This is a little look back at a map I released early this year but never really documented my thoughts on.
The Stars We Lost To Grief was my first Quake map, but it was not my first attempt at a Quake map. I had a few little false starts, falling victim to over-ambitiousness before I’d had a chance to get comfortable with the game’s library of entities and monsters. In the end, I willingly subjected myself to the limitations of a ‘1024’-style map—a map that fits within the fairly snug confines of a 1024x1024x1024 unit cube. With so little space at my disposal, I was forced to suppress my natural urge for grand narrative arcs and knuckle down to the thing I actually wanted to practice: tight, varied encounter design.
Someone from id Software (maybe Romero?) once said that when they make a game with a new engine, the first level should be something that was completely impossible in their previous engine. This resonated with me a little, walking away from a massive Doom project with its limitations still painfully apparent, and The Stars We Lost To Grief quickly became a depraved orgy of moving parts, alternating between ambushes and traps with a healthy dose of timed platforming (note: still not sorry). I quickly saw the value in making a cramped level, and leaned into it to try and create hairy encounters with only a handful of monsters apiece. I love a good old-school movement-heavy shooter, but my eyes quickly glaze over when I’m just circlestrafing around a big pack of baddies in a wide-open area. Limited space to move is what keeps things interesting.
Getting to grips with Quake’s roster of baddies was an interesting time. It’s a fairly small list, and smaller still if (like me, at the time) you refuse to use the military-base-themed enemies outside of a military-base-themed level. In the map’s tight arenas, I focused on aggressive enemies that would either rush the player down or use large projectile attacks, hoping to make players panic in close-quarters: Ogres, Knights, Death Knights, Fiends, and of course, the Spawns. This was definitely when I fell in love with Ogres in particular, which I feel are enormously flexible and able to stay a threat in all sorts of contexts—provided the player isn’t powerful enough to just delete them on sight. Most fights combined these enemies with traps or hazards of some variety, letting me use fewer enemies while still keeping things stressful.
Like all ‘first’ projects, The Stars We Lost To Grief had a few rough edges. I had to scrap one trap entirely after realising there was no way to stop the cacophony of a dozen moving spikes once the player had successfully passed through it—a cacophony which was, due to the map’s small dimensions, impossible to escape. The 1024-unit restriction also meant that it was largely just a short linear gauntlet, with precious little room for exploration, secret hunting, or even just moments to breathe. Some people even found it overly brutal—but what's Quake if you can't be a little bit mean?
