As the follow-up to Factor 5’s Gamecube smash hit, Rogue Leader, Rebel Strike tried to build on its predecessor’s success by adding ground combat elements to the game experience. Not everything worked out the way it should have – the ground gameplay was frequently chaotic and hard to control. I will try to write a more detailed retrospective at a later point.
I was credited as a Mission Design Director on this project.
This is an unfinished (but fully playable) Unreal 2 level (based on the PC Games tutorial I wrote in 2003) that I released to the community. No scripting or particle effects, but the map is fully playable and provides at least 30 minutes of gameplay. See if you can find all secret areas, there’s three dead hidden scientists! More information can be found in the Solaris Base readme.
After a 6-month stint on Wheel of Time, work on Unreal 2 started in early 2000. Initial exploration was done with the “old” engine that had already been used in Wheel of Time and Unreal Tournament, but that changed very soon. If you’re going to make the sequel to one of the most successful games of all time, of course you want it to look as flashy and up-to-date as possible. And as Epic got busy adding new breathtaking features to the engine, we of course wanted/needed to use those features. The cycle started at GDC 2000, where Epic showed the new terrain engine, and continued with a new shader system and a new occlusion system (portals instead of span-buffering). And then there were Static Meshes.
Hardware-accelerated static vertex buffer (the green wireframe you see in this shot) where one of the big innovations for Unreal 2.
With the advent of Hardware T&L 3D cards, most notably the GeForce and GeForce 2, 3D engines finally had access to very fast, hardware-accelerated vertex transformations. And while all that technical lingo didn’t mean much to the average player (and shouldn’t have to), the visual upgrades spoke for themselves. Old levels that I had built for the mission pack and WoT might have 500 triangles per scene. With Static Meshes, I could suddenly build levels that displayed as much as 20,000 triangles per scene. That was a huge jump, and it required changes to the workflow.
Static Meshes marked a true generational shift for 3D games, and that affected game development as much as the end product. In the past, level designers had been the ones to build everything that you saw in an environment. They modeled the actual 3D space (usually using textures provided by the texture artists). They scripted the puzzles and set up the AI. They designed a lot of the game mechanics. In short, LDs pulled everything together.
On Unreal 2, the LDs would still be the ones pulling everyting in a level together. But with these static vertex buffers enabling a lot of additional detail, it became much harder to actually create all that detail. Static Meshes had to be build in 3D modelling packages like 3DS Max. The meshes were higher-resolution and required UVs. And the skillset required to make these meshes was just slightly different from that of most level designers.
All this meant specialization. The industry now needed level artists who could model and texture all this new content (often based on the level designers’ placeholders). LDs and artists had to work together more closely than before, and jointly figure out how to create everything efficiently and economically, for example making modular building blocks whereever possible. And through all that, the good LDs still had to learn modeling apps themselves, so that they could do a fair bit of the 3D work themselves.
Personally, I was was happy as Larry about the shift. I might not have known it at the time, but I had gotten pretty burned out by the familiar workflows that I’d been using since the Quake days. When Static Meshes came along, I experienced a new burst of energy. Building levels was fun again. The level of detail I could put in an environment was inspiring. And consequently, I spent a lot of time learning 3DS Max’s polygon modeling tools and establishing ways to put Static Meshes to the best use in our game. Most meshes in my levels were modeled by myself, and most other level designers did the same. All Unreal 2 LDs grew a lot as artists in this period, for sure.
The problem with all this technical and visual novelty? It was very easy to get lost in the details and not see the big picture. And I think that if Unreal 2 can be accused of anything, it’s the fact that all the great parts that make up the game – graphics, AI, story, XMP gameplay – didn’t come together to form a cohesive and compelling single-player experience. Unreal 2 showed signs of greatness throughout the entire game. There’s beautiful and tense moments everywhere, and some missions had some cool novel gameplay. But as the game unfolded, things didn’t always gel with everything else. The Atlantis level, my baby throughout development, is a great (personal) example of this.
Issak does the weapons loadout before each mission.
The Atlantis level was supposed to tie the game together. Very much like in Wing Commander you would return to your ship between levels to reflect on the previous mission, learn details about the upcoming one, bond with your crew, and generally learn more about the story. There was a lot of stuff to discover; the overall story and the crew had nice (character) arcs to them; you got fully scripted 3D mission briefings (a first); and the level looked great (if I may say so myself). What’s the problem then?
