As I’m typing this update, Valve’s Perpetual Testing Initiative DLC for Portal 2 is downloading via Steam. This update brings a slick and simplified level editor to Portal 2 along with Steam Workshop support to easily share and find other puzzles online – the first chambers are already beginning to show up!

Over at MapCore, we’re kicking off the Perpetual Testing Challenge in which designers will have about two weeks to create 1-3 Portal 2 test chambers using only the new editor. In addition to being a great quick and timely challenge (that also buys us some time to prepare for the next more technical challenge), it also provides as level playing field as we’ll probably ever get. 

When it comes down to it, that’s really the beauty of this editor – whether you’re a professional, an amateur, or a first-timer, you’re on roughly equal footing in this editor. Sure, experienced professionals or hobbyists have the advantage of experience and the knowledge to take a test chamber and tweak/polish/detail it in Hammer. However, they no longer exist behind a thick technical knowledge barrier or this jumbled visual mess:

This type of tool gives anyone with an idea the near-immediate power to attempt to realize it, and that’s a very good thing. In the discussion for the MapCore Challenge, one user worried that tools such as this will somehow dumb down or diminish the achievements of more experienced users. We’ve been having a similar debate since Unreal Engine 2 stepped onto the scene with its modular/scalable mesh-based level design, and the art of level design has not yet crumbled into ruin (unless you count today’s countless destroyed battlefields and overabundance of conveniently placed half-height cover, but that’s another debate).

Simple tools like this, LittleBigPlanet, or Nadeo’s tools (pictured above: TrackMania 2 and ShootMania Storm) exist not to threaten the livelihoods of developers, but to create a spark. The spark of “oh wow, I can do this?” The spark of realizing that all those ideas you’ve had bouncing around in your head as you’ve played your favorite games over the years are something you can actually try out for yourself. For all the amazing ways that exist today to make entirely unique games, there’s still something to be said for the playground of mod tools for an existing game – for taking the familiar and adding your own personal twist. That’s something that’s been sorely lacking in recent years with the rise of this generation of consoles, more and more complex internal tools, and fewer and fewer resources to release polished user-facing toolsets.

In the time I’ve been writing this, the Steam Workshop link at the top of this page has gone from 3 entries to 136. Looks like Valve has ignited a pretty big spark.

–

Unrelated: A little game called Starhawk is on shelves today in North America, and in the coming days in Japan and Europe. Sadly, I’m home sick instead of celebrating with the team, but it has been a great ride and I’m thrilled to have it out there. I’ll write some more words about it soon.

It’s taken a couple years, a couple layouts, and one hell of a Python script, but… Cubes. They’re done.

Partner-in-cubing Matthew Breit has his in-depth writeup here, with an even longer look at the CubeSpew™ script that created the cubes still to come. I’ve provided my own write-up and screens here.

Man, cubes. Next up will be the release of Starhawk, followed by my personal time going towards koth_roundhouse for TF2 and resurrecting an older, larger version of lun3dm5 as kfs3dm2.

It came to my attention recently that the download link for the Nightwatch textures on FileFront randomly disappeared. I’ve updated the original post with two new download options, a public Dropbox link and a ModDB mirror. If you don’t feel like clicking through, here’s direct links for you:

• Textures - nightwatch_textures.rar (46.52 MB)
  • ModDB
  • Dropbox
• .rad files – rad.rar (5 KB):
  • button-masher.net
  • Dropbox

To see some of these in action, the guys over at the Sven Co-op forums have been doing the most with the textures so far; if you poke around there you can find quite a few maps with their own take on the NW set.

We also ran a Nightwatch-themed challenge over at MapCore back in July; you can view the winners as well as the rest of the entries over there. If you’ve made anything with these textures, I’d love to see it.

“Hell yes,” I said aloud as my character stepped onto the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. I was so ready for this. Through its first three missions, Battlefield 3‘s campaign had been a shaky ride – literally, too, as the entirety of “Uprising” can be legitimately blamed on the earthquake that closed “Operation Swordbreaker” – and the game was teetering back toward the shelf. For all the hype, for all the amazing trailers closing with the Terminator Salvation-esque take on the familiar “da-dun dun da dun-dun” Battlefield theme, this was a game that seemed to be in the midst of a major identity crisis.

