Showing posts with label imagined mods. Show all posts
Showing posts with label imagined mods. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Postcards from Quakeland, 2022


Some random notes and thoughts from Quake modding land, in this cold wintery June of 2022:
  • Community Hubs
  • Official Mods
  • The Future of My Quake Maps

Sunday, August 9, 2020

new Quake map: "Smell It In The Street"

I made another Quake map! This one is called "Smell It In The Street" and it was made for the Doom Tintin map jam, a level design jam centered around using Quake mapping community member Tintin's texture pack that samples from Doom 3 textures.

Some brief level design thoughts follow:

Monday, February 11, 2019

Black and white and re(a)d all over: on SOD (1999), Half-Quake (2001), Jeux d'ombres (2007), and NaissanceE (2014)


Last week I finished playing through the entirety of NaissanceE (2014), an avant-garde walking sim / platformer game inspired by brutalist megastructure manga and filled with subtle callbacks to new media art. NaissanceE has a bit of a cult classic reputation among level designers and modders, due to its heavily reliance on abstraction, lack of concrete narrative, and punishing platformer sections.

To this day, the game still defies easy categorization and demographics. Who is this for?

The walking sim aficionado of that time (the Dear Esther remaster was in 2012, Proteus and The Stanley Parable remaster were in 2013) would've hated the platformer sections with instant-death traps, while the action jock might've been tempted to rage-quit with every coy architectural riddle and impossible-to-navigate dark room. Back in 2014, only a few critics dared to defend this design clash.

I think the work still holds up pretty well in 2019, and to understand why, we should take a brief trip back to 1999.

Saturday, August 18, 2018

Grinding as repetition as savefiles as insistence


In "Portraits and Repetition", Gertrude Stein argues that repetition is better understood as "insistence":
"... there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis." (PDF)
This rings true to me for basically any activity. Woodworking, cooking, dancing, guitar-playing, painting, writing, welding, negotiating, swimming, typing -- everything requires practice, and in practicing, we insist on the continued value of that activity each time. We can never repeat any performance or action exactly, by virtue of memory and time. Each repetition always means something slightly different, and changes the meaning of all the repetitions before it.

Game design theory formalizes this repetition as a "core gameplay loop" or "mechanic" or whatever, but let's keep following Stein's insistence on insistence for a minute:

Friday, June 29, 2018

The Forgotten City (Skyrim mod) as dense quest


This post kind of spoils (but not really) some of the Skyrim quest mod The Forgotten City.

Bethesda open world RPG games have developed certain quest tropes. One trope is the conflicting stories quests like Two Sides of the Coin (Oblivion), In My Time of Need (Skyrim), and A Business Proposition (Elder Scrolls Online) which present two NPCs with conflicting stories and no real way to discern who is right, so you just have to pick a side and hope you feel good about it. Naturally, this provokes heated debates among fans, such as this epic two year 500+ post multi-thread argument about which NPC was ultimately truthful in Skyrim.

I heard about the popular Skyrim mod The Forgotten City after their E3 2018 retail remake announcement. After playing it, I think The Forgotten City exists within a different open world quest tradition of complex "dense quests" with many characters and possibilities in a small space. It reminds me a bit of Whodunit (Oblivion), Tenpenny Towers (Fallout 3), Beyond the Beef (Fallout New Vegas), and Diamond City Blues (Fallout 4)... the retail version of Skyrim conspicuously doesn't have any comparable dense quest, so The Forgotten City sort of fills this gap.

Friday, May 26, 2017

From modders to mimics: a people's history of the "prop hunt" genre

This post contains minor gameplay spoilers for the first hour of Prey (2017).

Contemporary game design is built on the blood, sweat, and tears of countless modders. MOBAs, tower defense, realistic squad shooters, walking simulators, survival royales, all started as mods. (For those keeping score: Aeon of Strife for Starcraft 1 or DOTA for Warcraft 3, innumerable tower defense UMS maps for Starcraft 1, Counter-Strike for Half-Life 1, Dear Esther for Half-Life 2, Day-Z for ARMA.)