Atlantis never quite felt like it was part of the same game.
As its own microcosm, Atlantis actually works pretty damn well. But when integrated into the full game, it feels disconnected. Sure, the characters comment on what’s been going on the missions (more so in some interludes than in others), and there’s elements like the souveniers that you bring back from each mission (and which show up in the player’s cabin). You even acquire a pet Seagoat in one of the missions. But if you ask yourself “What is the game about?” and break down a game by its core gameplay mechanics, the main component of the game, the shooting, had better be present in all major parts of the game. Unreal 2 is first person shooter. And you don’t shoot on Atlantis. Instead, you do all the things that slow down the shooting action during an actual mission: exploration and talking. You can do that in short bursts, to add variety to the game and back up the core mechanics. But when it starts feeling like an obstacle, like something that’s keeping you away from the main component of the game, that turns into a problem 🙂
It’s easy to see where the disconnect came from: Legend started out as an adventure company, and story was very important to us. I got lost in the incredible detail and beauty I could bring to the level. The Atlantis formula had worked in Wing Commander. But Atlantis didn’t streamline the intermission gameplay enough (the long load times didn’t help, either). And in the end I feel that Atlantis is my greatest failed experiment. I love the ambition and effort that we put into the level. It works. But all that effort also distracted and took resources from the other areas of the game that could have used extra help. Putting more focus on the Kai (our version of the Nali) for example. Or finishing the SP missions I had to abandon during development.
Unreal 2 is a great example of a game that has fantastic parts throughout, but somehow fails to pull everything together to make a great whole. In the end there’s a whole list of small reasons that didn’t make Unreal 2 as popular as everybody involved had hoped. The system requirements were high. There was no multi-player out of the box. The pacing was too slow, and the game was too much on love with its own beauty. And the game played against expectations; people had a clear idea of what to expect from an Unreal single-player game: Medieval atmosphere (with a few starships and sci-fi elements), Nali, Skaarj as the ultimate badasses. Instead, Unreal 2 delivered a space opera with a few guest appearances by the Skaarj.
Static meshes and textures from one of my scrapped Unreal 2 missions were resurrected for an XMP map.
Personally, I moved on shortly after completing the game. Not because I desperately needed to get away from Legend. But I felt like the time was right to make another change in my life. Much of the core team stayed on board for a few more months, and created the XMP multiplayer pack. And this time, there were no mixed feelings about the end product: XMP rocked. It might have gotten a bit overshadowed by Unreal Tournament 2004, but everybody who played XMP liked it. It had a slew of innovative multiplayer features. It had vehicles, placeable fortifications, lots of new tactics and gameplay moments, and it was free. You can’t argue with that!
As for the main game, maybe I’m being too critical of it. A lot of people liked Unreal 2. Some really loved it. It has a Metacritics score of 75. I’m just looking at the incredible amount of talent that we had, all the great parts that are in the game, and at how well XMP turned out, and I’m thinking Unreal 2 has untapped potential. No matter what my final feelings are, though, one thing is clear: the time I worked on Unreal 2 was well spent. I met great people, I acquired a lot of new skills, and I learned a lot of lessons that I am applying to current and future projects.
I worked twice on The Wheel of Time: a short stint in 1997 and again in 1999. In 1997, Glen Dahlgren contacted me after seeing my Quake levels. He was still gearing up for the game, and Legend’s idea at the time was to do large parts of the level design over the internet, with contract designers from all over the world contributing the game’s “pockets”, as the areas of the world where called.
The problem was that I couldn’t grok UnrealEd for the life of me. The editor was still pretty early in development and it was missing many basic niceties such as vertex/edge dragging or a clipping tool. And the Unreal engine’s CSG approach – carving the world out of solid matter rather than building it up in a void (which is how Quake did it) – was very alien to me. So I never produced anything for Wheel of Time during the first run, and would soon abandon the project in favor of the full-time position that Ritual Entertainment was offering me.
