"One Need Not Be A House" is a large non-linear concrete bunker island / brick brutalism map that I made for Quake Brutalism Jam 3 -- a huge single player mega mod for Quake 1 with 77 (!!!) modernist-inspired levels made by the community.
You can download and play it for free here, as part of the QBJ3 mod at the Quake community hub Slipseer. This time the jam organizers even made a 100% free standalone download with no Quake purchase required!
In this post I talk about my inspirations, intent, and what happens in the level.
This is your last SPOILER WARNING: if you care about spoilers, play the level for yourself first.
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| Kahn's "brick brutalism" masterpieces in Bangladesh and India |
My main architectural inspiration here is the work of Louis Kahn, specifically his "brick brutalism" masterpieces: the National Assembly Mosque / Presidential Plaza of the National Parliament House in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India.
While Kahn isn't the first architect you'd associate with brutalism, his unadorned brick monoliths are very brutalist, showcasing the raw material and brick's unique affordance for archways. It also embodies a critique of orthodox Western brutalism's concrete fetish -- a truly global brutalism must adapt to diverse climates, materials, and cultures.
Kahn was friends with Luis Barragán, the main design inspiration for my previous Quake Brutalism Jam map "There's A Certain Slant Of Light." Both Barragán and Kahn developed their own distinct takes on brutalism, paying greater attention to materiality and light. It's a sunny contrast to the grimdark concrete megastructures in most of the other QBJ maps. Studying these architects also forces me out of my comfort zone, to build in ways I wouldn't usually build.
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| the first thing I built: brick tower with spiral staircase, and near-final texturing and lighting |
I began by prototyping a round brick tower in Quake, and then painstakingly cut away a circular window with a careful trim around the edge. If this wasn't a Kahn study, I wouldn't have bothered. Making a thin round subtractive shape that curves on 2+ axes is pretty annoying. Even though TrenchBroom is the best Quake level editor around, there's still no magical modern modeling tools to do this for you -- this is still 1990s era low poly tech, you still have to drag each vertex into place, by hand.
It also shows how blockouts in level design are a bit bullshit, because from the very beginning, texturing and lighting heavily influenced my core shapes and metrics. Makkon's excellent chunky brick textures and trims worked best with a wall thickness of 32, and my daylighting tests showed I needed a fairly steep sunlight angle to brighten up anything behind the massive tower. Without near-final textures, I would've defaulted to a wall thickness of 16, thus requiring an expensive rebuild. Without near-final lighting, I wouldn't have realized the towers block so much sunlight, thus requiring an expensive rebuild.
In this way, the layout and blockout were dependent on the texturing and lighting.
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| shadowy spiral staircase interior of the tower |
Inside the towers, you climb these big long spiral staircases to the top.
The conventional wisdom in Quake mapping is to avoid spiral staircases. They're tricky to build. Steeply sloped spiral staircases cause weird quirks with Quake Engine player camera and traversal -- see 3kliksphilip's video about the cursed spiral staircase in de_dust2. The inconsistent sloping and "vibrating step" jitter feels bad (and the Quake norm is NOT to clip stairs into invisible ramps). Lastly, smoothly "slicing the pie" at a constant rate around the spiral is a mildly annoying input, requiring small frequent mouse-look nudges.
But mother, I love him!! I love spiral staircases anyway!! I love any big long continuous stretch of stairs!! See my previous map Taught By Thirst which ends with a big fight up a pyramid, or my earlier map The Close And Holy Darkness with a big staircase courtyard.
I like how big long stairs afford "free verticality": players can treat the entire staircase as one continuous sloped floor plane. Contrast this to a traditional boxy stairwell with frequent landings and orthogonal turns. Yuck! I argue breaking continuity is worse than any spiral stairs discomfort -- a discomfort I mitigated with a thick central pillar, wider steps, and a shallower rise.
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| early work in progress screenshot; notice the 4 big cylindrical shapes in the middle |
I like these towers with spiral staircases so much that I anchor the entire map layout around this "square" of 4 tower-spiral-staircases. Everything else flowed on from this early design decision.
How do these tower-spirals relate to each other? Do you climb each one separately? Or do you enter one, and then use bridges to access the others? In any order?
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| The Silent Cartographer, from Halo: Combat Evolved |
It's tricky to reconcile non-linearity with current Quake community encounter design norms, where tight progression and fight scripting are more of the fashion. But I don't have the time nor skill to make a non-linear masterpiece like Tears of the False God that seems to anticipate your every possible move. So instead I think I'm OK with letting players feel like they're getting away with something, to ambush mobs and "break" encounters by approaching the "wrong" way with different weapons and powerups. I use zero monster teleport ambushes: all my monsters are "on the page", all my fights are "fair." It's more of a Dark Souls attitude than a Quake attitude.
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| "rafts and rockets" section with a line of rocket soldiers facing away from the main approach |
Here's one early example of my non-linear encounter design, the "rafts and rockets" area pictured above:
FROM THE BOTTOM: Many players enter from the rocks. You'll have to platform across these vulnerable wood rafts that bob up and down in the poisonous ocean. Before you jump, you'll likely snipe the unaware rocket soldiers -- but if you're not quick enough, they could blast you into the poison water. (Here I also placed an invisibility ring, a dare to sneak underneath without sniping.)
