Prodeus
This is my unofficial work for the game Prodeus. I’ve listed them in order from oldest to newest.
Xtal Site 02
This was my first exploration of the Prodeus editor. I had read about a mapping competition and decided to give single player mapping a go, plus I also got to learn new tools which I always enjoy. The tools were very easy to pick up and learn and the fast compile times were a blessing for fast iteration. This was helped greatly by the community at the official Discord server who were always there to answer questions and give advice.
The map was made in the room-by-room fashion, meaning I was basically designing it as I went. A bad habit from years of being a hobbyist. The map was feeling fun and I was enjoying myself working away in my spare time while doing my 9-to-5.
When I placed 3rd in the competition I was really happy, it felt good to have success on what was basically my first publicly released single player map and it reignited my passion for mapping again. As soon as the competition was over I jumped onto my next map.
Hanger v2
After the competition I wanted to just make some art, so I decided to remake the most remade map, Dooms E1M1. My plan was to see what a version of such a classic would look like with my weird tech base style.
First I opened up the Doombuilder editor and traced out the spaces and converted it to a scale that felt good in Prodeus. Next I took the items and replaced them with the Prodeus equivalent. With the layout work done it was art time!
The biggest challenge was taking the abstract Doom style and trying to make it feel more grounded. First I built up the structures to make the map feel more functional. For the colour palette I went with some blacks, browns and red for the highlights as well as orange for the skybox and fog. Next I decided to expand on the slime pits; I connected them and made a river running through the whole map that lead out to a nice view outside the armour room near the start. This view was a little extravagant with looming towers and a river of green slime flowing down into a cave. This would not usually be something I’d do but I felt that the scale of the map meant I would have some free faces to have a little fun with so why not?
Archology
After making the Doom map I spoke with Jason about process and he shared an interesting article about pre-production and planning. With this new perspective I planned out this level. There were a few other things I also wanted to play with; one of them was colour theory and the other was making each floor of the building have a unique function.
The basic level flow has you starting in a digger that bursts to the surface where you see a giant building. The lowest floor is administration then after an elevator crash you’re in an engineering sub-level. Above that is the living quarters and mess hall which is connected to a landing pad. Next floor up is manufacturing and then finally the cargo ship launching tower.
It was a very smooth process and near the end I was asked if I would be interested in joining the Prodeus team. This was a real honor and I could not wait to get started. This was my last map before I joined the team.
Synthetic
During the production of Prodeus Jason had a holiday and I had two weeks on my hands to burn, so I decided to finish up a draft multiplayer layout I had made using a lot of my Quake 3 design sensibilities. It was a simple enough small duel map. I was very interested to see what I could do with such a small space. This was like a mash up of tech base and alien architecture and I was really enjoying the freedom to just push wild shapes and designs.
Just like with the earlier Hanger V2 map I had some fun with the skybox and added flying ships, lava flows on mountains and some giant silos.
Brutal Noir
Another quick layout. The layout ended up being used in an interesting experiment where four other level designers got a quarter of the map each to art. None of them knew what the rest where making and I stitched it all together at the end. While that was fun to see I still wanted to make some art so I made my own version at the same time. I was listening to the Blade Runner soundtrack while working and decided to add rain and mess about a bit with the atmosphere. There is a little Easter egg in the skybox: I built a giant Playstation 2 console.
END OF THE LINE
This was my first single player map I had made since finishing work on the campaign. It felt good putting what I had learnt into practice building something with a contained story. I wanted to show each of the different styles I had developed over the two years I had been working on Prodeus.
As with all my work there were many iterations and edits to get to the final version. Originally there was a whole series of tunnels and a run through a ravine with a basic jumping section. This got cut as it felt better to get into the main parts of the map faster than having what was basically an extended introduction. The second area that got a lot of edits was the final Prodean section. It was originally a large arena with a basic wave combat setup but this felt dull and a bit of an anti-climax so I reworked it until I was happy.
Working on Prodeus has been wonderful and I will always remember how amazing it was to finally find direction in what I want to pursue as a career. After 5400 hours it’s time for the next project…
Quake 3 Arena
For many years I worked on custom levels for Quake 3. At the beginning I wanted to get into the industry by getting as much experience as I could making maps. Then I settled into just being a hobbyist mapper and worked a regular 9-5 job until Prodeus came along and reignited my passion to pursue level design as a career. I really enjoyed learning everything about the editing software GTKRadiant, making textures in Photoshop and writing shaders.
BONES
I was asked to do the art for this map by Terifire from the CPMA community. Sadly this map did not get to the finish line but it was damn close! I’m still amazed at what you can do with an engine that is almost 25 years old!
The version I received was very basic in terms of art and layout, but what was there was great. They were using a texture set by the super talented Yves Allaire, so I started there and built out the set a bit with some extra textures and then wrote the shaders for the lights, glass, screens and all the rest.
Making all the geometry really was me pushing the editor as far as I could at the time, while I really like what I was able to achieve I might have added a little too much detail. At the breakneck speeds that CPMA is played there is a little too much visual noise.
Frantic V2
Remake of the famous CPM24. First I took the original map by the talented Rich "swelt" Jacques and built the .map file using Q3Map2. Next up I removed all the textures and cleaned up a bit of geometry so I had a nice base to start from. Next up I needed to find a nice texture set and start getting the theme locked in. I found the great texture set by Greg Ward (flipout) from his map Endurance. Using that I also made a bunch of my own textures to fill in a few gaps, these were mostly signs and remakes of some classic Quake 3 textures in photoshop.
Detailing was next, I had a lot of fun making shapes and building up the look to make the space feel more believable. It’s a very small map so I built up and out to give it a more oppressive vibe.
I think my biggest regret looking back is the lighting. I should have made it less spotty and more even to make reading the arenas easier but overall I’m proud of how this map came out.
Jackal
Small deathmatch map I made. Had a lot of fun working with materials and keeping the look nice and clean. This was submitted for the Quake 3 15th Anniversary Contest hosted by the folks over at Mapcore. After the competition I did a little more work on it from the feedback. Here is a review.
Server overload
Large CTF map made for a competition run by Maverick Servers. Was a tough map to make, but it came in at 8th so that’s cool. Sadly this map came out at a time when Quake 3 was not the most popular game so getting a full server would probably be impossible. Still, I had fun making it and pushing the limits of the Quake 3 engine.
