My personal library

[FrostNova]

Hi, I've played tremulous more than 10 years ago.

I made a site full of level design articles in hopes of breaking into the industry. I began with google sites, but now I've migrated to mediawiki. I still want something better than mediawiki, but for now it was the easiest solution to publish text and have more freedom to format than google sites. My plan is to work in the industry. My long term goal is to make that site a professional resource and refactor everything. But that won't come until after some years of professional experience.

For now I've stopped adding more articles because it's a futile endeavor. The reason is pretty much this article of mine: https://www.henry-ym.org/index.php/Envi ... e_me_blind

https://www.henry-ym.org

[illwieckz]

Hi FrostNova. That's an interesting library of articles there! (Let's pour in more validation for the ego, hehe ).

I've read some articles, and I found some useful, like this one about “Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them”, especially those two points:

• It's easy for them to notice a problem. Solving problems is another matter. The players don't know how the game was made, the process behind it. They don't know what restrictions were in play. They don't know what, how many and how decisions were taken.
• Players are usually more biased in seeing a problem in a game because they value their tastes first, their personal experience.

The first point is something we experience as a game project, as some players may spot problems and then, have hard time to understand that identifying a problem is not fixing it yet, and that is in fact the easiest part. That's why the second point about identifying biases in problem finding is also useful, especially the paragraph about “How to differentiate a personal taste from a mistake” which I find insightful.

I may have an answer to your first question here: https://www.henry-ym.org/index.php/Inco ... chitecture

You wrote:

I don't know why they made the elevator's exit / entrance be oriented towards inside the building, not the outside. I have no idea if there are buildings in the world that have elevators like that.

It may be intentional as part of an optimisation process, by making the elevator on the other side of the entrance, the level designer ensures that when being on the second floor reached with the elevator, the game doesn't render the outside of the first floor (where the building entrance is). See this article: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wik ... timization and https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Hint_brush
Here is an image from the Valve wiki, see the “No hints needed”:

You can find such kind of “incoherent architecture” in classic Tremulous/Unvanquished maps like ATCSHD or Plat23, where the corridor goes around a very large pillar making sure you can't see (and then render) the outside from the inside, even without elevator.

Code: Select all

           //////////////////|
           //|‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾|//|
           //|    ____    |//|
           //|   |////|   |//|
        /////|   |////|   |//|
        ‾‾‾‾‾    |////|    ‾‾
inside  _____    |////|    __  outside
        /////|   |////|   |//|
           //|   |////|   |//|
           //|    ‾‾‾‾    |//|
           //|____________|//|
           //////////////////|

Was this article moved to the new site? https://sites.google.com/view/leveldesi ... 6-analysis

You said there you redid the blockout of Unreal Tournament's Deck16 in Unreal Engine 5, did you released any map (whatever the engine/game)?

[FrostNova]

I made this: https://www.moddb.com/members/frost-nova/addons

I have made maps for Open Arena before. If you ever seen maps called Lego + something. Plus, a colorful map with too many colors at the same time, circular arena style, called RGB. I made it too. I deleted them from moddb because I was going to rename to remove the "lego" trademark, but I guess I forgot to upload them.