Quake
Buy GameNods to Mods Interview: Honey Add-on for Quake
Quake
Buy GameQuake players are in for a treat with our latest free Add-on!
Players of our re-release of the classic FPS that changed it all can now dive into Honey, at atmospheric trip through a fog-laden village with a dark secret beneath the surface.
To celebrate this fan-favorite mod making its Add-on debut, we got in touch with the mod’s creator and Senior Level Designer at MachineGames, Christian Grawert, to get a closer look at what makes this Honey so sweet – enjoy!
SLAYERS CLUB: What was your first experiences with Quake?
CHRISTIAN GRAWERT: I watched someone else play it on a demo PC set up in a computer shop in 1996. I didn’t understand much of what was happening on the screen at first, but I could tell it was something special. I didn’t get much chance to play it for myself properly until I got it as a Christmas gift from my sisters and ever since then it’s been my favorite FPS game.
SC: What got you into Quake modding?
CG: I remember purchasing an unofficial expansion pack that came with an editor. It was an incredibly obtuse piece of software with practically no documentation and I didn’t have any internet back then. I didn’t manage to create anything worthwhile using that but eventually I downloaded WorldCraft shareware at school and managed to bring it back home on some floppy discs. A bit later I was introduced to IRC, joined some Quake channels, and spent most of my late teens talking about Quake and mapping with a bunch of weird but wonderful people.
SC: What tools did you use to create this Add-on?
CG: Originally I made it using WorldCraft and some tools I wrote myself. For this release though I’ve gone through and updated the levels using TrenchBroom. I was a bit slow with getting started with TrenchBroom, but after getting used to it I couldn’t imagine using anything else these days.
SC: What was your main inspiration for this Add-on?
CG: It’s a bit of a mix of things. One very big inspiration was a trip I had to Siena, Italy. The old city center there has some very narrow streets surrounded by surprisingly tall medieval brick houses and it looks fairly modern, almost like some 19th century industrial sites.
Another inspiration was some areas around South bank/Southwark in London, where you also get these massive brick facades that are rather sparsely decorated but still quite beautiful in their own way. Same thing with the Speicherstadt area in Hamburg, Germany.
Another event that inspired me was that around that time the first gameplay trailers for Diablo III came out, and one of them had some gameplay in an underground catacomb area where the player was traversing some weird bridge/aqueduct looking structures over a seemingly bottomless void. I remember thinking “what a weird looking space”, and that planted a seed that eventually became the big open room with the multi-level bridges in Sheer Hellish Miasma.
SC: What is your individual approach to level design?
CG: I’m not really sure if I have real approach to the actual design, I usually just go by my gut feeling.
I try to work with both the visual and the gameplay aspects intermixed, letting one inform the other and vice-versa. I have a hard time approaching a level either from a pure gameplay standpoint and doing blockouts, or from a purely visual point of view. These two are so closely interconnected that it makes no sense for me to look at just one aspect.
I also like playing around with what happens when two different types of environments meet each other. No matter if you’re doing something real world or fantastical, your location is placed somewhere, and in those places where somewhere crosses over to somewhere else, that’s where you can get exciting things happening.
And whenever possible, I strive to push the player into lava or a pit of Spawns.
SC: What was/were the biggest challenge(s)/hurdle(s) you had in making this Add-on?
CG: For the original release, it was definitely the compile times and technical limits. For (the Add-on version) though, using the features of modern compile tools, compiling all the maps in one big batch takes less than 10 minutes. I also spent an unnecessary long time teaching myself Terragen to render out a skybox for the start map, but I think it looks alright in the end.
SC: Now that you’re Senior Level Designer at MachineGames, do you still dabble in making Quake mods yourself, or keep up with the latest community creations?
CG: I like to have side projects I can distract myself with after work, so there’s always some scrap levels lying about. We also have our weekly Quake Club at Machine Games where we try to keep ourselves entertained by showing off things that we make.
SC: Anybody else at MachineGames that you’d like to give kudos to for their chops at making Quake mods?
CG: Kudos to the entire Quake Club. It started up as just a way for us level designers to flex our design muscles outside of work, but we ended up creating a fantastic release with Dimension of the Machine. I’m super proud of us managing to pull that off when a lot of our team members had never even played Quake before.
SC: What have you enjoyed most in the re-release of Quake on modern platforms?
CG: I’ve really loved seeing the reactions of so many people trying Quake for the first time and discovering why it’s considered such a classic FPS. And especially seeing so many people playing our levels and giving us love; that always warms my heart.
SC: Who’s your favorite modder or team of modders in the Quake community and what’s your favorite thing they’ve done?
CG: I am a big fan of the work that mfx does. What Bal has been doing to Quake lately is pretty wild and I had a lot of fun with the recent Dwell episode. I must admit I haven’t kept much of an eye on the Quake community for the past decade, but I am very happy to see that it is enjoying somewhat of a resurgence these days.
SC: Wanna give any other shoutouts?
CG: Immeasurable gratitude to Spirit for running Quaddicted and his tireless effort of archiving everything Quake.
Big thanks to SleepwalkR (TrenchBroom) and ericw (compilers) who provide us with amazing tools that enable ever greater works of art.
Big thanks to all those people who tolerated me hanging out in IRC and being an idiot for all those years.
SC: Now for maybe the most important question… Who at MachineGames is the dominant Deathmatch player at the office?
CG: Well it’s definitely not me. I can’t deathmatch my way out of a paper bag. I had to enable cheat codes to complete the tutorial level in Quake 3.
