The Last and the Limbless

by Ryan JL on 2024/02/08 at 22:54
Posted In: Games

I have a new map out as part of Fairweather’s Remix Jam for Quake. The pack’s theme is to remix a multiplayer map from any game for Quake single player.

Screenshot from Quake, showing a straight path through a "street" with doors and windows.

This was a weird one! I had several ideas for remixing a Counter-Strike map again (my first draft for the jam was a remake of de_prodigy), but then I had another idea: how about something from a game that isn’t even a first person shooter? What I ended up creating and taking inspiration from instead was a map from Rayman M/Arena, Zenith Harbour.

If you’re not familiar with Rayman M, it has maps for both fighting and foot racing. While adapting the fighting maps could be well-suited for Quake’s arena combat, I personally wanted to build something more exploratory, so I picked a racing map. Zenith Harbour stuck out in my memory the most for a few reasons, the main one being that it stuck exclusively to the standard behind-the-back third person camera, so it was pretty easy to adapt to a “real” 3D space. Most of the other racing maps have one or two 2.5D sections with a side camera that they switch to.

The other reason I chose Zenith Harbour was that I could easily adapt some of the same traps and shoot switches into Quake, in the same (or similar) positions.

In the original map, there was a trap with fire spouting from the left side, part of which was disabled with a button. This was recreated as a series of lightning traps that are temporarily toggled off.
This building has 2 of its 3 pathways gated off with a laser grid that’s disabled via a switch to the left. This became simple metal bars in my Quake recreation.

I took liberty with a few other areas, mostly with regard to the floating and rotating platforms in the original game. Often, these floating platforms turned into floors for a new enclosed space for more potential for combat setups.

The other feature of the original map is that it has patches of grass that slow the player down. Instead, this was mostly turned into Quake’s green acid goo.

Overall, I’m happy with how this turned out! I wish I could have spent more time on the details. There are also a couple things I didn’t think work out quite as well; I relied a little bit too much on center-print messages and arrows for the player. On the other hand, it wasn’t too complicated of a layout with opportunities for getting terribly lost, since it’s mostly just a giant loop with alternating paths.

This event has resulted in a massive collection of about 30(!) maps, even including a couple of other racing game maps, such as Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road. As per usual, it requires a full copy of Quake and a modern source port to play.

Download Remix Jam on Slipseer.

Screenshots for comparison are from Project Longplay’s video of the PS2 version of the game.

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