Battlefield was not settling for a couple million sales and “solid military shooter” acclaim – it was coming for Modern Warfare 3 and the AAA crown. No game was going to unseat Call of Duty overnight, but the Battlefield series looked ready to make its move.

One of Battlefield‘s calling cards has always been its massive scale battles, which were well-represented in previous single player campaigns in the Bad Company spin-off series. While the second Bad Company game did noticeably scale back from the openness of the first, both games succeeded in creating very compelling yet open-ended gameplay experiences in sprawling (and destructible) levels.

It was puzzling, then, to see the prologue mission, “Semper Fidelis,” unveil the latest iteration of DICE’s impressive Frostbite Engine in a subway car, underground, at night. Awkward hand-to-hand combat played out in confusing and slow QTEs whose button presses were more “play next scripted sequence” than “react quickly,” and an additional QTE to jump from one train car to the next just left me longing for Mirror’s Edge 2.

By the conclusion of Battlefield 3′s third mission, “Uprising,” I still didn’t really know what I was playing. While “Operation Swordbreaker” had shown the big-time production value and polish that “Semper Fidelis” had lacked (I submit the game should have opened on the visually stunning exit from the APC at “Swordbreaker’s” start), the subsequent “Uprising” dragged the game back under cover of darkness in the form of a pseudo-stealth level. After a few minutes of crawling through conveniently cracked rubble and surviving a life-or-death QTE with a rat, I was about ready to be done with Battlefield. That’s when the form of an F-18 appeared on the next mission’s load screen.

Flight has long been another of the Battlefield series’ calling cards, with a combined air + ground experience few other games offer, let alone match (obligatory Warhawk and Starhawk shill goes here). Surely, then, “Going Hunting” would provide that first dose of Battlefield action to truly set this game apart.

The intro is a tedious walking cutscene (but an excellently presented walking cutscene) aboard an aircraft carrier with the player character following another pilot as he gives a quick pre-flight briefing. After a brief stroll through the interior, the pilots exit to the flight deck. This may be one of the most stunning visuals of this generation of games – stormy waves crash against the carrier’s hull under ominous clouds pierced by a handful of rays of sunlight. On the horizon, a naval destroyer fires cruise missiles toward the shore. I can’t wait to fly in this.

At the walking cutscene’s conclusion, the other pilot turns to say, “Okay. Let’s rock and roll,” and straps on his helmet. I’m certainly ready to rock and roll… until he climbs into the cockpit of the waiting F-18.

“You’re kidding me.“

Alas, they were not. My character plops on her helmet (she’s indeed a she, which might be neat if she had any meaningful role to play in the game) and hops up the ladder to the rear seat. It’s now time for the “flight” tutorial, which consists of looking left and right to make sure that the flaps and tail stabilizers play the correct animations when scripted to do so. Spoiler: They do.

“You have got to be kidding me!“

For 20 minutes, my heart sank as I begrudgingly rode along in what can only be loosely considered a “flight” mission and is perhaps the biggest sting of gaming disappointment I’d felt in years. It is no more than a rail shooter – a highly polished big-budget AAA rail shooter, no doubt, but a rail shooter nonetheless – and not a particularly good one. Your role as co-pilot is to look around, fire weapons, and deploy flares.

During the dogfight phase of the level you ride a spline path, spending much of your time waiting for enemy planes to follow their spline paths. When they’re in your gun sights, you fire a completely ineffective machine gun and occasionally fire off missiles as target locks allow. When they’re behind you, you turn around and wait for them to fire a missile, at which point you press the button to drop flares. Then the enemy fighter will slowly pull up alongside you before pulling forward into your crosshairs. Repeat a dozen or so times, and scene. The level then transitions into the targeting camera for a now genre-standard thermal-vision bombing run. After painting targets for A-10 strikes, the game fades out to a first-person night-vision landing sequence back on the carrier.

