Phoenixan

Smoke and steam. Crates and warehouses. Machines whirring. Fans spinning.

Recently, I chose to host my first mapping jam for Quake on Slipseer & the Quake Mapping Discord. The direction was to build a map in the style of a factory using the Alkaline toolset. There were no restrictions on theme or texture set; however, every map was required to include at least one instance of Floyd.

Floyd is a cylindrical robot that walks around on 2 legs (and fires a volley of lasers, but don’t worry about that).

For this, I put together both a proper map with gameplay, as well as the start map. I won’t spoil the start map here for those who want to check it themselves, but I felt like I had some fun ideas around the difficulty selector (and difficulty names!), as well as the portal style for each participant.

The jam itself had a pretty decent turn-out with 11 maps, including my own. This worked out pretty well, since I planned the start map around having potentially 10-14 maps to point to.

My own map started out as a submission for Bonk Jam, which I scrapped after a few hours of work into it, since I felt like the layout was perhaps better-suited for Alkaline’s jump boots power-up and enemy roster, rather than the newly introduced Bonk Hammer.

Because of the map’s original intent, the layout is vertically-oriented with 3 layers on top of one another. Vats are covered by lids, which the player lifts upward via a switch. These then become platforms to access the final areas, with added assistance of the jump boots. The worker robots start as pacifist entities, but become angered as the player “interrupts” their work.

If you’re into Quake, and are in the mood for some factory exploration, follow the link here to check out the full download on Slipseer! This requires a full version of Quake along with a modern source port. All other files, including the Alkaline mod itself, are all included.