FROM THE TOP: Or if you approach from the beach, you'll be busy fighting some knights -- and that's when all the rocket soldiers start firing at you. The beach isn't safe, but it's the best place to fight the knights with a close range weapon, so you have to juggle the rockets until you have a spare moment to snipe back with the pistol. Or maybe you found the nailgun already.
FROM THE TOP-LEFT: It's also very possible to sneak to the stairs. The rocket soldiers might be lined-up perfectly for you to take out all of them in one shot with the Rebar Gun or Invoker.
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| editor screenshot of some of QBJ3's new monster types and weapons |
"Rebar Gun or Invoker"? Huh? The QBJ3 mod has added so many new weapons and enemy types that it's basically a whole new game distinct from Quake. It was a challenge to the mapping community to try to figure out how to use all the new mechanics within the jam's 7 week time limit. They even made a tutorial level just for the level designers AND it was really difficult!!
I tried to maximize my use of new QBJ3 features. I placed quite a few "vampirism" powerups, which makes kills drop little red health orbs. It's like Doom 2016, encouraging you to rush to stay alive. It also turns big mobs into big healing opportunities and messes with target priority, where sometimes it makes more sense to mow down low-threat enemies first to cash them in for health.
I also love the new fodder monster types, like the "rocket soldier" is dangerous long range fodder, or the "swarmer" and "sploder" are super-fast melee fodder good for ambushes and chaos. But maybe my favorite is the "amalgam", a big flying concrete monolith made of mouths -- it's useful to have a slow tanky flyer, but also its caltrops don't aggro other monsters so it's a great support enemy too.
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| a small courtyard with a tree; notice the monsters hidden in the shadows in the back |
Again, doing art and lighting early in the design process was important for figuring out monster placement and gameplay stuff. If I didn't like how dark an area was, that meant I had to punch some holes in the ceiling or move some walls, so the sun could shine through. Then once I saw where the light could not reach, I knew I could safely hide some monsters in there.
This entire level has only one main light source: the sun. If this is truly an abandoned overgrown place, then there should be no random inexplicable electrical lighting. This also follows the tradition of levels like Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, emphasizing natural light and committing to worldbuilding via lighting.
(Did you know the original Quake 1 lightmap baker didn't even support sunlight / global directional light? The mod community only added this feature later, when Tyrann updated his popular TyrLite tool on December 14, 1999. Imagine... more than 26 years ago, some random Australian nerd invented the sun.)
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| the back garden area / another variant on the spiral staircase |
While there's a lot of freedom to make your own route throughout the entire level, the overall map progression has three general stages / objectives:
- Beachheads: get up to the wharf -- either through the central pipes, or by climbing up near the aqueduct pipeline, or by sneaking up a ladder from the back beach. Get Flak Gun, Rebar Gun, Grenade Launcher, and maybe Invoker.
- Wharf: find 1-4 silver keys to unlock stairs and shortcuts. Get Nail Gun, Rocket Launcher, and maybe Invoker.
- Towers: find 3-5 gold keys to unlock the aqueduct pipeline to the exit tower.
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| gold dome from Riven |
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| aqueduct pipeline with giant golden orb floating in the sky |
I wanted to end with something surprising. Not just another big mob fight or something. If I had more time, I would've built (yet another) spiral staircase that leads down, all the way down, below the ocean, into a big surreal subterranean arena or something, Dark Souls style.
But I didn't have much time, so I opted for a smaller ending: an old wood house.
Given this map jam's architectural theme, I thought the ending should invoke architecture. Brutalism was a response to modern materials enabling new ways of building, it requires something to react against, a status quo of traditional vernacular architectures. Modernism requires a pre-modernism. And that's what this house symbolizes: the spiritual weight of pre-modernist architecture haunting this entire place.
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| the ending teleporter, atop the last tower -- an old wooden house |
As usual, my map title ("One Need Not Be A House") comes from an Emily Dickinson poem:
One need not be a chamber — to be haunted —
One need not be a House —
The Brain — has Corridors surpassing
Material Place —Far safer, of a Midnight — meeting
External Ghost —
Than an Interior — confronting —
That cooler — Host —Far safer, through an Abbey — gallop —
The Stones a’chase —
Than moonless — One’s A’self encounter —
In lonesome place —Ourself — behind Ourself — Concealed —
Should startle — most —
Assassin — hid in Our Apartment —
Be Horror’s least —The Prudent — carries a Revolver —
He bolts the Door,
O’erlooking a Superior Spectre
More near —
This poem is fairly straightforward. She's saying you don't need to be a house to be haunted, because your brain is so fucked up it's like a haunted house already. At least in a physical haunted house though, you can run away from the (physical?) ghosts. Unfortunately you can't run away from brain ghosts.
There's a bit of dark irony in the last stanza. Dickinson invokes a revolver, obviously useless against any ghosts outside your brain. However, the "superior specters" inside your brain, though superior and unfleeable, are actually quite vulnerable to guns, if you think about it. So your worst Assassin... is yourself. Again, a surprisingly dark and Quake-like sentiment of Miss Dickinson.
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You can play this map and MANY MORE brutalist-inspired levels in the Quake Brutalist Jam 3 mod, available for free here at the Quake community hub Slipseer. There's even a 100% free standalone version available, no Quake purchase required. (But if you're even a little bit computer savvy, the Quake mod release is strongly recommended instead, it just requires a little more setup.)
