Section 28

I made this!

Brutalism's pop culture association with 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 sold and paraded around.

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 I was at school mostly in the tail-end of the period it was in force before it was repealed in 2003, but it cast a long shadow to put it mildly.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 tinted 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.

To that end I also put a lot of doors around the map, some closed, some dropping away into inaccessible darkness. One of my goals was to try and make a space that felt casually plausible as you moved through it, that you could imagine real people moving through as long as you didn't think too hard about it and making the space seem bigger and more expansive than reality was a big part of that which I think turned out quite well. I am especially proud of the skate park (the Squake park? The Skate Quark?). A lot of people said they really liked that and recognised what it was very quickly. It made for a really good arena I think for people willing to dig in and go for it, since there's some fun movement you can do by slope jumping off the half-pipes.

Generally my process was what I assume is not at all novel, but I call 'creative obfuscation'. I started with a simple hallway and courtyard and gradually spiralled out from there by building up obstacles to the main progression path. An open door becomes a closed door with a button. Then button gets placed in a side room that you have to follow another path to find. Then on that path you follow the same kind of process for as many layers as you want, mixing up what the obstacles are (keys, enemies, blocked paths and so on). The nice thing about this was it generally led to the play area being pretty manageable. At any given time there's usually not more than 2 or 3 distinct branches the player could take, which would then terminate, lead back to the root or back into one of the other paths.

For the most part I think this worked out pretty well. I had to make a few tweaks (and put some signage up pointing towards key doors); that and some strategically placed enemies to help guide the player meant most of the people I watched had a pretty fine time finding their way around. The most teeth grindingly frustrating thing I ran into was 4/4 playtesters missing the starting shotgun and wandering off to finish the rest of the level without it. This was not their fault to be clear, they wandered down a clearly marked side passage rather than continuing straight down towards the weapon in the distance and never ended up circling back, but I ended up having to make the ugly fix of just bolting that door shut until the they got the weapon and a key next to it!

Overall I was pretty pleased with the reception, most of the people I watched seemed to enjoy playing it and had kind things to say about it. I think it did fall down in a few ways though. Like a lot of Quake maps, there isn't a lot of guidance on what to think or feel about it. I wanted to give the impression of a place that was once good, now decayed and I really think that didn't come through as I wanted it to. Really the only place it was strongly expressed was the Skate Park and the greenery around the first courtyard. Time pressure led to less of these kinds of details than I wanted; at least one person had the sense that we were invading a city belonging to the enemies, for example. If I were to have infinite time, there's so much I could have added. Signage, graffiti, shops, whatever. Anything to make it feel like a personal lived in space.

Still, I am very proud of it overall. For the most part I think its pretty good. It also contributed to several people getting intensely mad over being forced to look at a rainbow and getting banned of Slipseer for their troubles, which I consider a personal achievment.

'Clenow – is a wonderful prison city, but the LGBT theme spoils everything;

Maps with LGBT theme in title and plot: Avix, Clenow – to be honest, the maps are good, but what I read and saw in them is disgusting and crosses out all the efforts of the authors

Honestly I feel I have to save these ones for posterity's sake. This person got deeply mad but still couldn't bring themselves to call our maps giant pieces of shit. Their hater game is weak, they will not see the light of heaven and this feels like a complete victory.

If I can indulge a little more self praise (and you can't stop me) so:

'WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS MAP CREATOR. WHY IS THIS ONE OF YOUR FIRST MAPS WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU. Lacking ammo and fights arent like the best are like my major complaints BUT WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU WHY WOULD YOU MAKE THIS(POSITIVE)' - A person on social media