Section 28

I made this!

Brutalism's pop culture association with cold concrete, totalitarian regimes, cold bureaucracy, social decay and so on has long frustrated me. Partly because its a fall from such lofty ideals, partly because on some level I kind of hate the process where this loose bundle of goals and ideals is eventually stripped down to just an aesthetic to be endlessly paraded.

So in the spirit of Quake, I decided to smash up a bunch of disparate things and see if they added up to anything interesting that might challenge that a little, namely:

• British post-war social housing, which in many cases was intimately tied up with Brutalism
• Thatcherism and its attack on that social housing (at its peak, about 30% of the population lived in some form of social housing!)
• To tie into that: Thatcher's anti LGBT policies

This led me pretty early on to the map's title: Section 28. To cut a long explanation short, this was part of a larger act of parliament that led to local authorities and schools being defacto unwilling or unable to bring up LGBT topics in any context. I was at school mostly in the tail-end of the period it was in force before it was repealed in 2003, but it cast a long shadow to put it mildly.

From here I had a pretty clear idea in the broad strokes of what I wanted: a residential area with visible LGBT iconography that had been occupied by the Quake enemies. Architecturally I didn't have a single clear influence I was following, though games like half-life 2 were in the back of my mind certainly when thinking about this kind of residential area. The matrix was also a pretty clear influence on the lighting. That film, depending on who you asked, used sickly heavy green overtones when its characters were in the matrix to imply that something was deeply wrong with the world. There are basically two main tones of light through the level, outdoor areas are lit with a white light tinged towards green, while indoor artificial lighting does the same with tinted yellow lights. That, combined with some very gentle greenish fog did a huge amount of heavy lifting in making the map feel like a continuous and cohesive space.

Over the course of making the map, I think I really settled into a style that isn't especially efficient, but really worked creatively for me. Essentially I started with a central tall room and a corridor leading to it. That isn't super interesting, so I added a side room with a button to open up the path. Then I locked the side room and made a corridor branching off in the other direction that would loop around eventually and bring you back into the button room. Then if I wanted, that corridor could have its own goal, maybe to reach a higher platform in order to do the loop back, that goal could be obfuscated with more pathways and so on. In this way I found it quite easy to build little recursive trees of goals and paths and sub goals that would eventually lead back to the main path you were trying to reach in a satisfying way.

I also landed early on a key aesthetic and gameplay feature that was used throughout the map. Having an infinite ammo pistol