Add the "prop hunt" to the list. The prop hunt is interior design meets hide and seek, where hiders "hide" in plain sight, disguised as the decorative clutter common in video game worlds, and seekers must guess what is inanimate clutter and what is sentient clutter. Arkane Studios' recent sci-fi shooter Prey (2017) cleverly commercializes this mechanic in a way that modders never could, and while it's nice to know they're paying attention to current trends, I think it's also important to remember the modders that usually get erased from game design histories. In this case, I argue that modders predate AAA design practice by at least 19 years.

CrateDM was a Quake 2 mod released on April 14, 1998, made in an hour by Chris "Shatter" Holden. As far as mods go, it was really simple from a technical perspective: a small map full of crates, and a PPM (plugin player model) that let players appear as crates, and no custom code or anything... which, I think, is brilliant. We often argue video games are made of code, and here was a new game genre created without any code at all!

Here is Holden's process and notes from the readme.txt:

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

"Psycho-material geographies" of 3D spaces, and The Beginner's Guide by Davey Wreden et al


This post gives vague conceptual SPOILERS for The Beginner's Guide, and spoils a few specific moments. You really shouldn't worry about it, I mostly just talk about me in this.

I was one of the people who secretly played The Beginner's Guide long before its public release. Why was I given access, and not someone else? Well, that's kind of what the game's about: a "Davey" who is talking through his relationship with another designer named Coda. Who did Coda want to play their games?

In her own excellent post about TBG, Emily Short argues that the game has a very spare "personality-light" kind of style compared to what Short regards as more distinctive contemporary experimental designers like "Stephen Lavelle, Michael Brough, Pippin Barr, [... or] Robert Yang." That shout out (thanks!) is what stirred my memory...

I remember playing this seven months ago (back when it was simply codenamed "The Author") and suddenly thinking... wait, is Coda supposed to be me?

Monday, March 23, 2015

Level With Me, vol. 1 re-release (v1.1)

I have updated my old experimental Portal 2 mod "Level With Me" to work with current versions of Portal 2. This mostly involved repackaging a menu file and rebuilding the sound cache. Assuming you have Portal 2 installed, you can download and play this collaborative interview / playable journalism project at the itch.io page.


  • Remember to feel free to stop playing the first chapter at any time.
  • Previous posts / notes are here.
  • Interview subjects were: Dan Pinchbeck (The Chinese Room), Jack Monahan (Stellar Jockeys), Brendon Chung (Blendo Games), Magnar Jenssen (Avalanche Studios / Valve), Davey Wreden (Galactic Cafe), Ed Key (Twisted Tree Games), Richard Perrin (Locked Door Puzzle)
TECHNICAL SOURCE ENGINE NERD NOTES: It was fun trying to figure out how to update everything; Valve updated every Source game to use .VPK v2, except Portal 2, so it was pretty much impossible to find the old VPK.exe compile utility. Luckily, I had a hunch that Alien Swarm hadn't been updated since forever, and I turned out to be correct. (For anyone who googles for this post, you can grab the one from the Alien Swarm SDK, or download the old v1 VPK.exe here. Make sure you place it in a \bin\ folder with a tier0.dll, and then you can just drag-and-drop folders onto it or a shortcut, etc.)

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Much Madness is Divinest Sense.


A couple things got me thinking:
  • Source SDK Base 2013 does not require any purchases whatsoever, and is freely available to all Steam users.
  • DOTA2 is using Source Engine 2, or at least some substantial derivative of it.
To me, that means Source 1 is definitely nearing the end of its life, and Source 2013 will stand as (perhaps) the last definitive engine fork for Source 1. There's a good chance I won't have to fix up my release ever again because of Valve updating Episode Two and breaking all mod compatiblity: furthermore, anyone will be able to download Source 2013 and play my mod.

Preliminary tests look promising: both chapters of Radiator 1 worked in Source 2013 with just a little massaging. So, contrary to all expectations (I'm as surprised as anyone), I'm dusting off the rest of Radiator 1 and the whole thing might actually get completed now, several years later. I'm cutting a lot of the stuff I planned before (mostly boring puzzle gameplay stuff that I was trying to hack-together using map scripting) and the end is already in sight, it's just going to be a lot of narrative scripting and re-learning the rhythms of working in Hammer.

... And hopefully this'll be the last time I have to edit and update this thing.

(Oh, and I've also updated my portfolio with all the latest trends. HTML5! Bootstrap-whatever! Responsive-whatsits!)

