"The Desolate Depot"

The Inspiration

I'll go through periods of playing Half-Life 2: Deathmatch with bots, and there's a specific (and apparently still fairly popular) custom map I always liked called dm_lostvillage. It's this neat little two-level close quarters layout, but it's built like garbage. You can tell this was the tail end of custom levels being able to get away with abstract, blocky shit visuals that don't really look like anything. There's many line-of-sight glitches and I'm not sure it was even vis'ed. Thinking the layout would suit Quake, I got to work rebuilding it with an idbase theme and hopefully more sensical construction.

The Construction

One of my biggest inspirations in how I build levels is Dimension of the Past, which is one of the semi-official Machinegames Quake expansions, that one done for its twentieth anniversary in 2016. I especially loved the way J.F. Gustafsson built these idbase levels with lots of supports in the walls, everything broken up and not looking repetitive, the textures all clean and aligned—slick, but not overdetailed. I've been trying to cop that for years. Maybe this is the first time I actually sorta managed it, maybe.

I started this one prior to the first Wales trip and didn't pick it back up until 2024 because of a bit of refactoring to make the pieces fit together I had to do and was unwilling to do. (It took about an hour when I stopped being a baby.) In the end, I wanted to add on some secret areas and extra bits to the layout to maybe make it make more sense as a place, even if it's still just a video game world. I still really like the idea of mapping in inaccessible areas to make the level feel bigger, like you're deathmatching in one corner of a base. Must do that more.

The Retrospective

After this was built, for my birthday, I decided to stage the first Somnolescent Quake deathmatch since building "Temple of the Strange" in 2017. I (slowly and painfully) figured out nquakesv, gave everyone a customized copy of nQuake so they could join right away, hopped on the eMachines Box with a DOS-based QuakeWorld client of my own (because I'm picky about QuakeWorld actually feeling like Quake), and we deathmatched 'til the cows came home. Connor and Savannah dominated, I did surprisingly poorly (and didn't mind, I was just happy to see people into my level), and even a few random folks we didn't know joined in for a round or two at the end! Super fun.

Of course, such a test (and giving it out to some other non-group folks for their expertise) found a bunch of bugs (stucks and dim lighting), laziness on my part (one fucked up lift), and maybe some things that won't be to everyone's taste. It was brought up to me that the walkway trim would probably prevent folks from bunnyhopping, and the only way to solve that would be to get rid of it. I wasn't willing to do that and have the ground be flat and boring, so apologies if you're one of those super cool speedy bhop people (not really). Amateurs, like the rest of us, play the map as I intended.

Anyway, this was fun! I really like how it came out visually and how it plays too. I've definitely got some ideas in mind for future deathmatch levels of various sizes and themes, possibly even Somnol-themed levels full of niche references. Maybe once I have enough of them, I'll run a little server you can join to play them with us.