short series of small, door, bloody rooms. Cages and hanging corpses. At theend of the room, teleport back the main area. ( AFter every room, have a limited teleport to show the player something? ) When the player teleports back, they walk toward the final door. As they do, the lights turn off and a bunch of enemies spawn. ( At the end of each room, give the player a weapon? He is pleased or whatever ). The player must defeat two or three waves before the door goes back down. As it does, give the player large, open corridors to walk through. No enemies. Also give them plenty of items. The final area is at the throne. Maybe have the lights go off and have a cutsome skybox? Final tp opens up when boss and waves are defeated.

I also already closed my notepads which held all my other ideas for setting, but it was a looong list. Included ideas such as, "Space Station", Water Land" and "Chicago". I'm gonna be spending the rest of the day working on an initial 2D mockup for this map.

4/22/20

Castle Trials might make a bit more sense, though it's a bit on the nose. Ah I'll give it some more thought down the line. Anyway, I finished up the 2D map earlier this morning. I highly recommend right-clicking and opening the image in another tab for easier zooming in if you wanted to read some of the encounters in greater detail.

I opted for simpler geometry this time since I knew I wanted the map to be comprised of many more rooms instead. I think the onscreen messages will be a greater point in this map as I want the player to know where they are in the trials, and what they're working toward.

4/29/20

The map is coming along well! I'm much more comfortable with Trenchbroom now. Though I did make a few changes already after starting to implement the top-down map since some ideas worked better in my head than ingame. Such changes include:

Starting the player off in a small room under the 2D's start point. I wanted the player to climb a hill and have the castle walls slowly come into view from a low angle. As I worked on this, I realized that the hill would have to be really steep and long, so I decided to start the player down a flight of stairs. That way, the shot of the walls is framed much better.
A lot of the passage ways were altered to give the player a line of sight of the next challenge. In the timer puzzle room, before going down the stairs, the player gets a very small glimpse of the super shotgun and enemies. The jump puzzle room does this with the first and last jump challenges as well. These are sprinkled pretty much everywhere.
The boss room has a staircase going up instead of down, so the player is coming from a low angle to help with framing it as massive.
In the timer room, the last second before the player fails is actually three seconds to give them an edge if they're extremely close. I always think games shouldn't exactly be fair, it should favor the player.
In the last acid room where the wizards spawn, the location has been altered so the player sees them easier.
Acid puzzle room has different platform routes. Some are easier and slower while others are harder and faster. Hopefully should finish up the greybox tomorrow!

4/30/20

Greybox is almost done! I was able to get some friends to test out a small part of it. The teleporter puzzle was annoying to players so I made a change to it. Instead of walking backward toward the teleporter taking you to the previous room, it'll instead spit you back into that same room, so you won't lose any progress when you guess wrong. I hoping the texturing will make the puzzle more fun, but I'm not afraid to cut this room if players continue to dislike it. I'll be monitoring this closely!

5/1/20

Yikes, finally finished the greybox. It took muuuch longer than expected. This map was definitely out of scope for me. Which is funny, I definitely had a feeling as I was creating the 2D top-down. I'm definitely worried about this map becoming unwieldy to work with and ending up being a large yet unpolished map. Depending on what feedback I get on my greybox, I may change the map drastically.

A link to the greybox is down below.

Also, you catch me working on this over on my Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/syfyskye

5/5/20

Been spending all day working on adding encounters. After implementing some encounters I had in my 2D top-down, a lot of it was planned in the pattern of threes. The trials, the castle wall encounters. I guess 3's just works good for games? Anyway, I'm really happy with how the first encounter went. I was really worried last week about not being about make this a well-made experience, but the encounters are going much faster than I anticipated. Maybe I enjoy and work better with encounters and enemy placement than placing down level geometry? All I can say is I definitely enjoyed putting thought into my encounters and testing it over and over again much more than level geometry.

Like in the 2D, the castle walls encounter starts off with two knights walking outside the castle walls, with a bed of lava in between the walls and the grassy area where the knights are. No bridge yet. Killing the knights spawns some shooting enemies on top of the castle walls. Shooting them opens two doors with shootable buttons. In order to make sure the player knows to shoot these buttons, I spawned some more shooting enemies by the button, with the shotgun the player will no doubt shoot the button. The left one opens the bridge, and the right one opens the door and which also spawns a hellknight. I found this to be incredibly interesting as depending on what button you choose, you get two different experiences. Either a knight that shoots across the lava like while you need to be within sight of them to shoot them, or open the bridge first and have to dance around the knight while you get upclose with them with the shotgun.