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

"Keys" by Ryan Trawick, and the emerging shape of post-mod culture and walking simulators


Keys is a newly released single player Source mod, made mostly by Ryan Trawick, that is freely available to anyone with a Steam account.

... Which is made possible by Valve's generous licensing of their Source SDK 2013 Base. This is kind of a big shift in policy for Valve. Historically, mods have been locked to their parent platforms so that they could drive-up sales of triple-A retail (e.g. people buying Arma to play the original Day Z, or Warcraft 3 to play the original DOTA), but something here has changed. Perhaps Valve has decided they have enough money, or perhaps they realized Steam is already a powerful platform to lock-in people anyway. So now, Source 1 is kind of transitioning into more of a middleware platform like Unity or Unreal, though most people outside of the TF2 / CS:GO communities have generally moved on already.

What are Source mods in a "post-mod" age, where they're not even modding a retail game anymore, and they're freely distributed and shared? Can we even still call these things "mods", or have they transcended that type of framing?

Monday, March 10, 2014

Course catalog at Radiator University, Fall 2014

If I had a university, these are some of the courses I'd run:

PE822 -- CS:GO SPORTIFICATION INTENSIVE (2 units, Detroit campus)
In 1999, Counter-Strike changed the face of multiplayer shooters -- sci-fi gothic fantasy died and "realistic" squad maneuvers became the dominant discourse. The series then languished until 2012, when Counter-Strike: Global Offensive triggered a renaissance in player and level design theory. In this studio intensive course, we will critique this development history and "sportification" of the series while iterating on small levels designed for public and competitive play. (PREREQUISITES: Sculpture I, War Crimes seminar, Basketball II or higher.)

KL72 -- MAKER MAKER (3 units)
Tools like FPS Creator or RPGMaker bring new blood into development communities while manifesting structural critiques of game genres. If something is difficult to do in RPGMaker, can it be said that RPGs should generally not implement that feature? How do the workflows and "grains" of our tools affect our abilities to make things? This course argues that making a new generation of "maker" tools, grounded firmly in new genres, is imperative for articulating a new praxis of game development. (PREREQUISITES: at least 1 linguistic determinism seminar.)

R20A -- COLLAB WORKSHOP, "PERVASIVE ARGS" (2 units, Montana campus)
The "magic circle" refers to the idea that many games clearly demarcate the boundaries between players and those not playing -- e.g. you must be playing a game in order to score a goal, otherwise you're just some person kicking a ball on a grass field. Taking cues from David Fincher's thriller "The Game" (1997), we will act as "puppetmasters" to construct elaborate "alternate reality games" that surround / swallow our players' lives, blurring the line between playing and living. (PREREQUISITES: Metalworking II, Improv Studio 201, and/or equivalent professional experience)

E100 -- ENGLISH 1
Writing expository, analytical, and argumentative essays; developing critical reading and research skills. Review of sentence structure and grammar.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

"Black Mesa Source: Makeover Xtreme" at Indiecade East 2014

Indiecade East in New York City is happening in... about a month... and I'm giving a talk there. (A talk that I should start writing. Shit.) I should also note that the entire speaker lineup is very exciting and diverse and Indiecade is a lovely games event with a very good signal-to-noise ratio.

My talk continues the "technical politics" theme of my other talks these past few months:

"Makeovers are serious business. That's why dozens of modders volunteered to makeover Half-Life 1 (one of the most influential games ever made) in a new game engine with new graphics, architecture, animations, voice acting, choreography, sound effects, etc. So much work goes into the video games we play, but what exactly does that work involve? Get ready for excruciating detail about the blood and sweat that goes into just one room of one level of one game -- and why us modders w-w-work it for years to give it away for free. See? Makeovers are serious business."

My relationship with Black Mesa Source is strange -- I did a lot of work for them for a few years, then left because I couldn't commit time to it anymore -- so I recognize a lot of the content, but at the same time it feels somewhat alien to me because someone else finished it.

There's something interesting to dissect about the identity of work, here, especially given the intangible status of mods.