The interrogation room cinematic leading into the game’s next mission is the icing on the cake, with primary character Henry Blackburn retorting to his interrogators, ”That’s a nice story. I don’t see how it connects.” Indeed, there is no connection. It’s never spoken of again.

I suppose I should have expected as much. Big budget shooters, perhaps out of the once noble pursuit of varied and diverse gameplay, have turned to kitchen-sink bravado in the name of “the experience,” relinquishing identity and personality they once held in the process. All too often we as an industry forget that games are an interactive medium, and that its greatest moments come not from explicit authorial control, but the authoring of player stories in the scenarios we as designers have laid out for them. Sitting in the back seat of a jet on a spline and occasionally tapping the flares button isn’t compelling interaction, and it certainly isn’t Battlefield.

The most baffling factor in “Going Hunting’s” existence is Battlefield 3′s multiplayer. How does a game with such a robust flight component in multiplayer end up with a rail shooter in its single player campaign? One only needs to look as far as the stunning Caspian Border multiplayer gameplay trailer to see what Battlefield 3 flight is capable of:

This is what propelled Battlefield 3 ”a couple million” pre-orders and that has driven the game to sales figures of over eight million as of late November 2011. This is something Call of Duty can’t possibly offer. This - closing distance, the chase, juking free of your pursuer, lining up the shot, and firing the kill shot, etc. - is pilot fantasy, not waiting 30 seconds for an enemy plane to lazily drift from behind you to in front of you while flying in a straight line. This is Battlefield.

It’s understandable when the latest Medal of Honor presents a similarly well-polished Apache helicopter sequence from the gunner seat – I’m not exactly expecting a helicopter simulation from that series. It’s unforgivable when Battlefield abandons one of its signatures and shoves me into the back seat of a jet-shaped stroller. Immediately following “Going Hunting,” I ejected the disc. The next morning, I ordered Modern Warfare 3.

Love it or hate it, the Call of Duty series has never been afraid to simply be Call of Duty. Battlefield 3 multiplayer isn’t afraid to be Battlefield. Battlefield 3′s campaign is, and pretends to be Call of Duty to compensate. In doing so, it leaves behind a hollow shell of a game that could have been so much more. If we’re lucky, DICE will take the training wheels off for Battlefield 4. In the meantime, I’ll be playing Modern Warfare 3.

After a couple years of being possibly the worst-kept secret in games (let’s be honest – just the rumored name piqued my interest in employment at LightBox), the cat is officially out of the bag. We’re working on a little thing called Starhawk.

Official Site | Twitter | Facebook

There is an absolute mountain of coverage out there on your favorite gaming site(s), but I’ll just draw your attention to these two videos. The first is a behind-the-scenes look at the excellent team at LightBox, and the second is an introduction to Starhawk with LightBox President Dylan Jobe:

You’ll see more of Starhawk at E3. Enjoy!

The voting this time around allowed members to vote for up to three levels, which I think aided some of the issues we had with voting during the previous challenge. I gave my three votes to Zest, Tintern, and vfig’s level, “Escherish.” The third vote was a tough call with some very closely matched entries, but I had to give the nod to some of the crazy tricks vfig pulled off in his level – many of them similar to the portal tricks I used in Bender.

I definitely recommend checking out as many of the entries as you can within the scope of your game collection.

One thing that bugs me about these dimensions, though, is that horizontal and vertical spaces aren’t created equal. Unless you fall back on ladders, elevators, or teleporters, covering a 128 unit vertical shift requires somewhere in the realm of 256 units – 25% of the horizontal bounds allowed in this challenge! As a result, many levels tend to fill every possible inch of X/Y space, but often can’t utilize the full 1024 units on the Z axis.

I decided I wanted to take a crack at this in Prey. I’ve long held that Prey is the best of the Doom III engine games; it remains one of my favorites this generation, and I’ve always wanted to experiment with some of the crazy level design possibilities opened up by variable gravity and seamless portals. The result is “Bender,” which is now available for download.

I took most of my inspiration from Human Head’s level “Keeper Gravity” (dmescher.map for those of you who might poke around at their example levels), carrying over cues like the glowing blue borders to represent gravity changes and 45 degree slopes to shift from one gravity zone to another, and also emulating elements of the visual style.

