There's lots of productive things you can do tonight, like play Quake. Or make levels for Quake. Teach your children how to make levels for Quake. It's good for the mind. It's good for the soul. It teaches critical thinking skills. It builds self-esteem!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gONePWocbqA&list=PLgDKRPte5Y0AZ_K_PZbWbgBAEt5xf74aE
Quake! 
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Plus, I love doing #LevelDesign for existing games! In fact, this is how I ended up working with games in the first place! Here are some of my favorite examples:
I've been working on a module for the luxe engine that allows you to import Quake maps made with TrenchBroom! It's such a nice level editor and this will help make 3D worlds so much nicer in this engine!
'6 elements of visual guidance' is a to-the-point and quite frankly excellent article by Liu Xinyan https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/6-elements-of-visual-guidance
I'm still proud of my own version of Level 6 of Prince of Persia!
I designed it with Apoplexy 4 years ago with inspiration from Prince of Persia 4D.
What do you think of the design?
Our latest news on Itch...
https://itch.io/blog/859592/2024-review
An idea for a house if I make #SuperTuxAdvance world based on #Luanti using a nice texture pack called RPG16.
If I was a very good programmer, I would program a level design software for the Source Engine that works more like building a house in The Sims, just a little more detailed.
No more drawing each brush yourself, or building each doorframe yourself. Just a software that lets you make a floor plan and then makes the basic geometry for you and you just have to finish up the details later.
Sigh.... I wish
tbh it would be amazing to try to re-implement DXHR in the Source Engine (extensive modifications to the Source source code required) and add in all the stuff they hoped to make.
Or at least re-implement the Detroit hub, ditch a bunch of the RPG elements that don't translate to Source, and just make a faithful (to the geography and the spirit of the original plan) open world level with all the life and random encounters they hoped to make.
Deep summer reminder: my game urbanism course will begin this October, and you can still enroll with a 10% off.
If you are interested in learning how to design cities and urban environments for video games, follow the link: https://maven.com/dimopoulos/designing-cities?promoCode=EarlyBird
Follow-up question: if in a video game you were faced with an electronic barrier that you would need to disable to progress, would you think to short-circuit it?
So, where does one recruit playtesters these days that isn't Discord?
What are some of your favourite puzzles in video games that aren't primarily puzzle games?
Games like Half-Life² for instance. Shooters or other first-person games, narrative games, etc.
I'm looking for inspiration. Brain teasers, stuff that doesn't require arcane knowledge, but makes the player think and figure it out. Common-sense deductions with a focus on thinking, not stuff that's just menial in execution (i.e. no "go back two levels and find a gizmo that needs to be brought here").
Today marks day 4/6 for sharing my #conceptart for this project this week! 
This post collects sketches and concepts for environment and gameplay elements, e.g. as the dangerous forests the previously shared "Trappers" are living in. 
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#gamedev #gamedesign #leveldesign #props #gameart #art #mastoart #videogames #videogame #games
Now isn't this a comfy, comfy orphanage? Wouldn't you like to grow up in a place like this? Just like our protagonist?
I finished laying out all the rooms for the first dungeon in Enigma Heart last night. My Zelda II influences are really showing -- but I think I'm also starting to expand on it a little bit and come up with my own ideas. In particular, I'm placing hidden areas and items that the player can't get to until they acquire certain items, spells, or skills later in the game.
(In Zelda II, when you beat a dungeon's boss and get its item, the dungeon becomes inaccessible thereafter)
This map is drawn in Aseprite as an RGB-color PNG image, at a scale of 1 pixel per tile. The blue tiles are solid, the white ones are non-solid, pink are breakable, orange are platforms, etc. I do it this way because I find high-level sketching to be easier as an image than in the map editor. My map editor can read this image, look for the appropriate colors, and generate a map "skeleton" that I can then texture and add objects to.
En ce moment, je peaufine mon niveau du désert et j'adore la vue d'ensemble du level design: avec la partie extérieur et la pyramide. Dézoomer sur le LD me rappelle toujours ces soluces dans les magazines Mega Force que je scrutais des heures.
Oh, it gets better.
So hlfaceposer.exe embeds phoneme data in WAV files to make the game's automatic lipsync feature work.
It starts out promising – the data seems to be embedded in a custom chunk, which is perfectly fine for expanding a chunk-based format like WAV.
It should be chunk type, followed by size, followed by chunk contents. I assume most implementations will ignore chunks they don't understand, at least that's how PNG handles it (and the fact the improperly formatted file plays in all software I've tested proves it), so using the non-standard "VDAT" ("Valve Data"?) chunk is fine.
Next up: size.
The chunk type identifier is 4 bytes ("VDAT"), the size is another four bytes – unsigned little endian integer. It's 54 02 00 00, meaning a length of 596 bytes (excluding chunk type and length itself). And that does check out.
The contents of the chunk though?
It's the same pseudo-JSON Valve uses for all their stuff, including choreography data. It's like JSON if you stripped away quotation marks, colons, and semicolons and relied solely on spaces and newlines as delimiters.
Shitty idea.
The format consists solely of keywords (like "WORDS" or "WORD", words and phonemes ("aa", "uw", etc.), and time stamps, all written into the file in ASCII plain text, separated only by spaces.
That's right, spaces. Not even 00 bytes – ASCII spaces. That, and curly braces to separate words, but values inside each word and phoneme? Spaces.
jfc...
Brooks 
