Hulk256
This was made for a competition, the rules being to use a limited texture set, the board game Space Hulk as a theme and no more than 256 brushes. The competition didn't prove too popular with the mapping community, but I like Space Hulk so decided to have a go.
Conversion Beaming
I spent some time figuring out how to port Space Hulk to Quake. Initially I had coop support, with each player getting a specific weapon to paralell the classic boarding party loadout. This didn't make it into the final version though - the brush limit was pretty severe and it required doing some teleport trickery since I didn't have access to the code.
So the player would instead charge through a tangle of rooms, with Fiends / Genestealers teleporting in from various directions to mimic how Blips in the board game work. Combining this with the pace of play meant that the player was under constant attack by the fastest enemy in the game, using one of the most OP weapons - the SNG, which was what I equated to the Storm Bolter carried by the Space Marines as they entered a hulk.
Primary Objective
This being Space Hulk, there has to be a mission objective. Most of them from the original game didn't fit, so I got creative and made one that could have been in the game but wasn't (although there were some similar ones). The player has to fight their way through the fiends and get to the console, then download the data. This means standing next to it until a timer elapses while more and more fiends spawn in.
With hindsight this could have been more obvious - Quake players don't like standing still so it became a bit counterintuitive.
To get around the brush limit I used the Quoth modelspawning feature to have a few decorative meshes here and there - hanging Zombies with Gug projectiles stuck to them became Alien victims, sort of.
The Way Out
With the Data Downloaded, the player has to escape. To mix it up a bit I thought I'd include a change in pace from the constant Fiend attacks and went for Chaos Marines AKA the Quoth Eliminator. A quick dash through the Hulk back to the start chamber (Docking Claw) and level complete.
Some people seemed to like the level, and a few hated it. Being the only mapper to enter the competition, I won by de-fault. As Homer says, the two sweetest words in the English language.
My prize was the statue you can see here, made by David Mckenna:
Statues!
As you can see he's starting show his age - got a few cracks now. One of them occurred during shipping, so David sent me one of his tests for a Cacodemon to make up for it.
Thanks to Distrans for organising the competition. Just a shame there weren't more entries.