An overarching goal for the level was to create walkable space on all six border faces of the cube, a goal I was able to meet with the help of a tucked away portal-linked corridor hiding under part of the main atrium. The seamless portals opened up a world of possibilities where players can exit a room in one orientation and enter a new room in a completely different one – they even create the illusion that the level extends well beyond its 1024 borders. In one case, the portal arrangement means you can even briefly see yourself running through the level.

I tried to keep the texturing fairly simple to aid in understanding which direction is currently “up.” In addition, item placement is fairly heavy and most if not all gravity change areas have items strategically placed to make sure there’s items stuck to whatever wall or ceiling you might end up walking on next. Here’s a video of it all in motion:

And some additional shots:

There may not be a more emotionally-charged game trailer than Wednesday’s trailer for Dead Island. The afternoon reveal spread like wildfire, quickly breaking into Twitter’s global trending topics (where it still remains as of Friday morning). I don’t know that I can recall a faster spread for an original title – whether people loved it or hated it, it sure got them talking.

As a three minute CG short film, I personally find it a stellar piece of work. For a game, however, the trailer sets a fantastic tone and atmosphere that is probably unlikely to be represented in the shipping title. Compare the closing shot from the trailer (above) to this screen in which we observe a red-skirted woman with a sword facing down a straight-jacketed zombie that appears to be a mix of Hannibal Lecter and the Quake 4 Berserker.

This is not a new problem, nor a new complaint. CG or otherwise pre-rendered trailers are typically more about style and theme than accurately representing gameplay. What makes Dead Island an interesting case is how far the theme and style of the trailer appears to fall from the actual game. While previews of the actual game still sound promising, I can’t help but wonder – what if the trailer actually did represent the game?

While imagining what this version of the game might be like, I immediately thought of Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru test. First seen in Star Trek II, the test places Starfleet cadets in an impossible scenario – a civilian freighter, the Kobayashi Maru, has been damaged in the neutral zone between Federation and Klingon space. When the cadet enters the neutral zone, his/her ship will be intercepted by multiple Klingon destroyers.

It is impossible to dissuade/defeat the Klingons, rescue the crew of the Kobayashi Maru, and escape back to Federation space. That, of course, is not the test. The test is of course actually meant to measure the cadet’s actions and leadership, even in the face of certain death. As Kirk describes in The Wrath of Khan: “How we face death is at least as important as how we face life.

Just a couple weeks ago, friend and colleague Matthew Breit recently wrote about the prospects of Groundhog Day: The Game. As he describes ways one might start exploring this hypothetical game, he touches on the movie’s scenario of the old dying bum:

Someone else discovers the old bum dying and starts a blog indexing his various failed attempts to save his life, trying to find the secret golden path through the game’s dialog and action options that helps the poor guy see the sunrise, and slowly evolves into a must-read meditation on accepting death.

This to me was the most poignant part of his entire write-up – the idea that, like the Kobayashi Maru, some outcomes are inevitable. What matters is no longer the resolution, but the actions taken along the way.

Most games, however, still predominantly focus on victory, usually in dramatic fashion. Our vernacular still refers to completing a game as “beating” it. Failure is rarely touched upon beyond dying and reloading the last checkpoint. Mass Effect 2 includes an ending where Shepard and his/her entire crew is killed – but you practically have to try to die. Halo: Reach’s story focused around the fall of Reach, but only really represented that fall by occasionally killing off core characters and including a brief “survive as long as you can” encounter at the end against an overwhelming swarm of Covenant.

Perhaps the best available example of inevitable failure I’ve seen is the flash game One Chance. You are a scientist whose cure for cancer turns out to be fatal to all life. You have six days before all life on the planet dies. How do you spend those six days? With your family? Desperately working for a cure?

Back to Dead Island. What if the game’s trailer is the bookend of its story, beginning with a normal family vacation, and ending in inevitable death? What do you do? Hole up in the hotel and wait/hope for rescue? Attempt a daring escape by boat/helicopter/plane/any transportation mode available? If you are separated from your family, do you try to save yourself, or do you go back at great personal risk to attempt to save them?  What measures are you willing to take to prevent your family from the horrible fate awaiting them?

