Arcade Berg aka. "Learning Game Design with Arcade Berg"

DN3DS – Creative Freedom?

One of the decisions I had to make very early in the production of my Source level was how faithful the original I wanted to be. The very first and original idea was to make a replica, geometry-wise but the more I thought about it, the worse that felt.

One of the reasons was that if I were to simply recreate something the same way it was, then what's the point, except for some people to get some retro feeling? Simply recreating it would only be a challenge when it comes to using the tools and measuring everything but that's not a challenge I'm looking for.

The gameplay can't be directly translated either, since we're talking about completely different games, except for the FPS-aspect.

I want to stimulate myself in regards of creativity, gameplay and problem solving so I decided to go for a remake/remix-thingy instead.

My goals are to keep the feel of the level. I want every player having played and rememberd the first level of Duke Nukem 3D to instantanously see and feel the resemblence of the level. I want them to "feel at home" with it. But I'm doing it "my way".

I'll keep the things you remember, like the hidden corridors, the alternative entry points, the overall layout and stuff, but I'll have it tweaked to become (what I hope) better.

And example of this can be seen in the image below, where the left part is the original Duke Nukem 3D and the middle part is my first blocked layout of the beginning of the level which is a 1:1 replica of the original. The right part of the image shows how it looks (at least right now) in my level.

Creative Freedom Progression

Another update:

I've scrapped the idea (for now) to create a Half-Life 2 level out of it and moved on to the Orange Box-version of the SDK, since Valve recently "released" documention for Left 4 Dead level design.

http://list.valvesoftware.com/pipermail/l4dmapper/2009-February/000000.html (9/3/09)
Thanks Cozy Dave for the URL. Oh, and don't forget to check out his blog (in Swedish) in which he gives updates on his HL2-mod.
http://davidlundvall.blogspot.com/ (9/3/09)