I was also really happy with the first encounter in the main hub. Like we planned, the player gets the nailgun before being thrust into a longer range fire fight with enemies patrolling the hub area. I had an idea of demons dropping down right in front of the player, so I used a monster-jump to do just that. After that, some wizards and knights spawn, so you get three waves before the player gets access to the puzzles. I did this so there is some kind of cadence between fights and rest periods. The rest period before entering the main hub, and the rest period the player has to take after completing a trial.

I'm a bit worried about the final boss room, though. I haven't fleshed that part out at all. But tomorrow I'm definitely gonna spruce up the acid room and time trial room's encounters. Then we'll get test, test and retest so we can get a good amount of ammo and health. Theeen it's on to the boss room.

5/6/20

One of the things I knew I needed to work on was the timer puzzle. The one where you needed to get through a number of rooms, killing every enemy and reaching the end room within a minute? It was too easy to beat and I knew I needed to make some new geometry to help extend it. And I've mentioned, I wasn't particularly thrilled about creating new geometry. Nor was I thrilled about possibly extending the timer puzzle was just taking some rooms I made and copy-pasting it as an extension. It didn't seem exciting at all. But I knew at the very least it was short. So, at the end of the timer puzzle I made a another staircase, expecting to just copy-paste another series of rooms when I had an interesting idea I've been wanting to do for a while now. I decided to make the last room as big as I could, which would make some nice contrast. And then I'd fill the room with a bunch of enemies, with loads of cover. I made sure that as the player walked down the stairs, in a hurry to reach the end and kill everything, they'd see this.

A bunch of enemies walking along paths, minding their business. A bunch of cover. And the end portal behind a gate. They know what they gotta do. (Hopefully! We'll see I got friends testing this tomorrow!)

I tried to place the enemies in ways that encouraged the player to keep moving. I ran around this room over a dozen times to make sure the player can squeeze between every gap at top speed, I'm hoping they'll move around a bit like Doom 2016, where it's about moving and shooting fast. But we'll see if this happens. At the very least, I really like the contrast between this final room and the previous ones.

I think I also found a sweet spot for the amount of ammo and health I give the player. I edged on the side of having too much ammo rather than not enough, though. I don't think this is the type of game where you want to run out of room easily. What was admittedly a bit tedious was making sure that the player had the right weapons and amounts of health and ammo no matter which order they took on the puzzles, which meant quite a lot of playthroughs, but honestly, it wasn't so bad. Tomorrow I think I'll post another update video showing off these encounters. I think I might be a better mood this time around, haha.

5/7/20

Firstly let's start off with an entities walkthrough link.

I also managed to get some playtesting today thanks to some close friends. Many thanks for Holly, Ian and Luke for letting me watch them as they play it so I was able to write down some observations.

Playtest #1

Died at timed puzzle
On second playthrough, finished time puzzle with a second left (should we extend this?)
Enemies in boss room didn't aggro toward player
Says two shamblers probably too much
More health and armor in boss room
Timer before red gate open should be shorter
Wizards of final wave spawn before boss do not grow aggro, make target
Shamblers/player getting stuck on stairs.

They said they really enjoyed the level but felt the boss room was much too chaotic.

Playtest #2

Said grunts on top of castle walls too hard to shoot (push wall forward more)
Didn't realize there was a gate covering the teleporter in timer room
Became confused after completed timer room but gate was still up (let's get rid of that timer)
Skips acid jumps, damage boosts
Not super clear when boss room opens
Died in boss room
Seems to struggle with pillars in boss room
Seems to struggle with boss room stairs
Would like to see enemies that spawn out of nowhere in hub area to have visible spawns. Kept spawning on top of the player.
Final timer room should have enemies and cover rearranged to encourage fast movement.
Failed timer puzzle (should extend it)

Playtest #3

Enemies on the castle walls felt too far away, was a chore to kill
In teleporter room, maybe add grunts to make it easier to tell what room is new/old
Acid puzzle is a bit boring, enemies should be spread out a bit
After triggering baddies in acid room, player jumped back to start, enemies spawning in failed to target
Liked the ending boss, disliked the staircase

Some good stuff! I'll definitely be

Changing the last room structure in terms of pillars and stairs (spread them out, make the stairs easier for both enemies and the player to climb)
- See of this makes the ending boss a bit easier. If not, I'll modify how many enemies spawn.
- Also add more armor and health in there.
Push the grunts on the castle walls forward so easier to shoot.
Spread out enemies in acid room.
Take out timer before time puzzle gate unlocks
Extend time puzzle

Among some many other small changes.

5/14/20

Began texturing today! When I was making the key rooms, I decided to color code them to match the key/item they have. I also decided to add a text trigger when presented with a new trial, hoping to give a bit more context and remind the player of why they're participating in these challenges.

