Freeway, the city map I’ve been working on for Unvanquished, had its first alpha release today. This is a very rough release intended primarily for gameplay testing. Once the level design flow has been finalized, I can go in and add details, sound, scenery, etc.
For my next Unvanquished map, I’m doing something different, something more challenging than yet another space station that starts with the letter “S”. (No, making two of them wasn’t intentional…it just happened.) This map is a dystopian, futuristic urban center, something that hasn’t been covered yet in Unvanquished and wasn’t very common in its spiritual predecessor, Tremulous.
I call it “Freeway”. Because something something originality something.
The map is inspired by the Detroit city hub in Deus Ex: Human Revolutions, which is one of my favorite games because it allows you to be sneaky and non-lethal. (Except in the parts that it doesn’t–the boss battles! Argh!) I’ve always liked skyscraper architecture and my love-hate relationship with real life cities is swinging more and more often towards “love”, so a city was the natural choice for a new Unvanquished map.
The theme isn’t the only new thing here. I’m also doing something different development-wise. Most early Tremulous maps (including mine) were developed in heavy secrecy, which was great for authors that were worried that their ideas would be stolen but bad for actually making a releasable map. It was very common for a new mapper to show up on the forums, post some enticing screenshots, and then disappear before a build was ever uploaded. In addition, many authors (cough not me I swear cough) went months between updates. That’s a long time to go without gameplay feedback from the community; often the feedback was provided by a few select beta testers–a very small number of eyes.
Worse, most mappers only packaged the compiled map and not the original, editable .map file, which meant that updating the map to fix bugs or to take advantage of new engine capabilities became next to impossible over time, as the mappers lost access to the original files. We lost access to a lot of good Tremulous maps that way. There are very fun maps out there that have no source available, which means we can’t update them to work with the new game engine.
Unvanquished mappers have gotten pretty good about packaging the source along with the compiled map (the source file compresses well, being plain text, so there’s no technical reason not to), but I’d like to tackle the first problem too. Unvanquished is an open-source game and I’m one of its developers; it should follow that my maps should be developed openly as well. I plan to garner feedback from the Unvanquished developers and community in an iterative, prototypical fashion. I also plan to keep old versions of the map so people can go back and see the progress it’s made from its inception to its current form.
Us programmers have a tool that’s great for this sort of thing: Git! The parts of a map that change most often are plain text (the shaders and the map source itself); the binary assets (textures, sounds) usually don’t change once they are added to the project, making Git an ideal choice for managing different versions of an Unvanquished map.
I’ve set up a repository on my GitHub account here. You can browse the Wiki for development updates and screenshots, which are contained in a separate branch. Viewing the screenshots from the earliest ones onward provides an inside look at my map development process, starting with the broad-stroked “sketch” of the main arena to where it is currently. There’s even an alpha to download, although it’s primitive at the moment. (Only the outdoor arena has any semblance of completion.)
I hope to see more Unvanquished mapper using an open development model like this.
Several years ago, I made a map called Station 15 for the open-source game Tremulous. To my surprise, it has since become a popular Tremulous map on the game servers. I’ve been slowly upgrading it to take advantage of the new capabilities featured by the Unvanquished game engine. This includes higher-resolution textures and lightmaps.
Station15
Okay, dirty little secret–this version of the map has been in Unvanquished since the last release, Alpha 28. But I haven’t had time to blog about it since fixing it up. Like Station 15, Spacetracks is a map that I made some NaN years ago for Tremulous and turned out to be popular on the game servers because of its gameplay. This is very puzzling because I’m a decent mapper (well, I’m okay) but a horrible Tremulous player. Spacetracks r1 has been included in Unvanquished* since day one, but compared to the other stock maps, it looked dated. Now it looks shiny, because everybody loves shiny it has higher -resolution textures and lightmaps.
Not much to say here. Got some fresh textures and just had to make a little test map to play with them, although it’s not exactly “little” anymore…I’ve been playing Halo 3 recently–actually playing video games is a rare occurrence for me, since I prefer creating worlds to destroying them–and I found the huge expanses and conceptual grandness of some of the maps in that game to be inspiring, as in the first two Halo games. (Especially the “High Charity” levels.)
I’ve been playing Halo 4 too much…
I have no idea how to turn this into a playable Unvanquished map just yet. In particular, the wall-walking ability of the alien team could make this room a potential pain in the posterior for the human team. Still…I like it.
Forgot to post about this. Unvanquished Alpha 22 was released recently, and one of the new inclusions is the latest version of my map, Snowstation!
Here’s the release article, and here’s the article on the map.