How do you die? Torn apart by zombies while reflecting on how poor a plan you just tried to execute? Cowering in a corner, afraid to venture out? Sitting and watching as your family is slaughtered in front of you, or overwhelmed while desperately trying to defend them? At the hands of your own just-turned daughter?

Dead Island will likely be a grittier, less slapstick Dead Rising. And that’s ok. It may even be a great game. But to truly match the bleak outlook of the trailer, Techland has to be willing to let us die. And we need to be able to come to terms with that.

© 2001-2011 Andrew Weldon unless noted

Indeed, the oldest levels on my site were released in late 2001, now going on ten years ago. I had just graduated from high school that spring and, with the assistance of a two week post-graduation LAN party celebration in my parents’ basement, shifted into a mostly nocturnal level-building frenzy.

I built and released five levels that summer – Zeta Sector, Phreneticism, Sector A, and Repair Bay 4 for Half-Life deathmatch, and Wormhole for Opposing Force CTF. I also began to involve myself in community sites like the original Snark Pit and the late Valve ERC. I met fellow aspiring designers who would become friends and future colleagues, many of whom I keep in touch with to this day. My CTF level, Wormhole, found its way into the rotation on Gearbox Software‘s official server and I found myself receiving feedback from developers at a studio where I would end up working 6 years later.

Of all the levels I released in 2001, the most important was my first – “Planet Half-Life HQ,” released in January. Planet Half-Life, then one of the central sites of the community, started a map contest in late 2000. The top ten entries would be combined into a PHL map pack for release after the contest’s completion. I got the wacky idea to try my hand at a submission of my own.

The contest was great motivation to try and actually see a level to completion. For years I’d been dabbling in Quake, Quake II, and Half-Life levels, but it was time wasted as I’d never come remotely close to finishing anything. Unfortunately, as busy as I was the first half of my senior year – the BHS Drumline/Marching Band, drumming for the stage band and show choir, varsity tennis, preparing for my final speech team season, plus that whole “school” thing – I missed the deadline.

I could have easily said, “Oh well,” and cast it aside like the dozens of other unfinished Worldcraft/Hammer .rmfs littering my hard drive. This time, though, I’d gotten close enough that the end was in sight. I hunkered down for a couple weeks after the contest had ended and released it anyway.

It’s not a good level. Thematically, it fits no known definition of “headquarters.” The layout is very flat and lacks the interconnected loops that help define good deathmatch flow. It’s a visual train wreck, showing only the occasional hint of any understanding of texturing, lighting, or composition. But all of those things can be fixed and learned. What matters is I finished it.

It’s easy to sit around and say “Yeah, I’m gonna make games!” It can be hard to figure out how to do it. The best piece of advice I’ve seen over the years is still the simplest: Make something. Dive into UDK or Unity. Mod your favorite game. Teach yourself C++ or LUA. Start building models. Get involved in the amateur development community. Finish something. Release it. Learn. Repeat.

In 2001, I made something. To any aspiring developers reading this, I say: What are you going to make in 2011?

Most of my votes went to the often-mentioned-here Matt Breit and his entry, “Ludonarrative Dissonance.” It’s a gorgeous level in screenshot form, but you really have to see it in motion – his teleporter, jump pad, and dodecahedron face textures are animated from unique pencil-drawn frames, creating a look not unlike that of the classic video for Take On Me. Matt has talked about wanting to do a full map in this animated pencil sketch style and you should encourage him to do so. It’s awesome.

Duncan “ReNo” Blair’s “Monotone Heights” pretty much destroyed everyone else in the community voting across all categories, which is what tends to happen in contests he’s entered over the years (I was, however, fortunate enough to once fend him off in a single category of an old Snark Pit competition with my HLDM level “Odin’s Guard“). We may have to ban him from future challenges if he keeps this up.

It’s been a while since we did a challenge like this at MapCore, but it may not be long before we roll out another one. We’re discussing some possible options for the next challenge now, and will probably start gearing up for another one in 2-4 weeks. Join us!