To celebrate a recent release of bobsp4, the series is here in one download.
spX:
It's been two years. In that time I've been in college, and gone through so much. I feel like a totally different person. I guess somewhere during my efforts to master Maya, I forgot people were still making Duke Nukem 3D maps. "Oh yeah", I thought to myself, "I never finished making BobspX!" Well I've been back at work on it for three days now and I'm close to finishing. It makes heavy use of polygon objects for level geometry and as such it won't make much sense if you play it without Jonof's port and the High Resolution Pack.
I'm currently 23 years old. I bought Duke Nukem 3D and Matt Tagliaferry's BUILD guide at Fry's Electronics when I was 15. To think that I've been using BUILD on and off for 8 years now....I think it's time for me to move on. I've been learning UnrealEd 3 in school, and that's probably what I'll dedicate myself to for the next 8 years or so. :-) With any luck I'll be able to edit for Duke Nukem Forever when it finally hits. How's that for coming full circle?
Bobsp4:
Author notes: This is, more than anything else, a concept map. It's fairly boring and conventional
gameplay wise, with just some keycards, pickable objects and an exploding alien base at the end. What is I think very unusual about it is the design philosophy. Some time after SP2 I began wanting to
experiment with very large wide open spaces. The problem with this was that it meant I could not pack in the dense detailing that I wanted to. The result of trying to achieve the best of both
worlds was BobSP3. I was not satisfied with it. Eventually I realized there had to be a good reason for the player to explore large areas or it was simply boring. And there had to be some kind of limiting mechanism to make it tense. For SP4, I set the whole map underwater. This gives a novel, interesting place to explore but which is exciting and dangerous on account of the limited air supply. Exploration is rewarded with air resupply stations and ammo crates as well as some neat/funny easter eggs in far flung corners of the map. Now, to have BobSP level detailing, I realized I could just condense it into a small number of places.
In this case, the underwater bases. This made for a logical contrast; large organic outside details for the oceanic terrain, densely packed BobSP details for the interiors of the bases. And the player is compelled to spend time there by puzzles, enemies, supplies and the fact that they are the only safe havens from the hostile and difficult outside environment. I believe this formula can be reproduced to make a new generation of more engaging maps. All it requires is some compelling natural environment to explore, with serious work put into diversifying terrain so that there is something new to see wherever you go and funny/useful things to find, and crucially it must be dangerous to the player in a way that requires periodically resupplying some finite powerup. For SP4 that was the scuba gear. But I can imagine for example, maps set on the Moon, with flickering spooky abandoned Lunar outposts, highly detailed and accurate to what we might actually build someday. I would love to explore that. But now, suppose the real star of that map is the Lunar landscape! Plenty of moon maps focus entirely on the base interior, and only have rudimentary outdoor terrain just for scenery.
What if there were several modestly sized outposts on a huge, sprawling, detailed realistic (i.e. white textures, NASA aesthetic like the upcoming game Routine rather than the cartoony aesthetic of the textures used for the original episode 2 Moon base levels. Hard scifi space habitat architecture would look fantastic in Duke, as this engine excels at small details and working/scripted machines) There'd be realistic, hilly Lunar terrain to entice the player to explore, albeit carefully. And a little CON hacking could produce a working space suit that the player must refill with oxygen only at special filling points within the habitats. And the gravity is reduced, and there are all sorts of lunar relics like the Apollo landing sites to discover if you explore the entire map. You can see how this design philosophy lends itself very well to lots of different settings.
Why not a map set in a Bioshock Infinite style sky city, where you must keep collecting new jetpacks in order to travel between different floating city platforms? A map like this could really showcase the new true room over room feature, in fact it would be necessary for such a map to exist, as the floating city platforms must have an underside to them, and float at different heights relative to one another. Or, imagine a map set in the center of the Earth, where you must dash from research station to research station through magma filled caverns, using the protective boots and regularly needing to find replacements for them. And large dark stretches of cavern require that you take care to periodically find new night vision goggles. Or what about an Antarctic map where to explore all of it without freezing todeath you must search for batteries that power your suit's built in heater? And so on and so forth, the idea is the same, only the setting changes between maps. Large, beautiful and varied natural landscape which the player is enticed to explore, but which is hostile to him in a way that requires periodically replenishing some powerup. And a fewmodestly sized bases, where you can condense the geometric detailing in a way that provides logicalcontrast between the indoor portions of the mapand the natural terrain outside.
And you know, now that SP4 shows how to do it, I'd even love to see more undersea base maps. Perhaps in Bioshock style? Or steampunk/Victorian? Or retrofuturistic, 1970's style? It's a setting not commonly explored in Duke maps even though this engine is very good for it because of the ease of defining where water is and isn't, compared to how hard that is to do in a real 3D game.
Needless to say, I don't intend to make these maps. They are an exhausting undertaking. I made BobSP4 simply to demonstrate this new gameplay concept, in the hopes that much like BobSP1 inspired very talented copycats, BobSP4 will inspire new maps built in this radically different SP4 style. Go ahead,let's see what you can do.