I did also change the boss room a bit. I had a mix of people liking the boss and people finding the boss too hard, so I made it a teensy bit bigger and adding more pillars. On one of my projects I worked on last winter I found out that the size of the map contributes to difficulty. I realized this as I watched players test out that game, a more open map makes everything easier as there's more space to maneuver. I used what I learned and made the boss room a bit bigger and added some more cover. I can now beat it pretty easily which I found is a decent sweet spot for player difficulty (of course it'll be easier for the person who developed it. Unless it's a match three game cause I suck at those.)

5/15/20

Just finished up lighting the place. Here's some shots I took! Remember the snip tool makes the screenshots darker for some reason. I usually adjust them in Photoshop but the contrast kept getting messed up so I left them in their original clip'd form.

Going up the first stairwell, you see this light coming from the outside. Just blown away when I first noticed the effects of having bounce lighting.

The first castle shot.

Castle door. Had to manipulate it a bit so the texture looked nice on it. Shout out to past Chris for picking an idea that would fit easily with Quake's aesthetics.

Just within the castles door.

The main hub and the tower.

Another shot of the tower with its sweet, sweet shadows. Along with demons waiting in perch for when the player crosses a trigger.

A shot of the main hub leading to the boss area. Notice the little alcoves I put in the tower. Enemies spawning on the ground now spawn in one of four alcoves like that I made around the tower so 1: Enemy spawns are a little more spread out and 2: Enemies aren't spawning on top of players' heads.

Intro to Acid room.

Beginning of Acid Room. Once again, the bounce lighting making that compile time worth it.

The second to last Acid room. Noticed I added some enemies on the moving platforms to make the room more exciting, in addition to adding two enemies in the room before this so the difficulty spike doesn't jump as shortly as it did before, thanks to Ian for this! This caused some headaches but I thought it'd be so cute to have these grunts on the moving platforms.

Last Acid room. Note the romantic lighting.

And once you get the super nail gun, the lighting gets even more romantic, and the platforms behind you vanish! This had an unexpected but cool effect, enemy and player projectiles briefly has a light source when they fire, and those bounce as well!

The entrance to red timer room. I love the light bounce here.

Red Timer room starts off much darker than the other trials. Perhaps an omen?

Right before activating the timer. I made sure to add a text trigger to remind the player of the trials they're taking.

The first red trial room. The player comes through the left hallway, so the two enemies wait to ambush them while the other plays as "bait".

The last room for the timer trial. The light from behind the player is standing strobes and has this really nice effect and it slight "fills" the room when it lights up.

A blue room for the blue key!

The entrance to the teleporter puzzle. Notice the glow on the launcher.

The last teleporter room. Notice how dark it is. Also, to let players know they're in a new room, I purposely put a monster right where the player spawns in, so they get the meaty audiovisual feedback of a telefrag, which only happens when you get to a new room. Each new room does with with different enemies, so you can tell which room you're in by what parts are lying about.

Red key room!

Yellow key room!

Aaand the new tower top!

Just within the boss gates. I originally wanted to have a bright light start glowing within here once all the puzzles were created, get a nice bounce from the gates onto the main hub, calling the players name. So I tried setting a trigger for the light, but it doing that will only turn a light off instead of starting off then turning on. I /was/ wondering how they did it in those Quake/Doom rooms where the lights would turn off after getting an item. So I went with a low-level candle strobing light instead. It contrasts from the bright room from the hub, makes it a bit more mysterious and it fits the atmosphere more anyway. I used the knowledge I gained from turning lights off into the last light effect in the last Acid room as detailed above.

The little hub area for the enemy boss. Note the bright light being shown on the mural in the back. I used this to drag the players toward the boss room.

One of the last rooms before Boss. The light here strobes really fast, but has a fill light.

The last thing you see before going to the bright final boss room. I also decided to add a text trigger here to remind players about quick saving and loading. I thought hard about this as it definitely breaks the immersion a bit, but players kept talking about lack of checkpoints when fighting the last boss. I thought about adding a passage way at the beginning of the level that teleports you to a hallway of items before teleporting you to Boss Room, with a text trigger stating, "This is a shortcut to the boss room, don't take it unless you were there already!" or something in that degree. I decided against that since I didn't wanna break the immersion at the very beginning of the level since the whole start works for bringing in that immersion with the flickering lights, the outside light bouncing in, and the intro text trigger to set the mood, I didn't wanna ruin that right away, but I felt the need to help the players out in some way, especially when they're asking for a way to continue playing your level, you gotta oblige in some way.

The start of the final boss. Notice I made the stairs juust enough for the players and enemies to use easily, along with major adjustment of the pillars for some structural design and cover.

What you see after defeating the boss and taking your rightful place on the throne.