Chris Brady

Design

Eager to work on a smaller level design project after Old Habits and Dead Wives and excited by the quality of the Trenchbroom editor, I started work on a level for Quake.

A month later, the level was complete following an active period of rapid prototyping and iteration.

Rather than use paper planning for this project, I prototyped with floor-only layouts in-game, before moving to full blockouts for gameplay testing.

The map was playtested by 4 different people, and feedback was addressed prior to release.

Concept

I've always been fascinated by the way that level design acts as a major method of pacing in linear games like Resident Evil 4 and Half-Life 2, and the way that the level designers and the player effectively co-direct the action in order to tell a story.

Initially during design, I didn't plan on explicitly emulating any narrative tropes of pacing, but I did know that I wanted to create a sense of rising intensity as the level progressed.

When I started building this began to manifest itself in a more literal sense, as the player fights an uphill battle that becomes gradually steeper, building up to a grand series of encounters in a large room towards the end.

Layout and Secrets

The immediate opening is mostly harmless, with few enemies, and players are even free to go swimming to get bonus ammo. Once they approach the walls of the fortress, they encounter a frontlines-style encounter with enemies that leads them to ascending the wall to open the tunnel gates.

The tunnels would be a brief, linear ascension if not for the secret area above. Players are hinted to its existence immediately by an enemy who drops from it. Now aware and looking up, players can find and shoot two buttons that open a secret door to this higher area, which includes brief enemy encounters and early access to stronger weapons.

Following the tunnels is a brief interlude that leads to the arena, one large room with 3 floors that players must spiral around to reach a key to a door at the other end. As they progress through this room, enemies continue to appear, jumping out of the walls and descending from the skylights.

After conquering the finale, players are given plentiful rocket ammo and engage in a much easier downhill fight towards the exit, a reward for having overcome the rising intensity of the level.

Combat Encounters

Due to the uphill nature of this concept, encounters involved pushing past aggressive forward pushing enemies, while often avoiding fire from ranged enemies. Quake's pallet of enemies have a healthy diversity to them. I used dogs, knights, and fiends as melee enemies, while using the ogres, hell knights, wizards, and vores as ranged enemies.

Fiends attack primarily by pouncing towards the player, so I positioned them as surprise attacks, and they generally made their entry by jumping down from above, jumping out of a door as it opens, or from a dark corner of the room.

Zombies in Quake can only be killed by explosion, so I positioned several in small groups, often below the player's height, so that players could kill them as "sheep enemies" every now and then, with the satisfaction of a 90s' game gibbing.

In an encounter towards the end, players are bombarded by grenades from ogres above, which lures them to a super nailgun (long ranged weapon) pickup. However, this is a trap, and picking it up causes doors to open and fiends to jump out, adding to the chaos.