What if I just wrote about my Quake maps? What if I did that?
Head Reattachment Trauma is not about gender transition. Alright yes, I forced players to type map suzyhrt into the console, and yes, I came up with the name to deliberately evoke gradual healing from a violent destruction of the self, but, that was mostly to annoy overly sensitive cis people. I don't really feel compelled to make art about my transition experiences. Maybe if I ever feel like I have something to add there.
So Head Reattachment Trauma is about waking up in a canister, and being surrounded by a bunch of other canisters that keep opening and revealing soldiers—or malformed corpses, or weird blobs. There's kind of a basic boilerplate narrative to the space, hinting that they're growing baddies in tubes with varying degrees of success, but this map was mostly an exercise in encounter design. After the tight constraints of The Stars We Lost To Grief, I was eager to work with a bit more elbow room and play around with a wider range of monsters (grunts and enforcers included, which I had previously avoided for seeming too incongruous).
My understanding is that when id Software made E1M1 (The Slipgate Complex), they designed it to show off Quake's feature set, with toggle-able lightmaps, true 3D rooms-over-rooms, sloping floors, and all manner of moving parts. In essence, they made a map that would've been impossible in Doom. With my own Doom map still fresh in my mind, I was asking myself the same thing—what could I do in Quake that was uniquely Quake, and impossible in simpler engines? It could only be 'way too many moving parts'.
It turns out I quite enjoy springing traps on people. Unspoken back-and-forth between designers and players is one of the joys of level design, and there is no quicker way to make your voice heard than with a nice solid prank. Something about this is probably rooted in the fact that I'm also quite a cautious Quake player—I need to be backed into a corner with a fire lit under my feet, or I'll pick the safest approach without fail, every time. And so, Head Reattachment Trauma also tries to back people into a corner.
Not everyone is a fan of a linear succession of ambushes, though—it gets exhausting fast. I kept this in mind with Head Reattachment Trauma, and sought to sprinkle popcorn enemies between major encounters, marking the way forward with scattered parades of clueless grunts. Unfortunately, with the relative density of the map, there were few opportunities for this, and even fewer opportunities I felt comfortable filling—it's important to give the player a few stretches of peace and quiet, too.
I'm really quite happy with this map—though like most of them, I feel it grew too complex and too time-consuming. In trying to do justice to Makkon's lovely tech textures, I found myself putting more and more effort into nondescript walls and ceilings. Compounded by this was the problem of large moving brushes, which needed to be very carefully lit in order to not look awful while sliding around. The final elevator sequence and arena probably took as long as the rest of the map put together—I guess that's what you have to be ready for when you want a climactic finale.
Head Reattachment Trauma is available on Quaddicted and Slipgate Sightseer. You will need a relatively modern Quake source port (such as Quakespasm)