Gambini, on 02 March 2012 - 04:02 PM, said:
At some point, I felt like i was 14 again and was playing Duke Nukem 3d for first time.
This is the best compliment I couldn't even hope for, it means we have reached our goal.
Thank you.
Gambini, on 02 March 2012 - 04:02 PM, said:
It was hard to tell what did each mapper since everything is so well blended and even.
I'm glad you feel this way too. Blending things together was one of the key point for me. Except for 3 of the boss maps and the link between Meatball and Derailing, all the maps are directly connected to each others. It is one of those effect that I love about the original game, and which was original for FPS games at the time, that I really wanted for us to recreate. I still remember the first time I walked towards the Bank in E3L2 after seeing it through the crack at the end of E3L1, I was so impressed after playing barely connected stuff in Wolfeinstein 3D or Doom.
This is also why it was important to make the maps one after the other. When I saw that building as an unreachable at the end of Merljin's map (the 4th map, City Lights), I KNEW that I had to start my next map there; even better, Merljin put an helicopter at the end of this map! I just had to make the crash happen there which at the same time made it reminiscent of E1L1, linked both maps directly (you can still see his streets from my rooftop) which ALSO gave me the opportunity to add some Duke Humour ("
Damn, those alien bastards shot up my ride again!"), which to me is funny in a classic Duke style because of its double irony : Duke rides a helicopter to end up making a travel he could have made by foot AND it's a call to the car crash at the start of the first map of the episode (
"Damn those alien bastards shot up my ride!).
To me, this was as much important in order to give a classic feel as texturing and architecture, and in the case of City Lights --> Sex City, it couldn't be more
perfect.
However, even though I'm afraid to break the magic a little, I think you can find every mapper's style a little bit if you look deeper into it :
-My maps have a more "squarish" architecture.
-Mikko's maps are more straightforward, no bullshit allowed, not a single moment of backtracking
-MRCK's maps have a bigger monster count and even though he did a great job recreating a classic visual design, he couldn't help but add some of his style in it as well (see the 2nd map for example, near the bar the chairs are using different palettes and the fences have shadows, which both are typical of his more "modern" style city maps, and never done in the original maps).
-Finding Merljin's style in his map is the hardest but for some reason that bar he made makes me think of stuff like RED2 but I can't really spot why (maybe it's just my imagination on this one though).