Inspired by my recent Beyond Belief retrospective, Negke decided to combine all Beyond Belief SP levels and combine them into one large map. The content is ultimately unchanged, but it’s neat to see the entire episode stitched together this way! You’ll need a modern Quake engine port to play this, of course.
Matt’s Level Design Retrospective 05 – Doom, Quake and More (Quake: Beyond Belief, Part 2)
Matt’s Level Design Retrospective 04 – Doom, Quake and More (Quake: Beyond Belief, Part 1)
Matt’s Level Design Retrospective 02 – Doom, Quake and More (The Troopers’ Playground Part 2)
Level Retrospective: The Troopers’ Playground, Part 1
Matt’s Level Design Retrospective 00 – Doom, Quake and More (My First Ever
Welcome to my renovated webpage! I am currently bringing all critical content online (my lectures and portfolio). The rest will follow shortly.
As a direct follow-up to my 2012 talk “Player Stories and Designer Stories”, this GDC lecture delves deeply into the oft-repeated, but rarely explored game design concept of “interesting decisions”. Meaningful choice is the foundation of good game design, but there is a surprising amount of ambiguity surrounding the topic. This lecture explores when decisions are meaningful to the brain, ties that reasoning into the biology and psychology of why decisions matter in real life (and why we play games as a result), and then uses Doom 2 combat as a case study for how Systemic Agency (a concept established in my 2012 talk) is created, which leads to interesting low-level gameplay.
Back in 2008, I got the Quake editing bug again: I wasn’t doing any level design at work at the time, it had been over 10 years since Beyond Belief had been released, and the Olympic Summer Games were on TV (I made some of my Doom levels while watching the Olympics, so there was some nostalgia there). So I embarked on Beyond Belief 2008 – my revisit to the days of old Quake editing.
The whole map was an exercise in “What If?”, and informed by my much improved understanding of game design and how systems design and level design interact. Quake didn’t have many strong connections between multiple runtime systems, but the zombie enemy type was one of them (it could only be killed in very specific ways, most notably the rocket and grenade launchers). What if neither of these weapons were given when the first zombies were introduced to the game? What inventive ways are there to still dispatch of these zombies? To my knowledge, no Quake level had ever explored this question. Well, BBelief2008 does!
My 2013 GDC lecture explores computer games’ place in the cultural landscape. As developers and players, we hear comparisons between movies and games all the time, and we are still heavily influenced by the way in which movies (and books) have shaped our expectations for storytelling, authorship, and even our very patterns of thinking. But it turns out that computer games are not a direct continuation of that media lineage, and that the era of authoritative entertainment that books and movies represent is presently being replaced by a new cultural age that is much more complex than the one that came before. My lecture extrapolates those findings into hands-on advice on everyday problems faced by level and narrative designers, and explains in detail how computer games are the perfect expression of our current cultural values; an age that is commonly referred to as Secondary Orality.