Of course I ended up at Legend Entertainment anyway. This time on-site, and presumably to work on the Unreal Mission Pack and Unreal 2. At this point, Legend had switched to a “let’s get the LDs into the office” approach, which was working out great for them. The original crew of Scott Dalton, Warren Marshall and James Parkman, in collaboration with the texture artists, was doing incredible work on WoT. After I had finished my work on the mission pack (slowly getting a grasp of UnrealEd along the way) I was asked whether I wanted to jumpstart Unreal 2 or help finish Wheel of Time first. I didn’t have to think long before agreeing to do WoT, especially looking at the levels that I would be able to work on. TheVault Beneath The White Tower, for example, which demonstrated Wheel of Time’s uniqueness perfectly.
The library under the White Tower hides the entrance into the vault
The Vault was a cool idea that Glen Dahlgren, the project lead, had even in the early design docs. This was to be a pure puzzle level that explored the cavernous expanses under the White Tower, with gameplay that was unheard of in the FPS genre. Unfortunately, the level’s implementation had been neglected until late in the project. I spent a few weeks molding all the available elements (various traps and 40 artifacts with different powers) into an actual working mission. Always making sure that the player path was fair enough to not frustrate the player (nobody likes to get punished with instant death when they make a mistake), yet challenging enough to be rewarding.
I’m quite proud of the outcome. The level does something very different for a FPS game, and as far as I know this is still the only mission in a FPS game that relies purely on puzzles and traps to make the environment interesting and level progression fun. Judging by the feedback we received this level was a success.
I’m still absolutely in love with WoT’s original multiplayer design, as well. Before production realities hit, Glen’s Citadel design was much more ambitious than what eventually made it to the stores. The original vision for the MP game was a truly epic read: Citadel was meant to be an (especially for the time) revolutionary multiplayer component in which up to 4 players role-played their characters, went out into the world to acquire information and ter’angreal, formed (and betrayed) alliances with other players, built up their citadels as the game progressed – and got into epic battles when they crossed paths.
The version of Citadel that actually ended up in the game (“hacked” in by Mark Poesch in a huge marathon session late in development) was much scaled back, but retained the spirit of the original idea. I’ve had some of the funnest multiplayer sessions in my life when playing 1-on-1 Citadel against other people, finding gameplay that I had never experienced before (like registering a seal on my altar, than hiding it all the way back in the opponent’s castle, right under his nose *g*. Try doing that in good old Capture The Flag!).
Wheel of Time was released around the same time as Unreal Tournament. Maybe that’s why it never quite found its audience. A big part of this can be attributed to the game’s positioning – we were making what was perceived to be a First Person Shooter, which didn’t appeal to many readers of the books. And the action crowd was busy with UT and Quake 3. But those who bought the game loved it. The WoT community was active for many years, and there were Citadel leagues and modding pages well into the new millenium. I’m certainly proud of the game. Wheel of Time looked great, had an ambitious story and some great, novel game mechanics.
Here’s to everybody who played the game and contributed to the old Wheel of Time game forums. And here’s to the late Robert Jordan, who made it all possible in the first place.
Unreal was always hovering around during the late 90s, just barely out of sight. Magazines had declared it the “Quake Killer”, but every time you thought the game might be close, it disappeared from the radar instead. The anticipation kept building. And to me, as a level designer, Unreal’s editor looked pretty damn delicious. While I was creating Quake maps in simple wireframe viewports, UnrealEd screenshots promised editing views that were fully textured and lit(!).
The presumed Quake Killer wasn’t released until after Quake 2. But when Unreal arrived, it made a big splash. I remember looking at the game in the Ritual offices, and everybody being impressed. Huge outdoor environments, beautiful graphics with many effects that had never been seen. And an editor that did indeed deliver everything the screenshots had promised. If you could get it to run, that is – the initial VBasic version was notoriously finicky.
My first contact with the engine had been during my initial, short stint on The Wheel of Time. As chronicled on the WoT page, I couldn’t get into UnrealEd at all and gladly went back to Quake editing. But after Sin was finished and I’d made the decision to go work for Legend Entertainment, there was no way back. I was going to work on Unreal 2, and I was going to learn UnrealEd! (It grew on me tremendously.)
