new Quake map: Mermaids In The Basement (for Quake Rooftops Jam)

After making my previous map "One Need Not Be A House" for Quake Brutalist Jam 3, I swore I wouldn't make another giant non-linear castle island single player Quake level.

... anyway, this is another giant non-linear castle island single player Quake level called "Mermaids In The Basement," made for Quake Rooftops Jam organized by Naitelveni and Sock. 

You can download and play Rooftops Jam now on Slipseer! It has 19 rooftop-themed maps, all made in 1.5 months.

This post details my design process, intent, and regrets. It SPOILS what happens in the level. If you care, then play it first. Consider this your last SPOILER WARNING.

Building rooftops is challenging. It implies building a big outdoor area, which the 1990s-era Quake engine doesn't handle very gracefully. 

There's also bigger conceptual player experience questions to wrestle: will the rooftop feel meaningful unless the player has to slum around on ground level first? And what if the player jumps off / falls off? Now you have to figure out a bottom layer too, as well as shortcuts to get back up. If the bottom layer is all connected, then these shortcuts have to be non-obvious or gradually unlockable too, or else the player can just bypass the roof layer entirely.

Some mappers cleverly constrain their rooftops with fences and high walls, others carefully snake and bend sightlines over an insta-kill void. I also like the underground city approach, with a ceiling above a ceiling. I chose maybe the dumbest routing / gating strategy: super-complicated spaghetti rats nest. Ugh.

first blockout test: is this core house shape flexible / OK?

Cinque Terre, Italy 

First I prototyped my core house shape. Early on, I adopted a shallow roof slope of 1:2, I felt a steeper incline would've made Quake's already-terrible slope handling feel even worse, while a completely flat roof wouldn't fit with my thematic goals: I wanted to study scenic Mediterranean beachside villages. 

You know those villages -- old picturesque colorful houses stacked along the cliffside, like Cinque Terre or the Amalfi Coast. Or maybe it reminds you more of Spain?

very bad practice

I thought maybe these staggered roofs could function as improvised ramps / stairs, to gradually climb up to the top of a village. Even though I'd heavily design these routes, the haphazard feel would encourage players to take the credit for their clever parkour and amplify the rooftop vibes.

This was also a construction experiment. I built as if I was working in Unity or Unreal, copy and pasting a messy jumble of houses at odd angles. It's all off-grid with many "floating" non-integer vertices. This is considered very bad practice in Quake mapping, something only beginners do. Perhaps sometimes we must do bad ideas on purpose and return to that beginner's mind.

texturing and color tests: too many colors, I decided to constrain the palette more

Then I experimented with more colors, since some of this map construction is similar to my previous map "There's a Certain Slant of Light" with hues inspired by Mexican architect Luis Barragan. These new colors made my houses resemble more of a Brazilian favela... However I don't know much about favelas and it felt a bit inappropriate to fetishize favelas in a video game, so I pulled back the color palette to warmer hues only.

Majula, Dark Souls 2

The warmer hues matched my lighting design goal, which was to experiment with more of a sunset vibe. I was playing a lot of Dark Souls 2 at the time, so maybe this is like my Majula. In the end I'm afraid I was a bit of a coward and I didn't go full-Majula though -- I still angle down the sunset direction fairly steeply, at a 15 degree pitch. It still feels plausibly like a sunset to me though.

Dark Souls vibes must've infected some of the ground-level street layer design too. I'm sure you can get some Undead Burg / Undead Parish vibes there. But really, I had more of dod_avalanche from Day of Defeat in mind, with its narrow sloping streets and careful ruination. Both inspirations serve their purpose: I wanted to contrast the wide openness of the rooftops with the closed-off compression of the streets and alleys. The street fighting should feel different from the roof fighting.

some of the new monster types in Arcane Dimensions

This jam uses Arcane Dimensions, a mod kit with dozens of new monster types. I tried to avoid the typical vanilla Quake enemies, and mostly draw from the AD bestiary for ~75% of my monster placement.

The teleporting Skeleton Wizards seemed promising at first, like maybe they could blink to nearby roofs or balconies during a fight? Unfortunately they teleported only if you ran up close to them. It was too easy to just stand at midrange and pelt them with a shotgun. They needed shorter sightlines than I could provide. Oops.

I ended up liking the Fury Knights and Justices more -- big armored guys that jump-attack a lot yet also mix-in ranged attacks. I also liked the Zombie Knights, slow-ish melee fodder that revive unless explosives or a quad-shotgun can gib them. Maybe I went very knight heavy to match the medieval-ish theme.

overview perspective from inside the map editor TrenchBroom

As with my previous map One Need Not Be A House, this level has a strong granular non-linear flow, with a network of branching routes that let you ambush enemies and "break" fights, as well as find weapons "out of order." I rarely spawn monsters or lock them away, it's all there. Again I'd say this is more of a Dark Souls approach to encounter design.