Are mods "games"? In terms of distribution / ownership / sales, no. In terms of artistry / concept / craft, yes. Is this Black Mesa Source level mine? Yes and no. When you get a makeover, are you still you, or someone else? What are the politics of makeovers? etc.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Course catalog at Radiator University, Spring 2013

If I had a university, these are some of the courses I'd run:

GD 202: LEVEL DESIGN STUDIO: SPACE AND DATA
There are two paradigms of level design in video games: the level as a constructed space, an architectured environment -- and the level as pattern of challenges, a series of situations and encounters. Students will build floorplans in Doom and engineer enemy attack waves for bullet-hell SHMUP games, build custom chess and checkers boards, and populate Skyrim dungeons with systemic parameters. We will also read an introductory body of architectural criticism and attempt to realize that theory as first person levels in Unity. In the end, we will argue that space and data are actually the same.
(4 credits; meets twice a week; satisfies "Spatial" breadth req.; Paris campus only)

DH 100: INTRODUCTION TO DIE HARD 1 STUDIES
This is the introductory course to Die Hard 1 Studies for students interested in majoring in Die Hard 1. We will watch Die Hard 1 every three weeks. In between screenings, we will read the novel it is based upon ("Nothing Lasts Forever" by Roderick Thorp), play Die Hard Arcade, tour several local modernist skyscrapers, and re-create scenes from the film in both analog and digital formats. By the end of the semester, students will be able to argue persuasively that Die Hard 1's many sequels do not actually exist.
(3 credits; meets once a week; bring your helicopter pilot license to the first class)

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Levels to Look Out For, June 2012: "Future of the FPS"

I don't normally theme these posts around anything, but these three indie FPS experiments share so much DNA that it's impossible to ignore. They're all very grounded in digital / virtual / "futuristic" aesthetics, but they're confident to sometimes let that futurism be incredibly alien. Also, I'd hazard a guess that few of these designers have worked on many FPS games in the AAA manshoot tradition, but these "outsiders" are the future of the FPS.

(Coincidental but shameless plug: if you pick up a recent issue of PC Gamer UK, there's a "Future of the FPS" feature I wrote, though I guess it's already inaccurate now, seeing as I've neglected two of these beauties...)

Dirac by "Orihaus"
Descriptions offered so far seem intentionally cryptic and foggy -- a multiplayer co-op wandering survival sim (?!) with an emphasis on atmosphere over gameplay, set in a stark Mordor-Tron world, with a little help from Structure Synth. What grabs me most is how the forms are so mechanical yet still incredibly abstract and inscrutable. You always see generic sci-fi corridors with gubbins and doodads embedded in the walls, and they're always encoded as "electrical panel" or "fuel pipes" or something. They're obsessed with being knowable because supposedly that's good design; I think Dirac shows how nice just a shape can be. (Unfortunately I missed the last multiplayer playtest, but there's another open test coming up on May 20th at 8 PM EST, just meet in #merveilles IRC on esper.net. Check the TIGSource thread for the most recent schedule.)

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Koumei Satou working on a sequel to Mistake of Pythagoras? Or probably not.

Longtime Half-Life 1 / Source mod players may remember Koumei Satou, who made crazy quirky single player mods like Sweet Half-Life (HEV scientists with SMGs; a boss fight in the room from Brazil), Peaces Like Us (one of the first mods with friendly Xen aliens), and Mistake of Pythagoras (an HL2 mod where one of the puzzles is deriving the Pythagorean theorem!)

Now, apparently, he has some sort of blog post where he's talking about workflow from Hammer to XSI Mod Tool to SketchUp to Hammer (?!) and it looks like some sort of sequel to Mistake of Pythagoras. The machine translation of the page doesn't provide much more insight, it sounds more like he's lamenting that everyone's ditching the Source mod scene for UDK and Unity. Am I reading correctly?

(Thanks to @Orihaus for the info)

Friday, October 14, 2011

Frontiers, and why I'm afraid of working with multiplayer.

Frontiers is a multiplayer Half-Life 2 mod where one team is border guards and the other team is refugees, with environments and visuals based on real-life diaspora. The concept is very compelling... but I'll never get to play it, since it's real-time multiplayer and relies on a live, sustained player base that it'll never have.

This is why "serious games" and messaged-based games, in my mind, should never require more than a handful of players (or ideally, 1 or 2) to deliver its rhetoric -- or they should use asynchronous multiplayer -- because this is how a game dies. In contrast, single player games live forever.

I don't want to say, "don't make real-time multiplayer games," because that sounds awful. But I guess I'm saying it. I don't see any way around it.