My desk in Legend’s old LD cave
I remember my years at Legend fondly for various reasons. The company had an “interlectual” approach to making first person shooters. Of course we tried to make good shooting entertainment, but the principals were also putting emphasis on infusing our games with story and narrative elements. Not surprising, given Legend’s history as an adventure game company. More importantly, we had a great core team that became my extended family for a while. We didn’t quite live in the office – but it was usually our base of operations for dinner and weekend excursions. We had a bigscreen TV in a time when nobody had a bigscreen TV yet, and we played endless hours of Soul Calibur on it. One year, with two of the Epic programmers in town, we had our Thanksgiving dinner at the office. The turkey was so big that we didn’t get to eat until 11:45pm, so most time was killed watching Star Trek TNG on DVD.
I had signed on to work on Unreal 2, but would get to contribute to two additional projects before we went into production on that game. My work on The Wheel of Time has a dedicated page. Before I helped out on WoT, I did some work on the official Unreal Mission Pack “Return To NaPali”, which was a good way to get acquainted with the engine. We were supposed to churn out the the level pack pretty quickly, using a lot of the unfinished content that Epic had created during Unreal’s development. And we added typical mission pack fare on top of that: a few new weapons, a few enemies, and of course new levels. Mike Verdu, the project lead, wanted to add some narrative elements to the game to tie everything together, as well, which spawned log entries telling the player’s story as he goes back to the planet to locate a crashed Marine ship.
As a mission pack, NaPali wasn’t supposed to be a new game. It was supposed to be an expansion and an homage to the original game, which meant understanding what had made the original Unreal successful. And in my mind, the success of the original Unreal rested on five pillars:
“Glathriel Village” was named after the human
hex in Jack Chalker’s Well of Souls books.
As I measure my mission pack maps by those pillars, the maps succeed on some levels and fail on others. The valley in which the crashed ship (the “Prometheus”) rests was indeed huge. I tried to infuse the medieval Nali village with a creepy “Skaarj-terrorizing-Nali” atmosphere. And I built arenas where the Skaarj could show off their navigation and combat skills. But my maps fall short on the epic feeling that many of the original Unreal maps had. A lot of that had to do with my sensibilities at the time, I liked to keep things as “realistic” as possible (given the context of the game), and that lead to a lot of human-sized spaces. I didn’t particularly like “Bluff Eversmoking” at the time. It felt too unbelievable to me, too far out there. (Since then my tastes have changed and I can certainly appreciate the map a lot more.)
So… if I could go back and do it all over again I’d try to go for bigger scope and less enclosed spaces. But I’m still happy with the work I did for the Unreal Mission Pack. It was a good introduction to the engine, it had some fun gameplay moments – and a lot of people played the pack! We were quite surprised when the initial sales numbers for Return To NaPali came in. In fact, the UPak got me the first bonus check that I ever received in the industry. And that’s a cool moment to remember.
Getting the job at Ritual Entertainment was one half of the battle. Trying to get into the United States was a whole different story. Of course it all worked out, and Sin was the first professional game I worked on.
In 1996 and 1997, I hung out on IRC all the time. It was the hot new thing; chatting with people from all over the world was pretty damn cool and novel. (It wasn’t a bad way improve my English, either.)
More importantly, it was a great way to make connections. The #quakeed and #level_design channels were two of my main hangouts, and the regulars were considered the elite of Quake modding. As the Dallas gaming scene exploded in 1997, with companies like Ion Storm, Ritual and Rebel Boat Rocker popping up (Seattle would soon offer additional options through Valve, Monolith and Cavedog), I saw many my IRC editing friends getting offered jobs as professional LDs. id had been the trailblazer, now everybody was trying to follow suit, which created a huge demand for people who could create 3D levels. But even with all those people getting hired, it didn’t occur to me for the longest time that I might be able to do the same. I was in Germany, after all!
I had graduated from High School in 1995, been deemed unfit for (in Germany mandatory) military service because of a broken knee, and enrolled at the University of Essen right after high school. Supposedly to study English and Biology in a teaching capacity. The “german” and “biology” parts weren’t a big stretch – I liked writing, and biology had always been my forte. It was the “teaching” that was the unusual part. I’m just not your traditional classroom teacher who likes working with children – nothing bad about that, but it took me a while to come to that conclusion for myself. So my university time was a schizophrenic experience – I liked the subject matter, I just didn’t like the final destination I was headed for. And that’s why my heart wasn’t fully in it.
