Ode to Neil / Jed "Wunderboy" Jedrzejewski

The Source modder community has always been a bit apocalyptic, but still its community leaders generally kept things going. Jed has been one of the most selfless and important mod tool developers out there since 2002: his updated Half-Life 1 model viewer with alpha texture support, his collaboration with Nem on VTFEdit / VTFLib, his early work on 3DS Max plugins, and the VTF Thumbnails plugins... all his tools were utterly indispensable.

On April 8th, he announced his "retirement" from the mod community, citing real-life stuff / general disenchantment with modding / the stagnation of his own Source mod, Ham & Jam.

I won't chastise Valve. Given what we now know from their employee handbook, you'd do the same too: you'd work on Half-Life 3 or Portal 5 or something new entirely, with all of your friends, instead of fixing an outdated SDK for an old engine branch that a handful of ungrateful fans use. Would you rather do fulfilling work or thankless work?

Anyway. Thanks for everything, Jed.

What makes "good" writing on level design?

Liz Ryerson recently did a great write-up of level 5-5 from Wolfenstein 3D (and makes a good case for the surrealism of 4-3) and it occurred to me that there's a pattern to this type of writing -- it's usually very specific, talks only about a single level (but contextualizes it within the whole game), and makes ample use of screenshots to help the reader understand the layout.

Writing about level design is incredibly important because we often run through levels so fast and understand "the language of games" so intuitively that it can be difficult to verbalize and explain. In playing levels, they exist more as tools to express our intentionality, not as objects to be studied and examined. The reality of it is that it would take a long time, or sometimes it's very difficult, to gain the type of fluency in platformers or Wolf3D that the best levels require.

But this is how we do research -- we make games and play the ones we can. Articles and essays are the best way to learn about levels that you haven't played / can't play.

Here are two authors of "level criticism canon" that, in my mind, show us how to do it...

CFP: Critical Information 2012 @ SVA / watch me talk briefly about Handle with Care.

I know a few grad students (you poor souls) read this blog, so I thought I'd share a CFP for a grad student conference I participated in last year -- Critical Information is pretty small, but the intimacy helps you engage the people with the people actually sitting there.

The rooms were small, which meant every talk was a "packed" house. Unfortunately I had to leave after I presented, so I didn't see any of the other panels, but I'd say SVA is a pretty cool place -- and they're clearly somewhat video game / new media friendly. If you'll be in the NYC area / or can travel there somewhat easily, consider submitting your project or research. (Also, the small size means less competition.)

Some people were asking about a video? Here's a highlights reel they put together of my group's session. (Note to self: next time, shave.) Also, see if you can pinpoint the exact moment in the Q&A when I enraged an entire room full of gender studies scholars... or, uh, hopefully they edited it out?

On "Joiner", detail, and greeble.

Joiner is a command-line pre-compile brush generator by prolific TF2 mapper Timothy "YM" Johnson; you make several brushes to represent the volumes of your rooms, run your VMF through it, then out comes another VMF with all the struts and support beams built and textured for you.

I find Joiner fascinating because it's also (an unintentional?) commentary on TF2 design styles: rooms are still composed mostly of simple rectangular planes that join at 90 degree angles -- that's the actual functional level geometry, but a typical player would recognize that as undetailed and thus as an unfinished / crappy map. What Johnson has made is not a "make level" button, but rather a "make detail" or "stop players from whining" button. The purpose of these struts is to cover the surface in a sort of greeble, so the player won't be distracted in comparing its perceived quality against other maps with "better" detail.

Surface detail is a paradox. It is "necessary" to exist in front of the player, but it exists to be more or less ignored.

Levels to Look Out For, May 2012.

These are some unreleased levels / environment WIPs I've seen posted around the internet, along with some brief commentary.

Island of the Dead, by Mac "macattackk" Hart.

Hart bases this CryEngine3 environment off the Arnold Bocklin's notorious Isle of the Dead paintings. What I really admire here is the masterful control over materials; the normal map on the rocks is really important to ground the unorthodox shape of the rock. It's a really surreal treatment of realism that, I think, is really subtle and difficult to pull off -- a desaturated, muted palette that somehow isn't boring. What I like most about this piece, though, is that Hart is actually fleshing it out into a level. He could've stopped with this one view and one camera angle to produce a diorama / portfolio piece, but now it's actually turning into a legitimate space as he extrapolates the painting's original style.