But I also do a pretty common community mapping thing, where I orchestrate big map-wide "slaughter" finales so that the player's accumulated arsenal and map knowledge feel meaningful at the end. That way you can lure monsters to your favorite arena and clear them with your favorite weapon. 

This time my main slaughter design experiment was to play with AD's "statue" monsters. I foreshadow this final slaughter with dozens of sleeping gargoyle and golem statues around the map.

statue-mode golem blocks access to a quad damage until later in the map progression

My main regret in my previous map was the secrets design. Half of those secrets relied on repetitively swimming through poison ocean. I was responding to some feedback that I didn't put enough secrets in my maps, so maybe I was feeling a bit bratty like, "here have all the bad secrets you can eat!!"

I think I do better with my map secrets here. Some secret passages let you bypass a healthy quarter of the map, while other forgotten nooks provide endgame weapons surprisingly early. 

Some statue golems even block access to powerups when you first encounter them, so you have to remember to revisit after the statues wake up -- a secret inspired by the petrified statues in Dark Souls 2. However I believe none of this secret design approaches the most sublime and meaningful map secret I accomplished in my de_aztec homage "Taught By Thirst."

semi-secret "back area" route that lets you bypass like 50% of the map and get end-game weapons

As with many of my Quake maps, the title "Mermaids In The Basement" comes from an Emily Dickinson poem:

I started Early - Took my Dog -
And visited the Sea -
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me -

And Frigates - in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands -
Presuming Me to be a Mouse -
Aground - upon the Sands -

But no Man moved Me - till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe -
And past my Apron - and my Belt
And past my Bodice - too -

And made as He would eat me up -
As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion's Sleeve -
And then - I started - too -

And He - He followed - close behind -
I felt His Silver Heel
Upon my Ankle - Then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl -

Until We met the Solid Town -
No One He seemed to know -
And bowing - with a Mighty look -
At me - The Sea withdrew -

This would seem to be an innocent trip to the ocean to watch the ships. 

But as usual, I prefer a delightfully filthy and erotic reading: "no Man moved" Dickinson, yet the sea undresses her, gradually working its way up to her bodice, devouring her until she "started" to climax and the sea "followed - close behind" until her "Shoes Would overflow with Pearl" (haha ew!)

"Mermaids In The Basement" is also just a really cool phrase. Can you believe she wrote it in the 1800s? It makes me imagine a TikTok guy building an eel pit aquarium under his house, but filling it with fish people.

The poem's frequent architectural metaphors and flooding imagery informed my map's ending...

noclip debug view of the ending: walking down into the second sunset ocean underground

Once you get the Gold Key at the top of the town, you fight your way down to the bottom, past all the awakened golems and gargoyle statues. That key can now unlock the giant Gold Door beneath the town!

You descend a deep dark staircase that seems to go below the very ocean itself... only to arrive at a second ocean and second sunset, deep underground. As if there are literally mermaids in the basement.

I placed the level exit in the sunset. You must chase the horizon, yet never quite reach it, just like Dickinson could never completely fulfill her endless sexual appetite! After all, as we're all well-aware, that's what Quake is all about.

Here's some more screenshots:

Thanks to Makkon for the excellent textures (and skybox!) as always. Music is "Solitary Machine" by Hall of Nights, from Quake Music Jam 2 - Slipgate Dissolution. Also thanks to playtesters Razzzor, ImmortalChickens, Lobotomy-Lobster, auhsan, Mopey bloke, and moko.

***

You can play this level and many more rooftop-themed maps in Quake Rooftops Jam, a free single player Quake 1 mod available at Slipseer. To play, you'll need to buy Quake (or download LibreQuake) as well as a modern Quake engine like Ironwail. 

To install and play:

1. make a subfolder called "qrtjam" in your Ironwail folder / or main Quake EXE folder

2. unzip everything into /qrtjam/

3. run Ironwail, select "Mods" in the main menu > select Quake Rooftops

If you need help setting up your install, you can always ask for help on the Quake Mapping discord or in the Slipseer forums "Rooftops Jam" release thread.

Keep in mind our main audience these days is experienced Quake fans. If you haven't played boomer shooters or Quake in a long time, you may want to start more on Easy mode. Personally my maps tend to be more on the easier side of combat and ramp up gradually, but others will be more intense from the get-go. Definitely check out the rest of the maps in the jam, there's some nice Mirror's Edge homages.