Me, stalking the Levelord at QuakeCon 97. Photo from Wendigo’s Quake Galleries
My heart very much was in level design, however. And when it finally dawned on me that hey, maybe I could move to the US and be a professional level designer, that was a major revelation. Mike Wardwell, another #level_design regular who had been already hired by Ritual Entertainment (still called Hipnotic at that point), hooked me up with an interview at the company. At this point, Beyond Belief had been released, and served as a great calling card. So Ritual flew me out for Quakecon 97 and a few additional days, and my first visit to America turned out to be a very pleasant one. The Ritual people were cool, hanging out at Quakecon was great, and I felt like I belonged there. I guess I didn’t feel like I was interviewing or auditioning for the job either, and that might have helped. I was just hanging out with the rest of the company, acting as if I was supposed to be there.
Soon afterwards I got a job offer, and I said yes without even knowing how much money I would be making. But that’s where the real challenge began. How to get me to work in the US legally? 3D Level Design was still a very new profession in 1997, the immigration authorities didn’t know what it meant. Ritual had no experience in the matter, either, and after the initial (pretty ludicrous) idea of getting me a student visa was discarded (student by day, illegal level designer by night – the then CEO even took me to the University of Dallas to check out the requirements), we found an immigration lawyer that other software companies had used to get European employees into the country. And since nobody knew what “3D Level Design” was, the lawyer applied for an O-1 visa, which we backed up with as many recommendation letters as possible from professional designers and from people who had played Beyond Belief. The application was approved, but I had to endure an excruciating 8 months of wait until I got the go-ahead.
My life in Dallas is best described as “turbulent”. Work was cool but, quite frankly, somewhat disorganized. I willingly crunched most of the 8 months I worked on Sin. I slept in the office. We were always a step behind the schedule. I quickly gained 10 pounds. Still, I wouldn’t want to miss that time in my life for anything. The atmosphere was creative and introduced me to Cinefex and Foxtrot. The work was a great learning experience. The people were great and made my transition to America easy and seamless. I met friends who I’m still in contact with today; in fact, fellow LD Charlie was a groomsman at my wedding.
My Sin Intro cutscene. After a while, the dialog started creeping into my dreams.
I learned a lot, too. Creating real world environments for shooter gameplay was a real gear change; making arbitrary Quake dungeons had been much easier. Sin’s level scripting language was fantastic, and after I reconnected with my inner programmer I was able to create some very elaborate gameplay sequences. Using SinScript, I was also able to create all of the game’s in-game cutscenes – the first in-game cinematics found in a major FPS game. Most of the movies I did for this game were pretty awful (blatantly disregarding all principles of cinematography), but the intro turned out pretty cool. And it’s fun to have that tiny place in gaming history 🙂
Sin’s load times, subject of the first ever Penny Arcade comic.
Sin turned out to be a good game – with some fatal flaws. The initial release had incredibly long load times (but hey, we made the very first Penny Arcade comic!) and a few showstopper bugs. Oh…and Sin was released alongside Half-Life! So Sin didn’t do well at retail, but I feel that the game is better than it was given credit for back in the day. Sin had incredibly interactive environment, an ambitious (if somewhat clumsily executed) story, and some very cool gameplay and scripted sequences. Creativity was everywhere – it just wasn’t pulled together to form one coherent whole. Speaking of creative people, the team that worked on the official Sin mision pack, Wages of Sin, would go on to make Medal of Honor for EA and later create the Call of Duty series of games. Many of them came from the Quake community as well.
I left Ritual after Sin was completed. Partly because development had left me more burned out than I wanted to admit to myself at the time. Partly because Charlie had moved on to work at 3D Realms. And partly because I didn’t feel much love for the follow-up game that Ritual had lined up, Heavy Metal FAKK2. As I made my trek across country to Virginia and Legend Entertainment, I left with no regrets. Sin was a neat little game to be proud of, even though it could have been more.
Ritual tried to revive the franchise a few years ago with Sin Episodes, but abandoned the effort after one installment. The company still exists with a couple of the old principals on board, but they are now creating casual games for Mumbo Jumbo.
The 9-level SP episode for Quake that got me my first job in the gaming industry. Back in its days this got over 10000 downloads in the first two days. There’s also various speedruns available. Start map, seven regular levels and a secret map. More information and links to level reviews can be found on Quaddicted.
Requiem was a troubled production. Several team members, including the moderator, dropped off the face of the Earth for intermittent periods. When it was finally released it was branded as a beta, and I don’t think there ever was an update. Despite its troubled history and late release, Requiem is a really good map pack with some impressive levels by the greats of the Doom editing. It was included in DoomWorld’s Top 100 WADs Of All Time. I created 4 levels for Requiem.
The second MM “mega-WAD”, which brought together ~20 of the best level designers of the time (many of which are working in the industry these days). I made four levels for this. Included in DoomWorld’s Top 100 WADs Of All Time.
After playing Doom for a two years straight Quake was an interesting experience: on a pure gameplay level, the game didn’t feel as refined! The weapons were a bit all over the place, and they didn’t have as big advantages/disadvantages against certain enemies that I’d come to appreciate. None of the monsters had the distinct weaknesses or complementary behaviors, either, which was one of the properties that had made Doom so great. (The Zombies and the Shambler were obvious efforts, but ultimately fell short.) So for all intents and purposes, Quake shouldn’t have been much fun to edit for – the single-player campaign just felt a bit too hacked together and premature. But of course there was more to it.
Quake was fully 3D.
And Quake had internet multiplayer.
And those features made all the difference.
I used Quest to make my maps.
Imagine it on a tiny 14″ monitor 🙂
I don’t remember how easily the whole three-dimensional thing came to me, having dealt with Doom’s 2 1/2D engine for several years. Presumably, working with the 3D Construction Kit had prepared me to make the jump to 6 degrees of freedom relatively easily – all the old Freescape vector environments had been fully 3D. But if you look at my first finished Quake level, Armageddon 1, you can definitely see the Doom mindset shine through. The map is an essentially flat layout, with a few vertical areas thrown in to take “advantage” of what Quake had to offer. But hey, the first Quake editors where very rudimentary, and we had to get used to 3D in the first place. Quest (my level editor of choice), was a great little tool, except that it had no shaded 3D preview (wireframe only!) and that texture alignment wasn’t supported when I made the early levels – I had to open the .map file in a text editor and type in the texture offsets manually.
Getting used to Quake editing took the community a while. The level of complexity had increased ten-fold, scaring off the casual level makers, those who just couldn’t invest the time that was required, and those who just didn’t think that Quake was fun enough to edit for (two of the most prominent victims were The Innocent Crew of Denis and Thomas Moeller, who barely got beyond releasing a few mini levels and level props).
Beyond Belief in a modern Quake Engine
Most people were focusing on Deathmatch mods and levels in the first place. When good SP levels did arrive, though, they were diligently getting tracked by places like Matt Sefton’s SPQ Heaven. I had known very early on that I wanted to make a single-player episode for Quake, it just seemed the logical thing to do. What I hadn’t realized was how much time that effort would take. I labored over 8 months on 8 levels, and got some help along the way, as well. The results were well worth it, though! You can read up on the details in the 10th Anniversary blog post (which is currently offline) – Beyond Belief is the reason I am working in the industry today (a possibility that just started dawning on me as I was in the middle of making the episode).
My Quake 2 maps were never released
When Quake 2 was released it addressed a whole bunch of the single-player issues that Quake had had, and was more thematically consistent, too. But I had already been hired by Ritual Entertainment at that point and was mostly killing time, waiting for my US visa to get approved. I made a couple of Quake 2 MP maps (Arma5 and Arma5CTF) and started a couple of single-player maps for a mini campaign I was going to release with Iikka Keranen. But that project was never finished – I guess I was pretty burned out. Obviously I never got into Quake 3 and 4 editing because at that point I was already working in the industry on competing projects 🙂 I’ve occasionally started making a map for later Quake games, but never finished those efforts.
The Quake period, especially Quake 1, was a great time. The mod community was coming into its own, internet multiplayer was taking off, the first national LAN parties were starting to emerge, and speed-running took its first (very quick) steps. I’m dedicating this page to the Quake community of old – everybody of the old Ocrana and Braindead clans, all the Quake level designers, and the speedrunners that took Quake demo recording to a whole new level.
