Fuel marks the re-invention of the level designer as a geographical mash-up artist. It’s 5000km² world is created using topographical data of the western United States, re-mixed and re-organised as a greatest hits compilation of it’s most famous and impressive vistas. America the Theme Park! A Main Street, USA for the natural environment. The boring between removed to create a Las Vegas casino’s version of the great American landscapes, a miniaturised Grand Canyon thrust up against snowy Mount Rainier sat flush against Crater Lake. It’s the America of the collective consciousness, of disaster movies, all scale and potential and awe.

These vast open spaces have been criticised for feeling empty, but there’s something terribly evocative about the stark, barren world. It’s epic, devoid of wildlife, inhabited only by aimlessly rumbling zombie trucks and a warped subspecies of humans unable to leave their go-fast machines. It’s a future so devastated by environmental collapse that there’s literally nothing left to do but move.

The main concern of Fuel’s populace doesn’t seem to be the basic necessities of survival or the re-construction of society, but entertainment. The world has been ruined by global warming, yet you toil in races to win fuel simply to buy new cars to race. The few concessions made to re-building the devastated world are turning the world’s roads into race tracks and its buildings into ramps, modifying the architecture of the past to combat the boredom of the present.

It’s got that gloriously single-minded Warhammer thing. IN THE FUTURE, THERE IS ONLY DRIVING.

I’m being knowingly forgiving. It’s unclear how many of Fuel’s limitations are the result of deliberate focus, and how many are caused by lack of time, resources, money. The driving model is unremarkable. The races are easy. It is buggy.

I don’t care. I’m not convinced a world of considered escarpment is inherently more empty than a world of man-made metropolitan streets. Fuel threads a needle through enough of my interests – architectural futures, solitude in games, exploration, level design – to make up for its shortcomings.

(The screen above is a press shot, because Fraps wasn’t working for most of my time playing the game. I’ve only eight lame screenshots of the starting area).

Yeah, kid. That’s a real shame about your dad. Do you like my new hat and shiny badge?

This is Jerk Fashion. Being a villain in Fallout 3 is easy; you can kill almost anyone, you can enslave them, you can kill them and then eat them. In jerk fashion, it’s less about being evil and more about being as big of a dick as possible.

Sorry, no, I’ve never heard of a Mr. Burke. This suit had a man inside, but he didn’t seem to need it.

Being a good person in Fallout 3 isn’t about abstinence; it’s about being horrible to the people who are horrible themselves. I’m essentially role-playing as Dexter.

Nope, I’ve no idea what that noise from Mr. Tenpenny’s room was.

What’s that, America? I’ve no idea what happened to your historical documents and founding fathers.

That’s all I’ve got.

These screenshots chart my progress as I learnt Half-Life’s map editor and engine, and show the gradually more complicated architecutre, lighting and texturing I created with each obsessive re-design.

This is most clearly demonstrated in the ever changing corridor from my aborted Sven Co-Op map, which starts looking like this:

And finishes looking like this:

There are many more horrible examples of arbitrary architecture below, and I’ve written a little about what I remember from each map. Also, as a treat: scans of scribbly ideas scribbled on crumpled paper.

The Corridor

This wasn’t the first version of this corridor, but it’s the earliest for which I can find a screenshot.

Almost every map I ever made was falling apart – broken grating, chipped tiles, cracked walls. It was an easy way to make purposeless areas seem detailed, without the need for any logical consistency. Also, pipes: the new crates.

And then I realised I liked grey.

The railings are there to stop you from falling in to the astonishingly deep and entirely pointless pit of doom.

This is how the corridor looked by the time I gave up on the level altogether. I actually like how it looks.

Concept Drawings

The above corridor was part of a a much larger Sven Co-Op map that was in a near constant state of development for over two years. At some point, I started scribbling down ideas for new areas

This was the planned layout for the finished map. I actually built everything that’s marked here.

Other Areas

The map did exist beyond the corridor.

The earliest version of the first area of the map I ever built. It’s horrible.

After completing the third version of the corridor I began to design other parts of the map. This room would later feel incongruous due to the changes made to the areas preceeeding it.

Not a different area, really, just the same corridor as viewed from the opposite end.

Bump Mapping

My friend Francis wrote some code to add per-pixel lighting and bump mapping to Half-Life. He wrote an article about it for the VERC Collective and needed an example map to show the effect. Since I wasn’t doing anything with it, I offered up the corridor from the Sven Co-Op map.

As far as I know, this is the first Half-Life map to ever have bump mapping. This pleases me.

Without bump mapping screenshots are on the left, with bump mapping screenshots are on the right. Click through for the larger versions or visit the above linked article to download the map and mod yourself.

Adding bump mapping meant generating height and normal maps for a bunch of Half-Life 1 textures. This proved to be a complete bitch.

Bump mapping is a method of generating shadows that allows you to create flat surfaces that appear rough – or bumpy – without wasting polygons on rendering every protuberance. Since Half-Life 1 didn’t include bump mapping, its textures simply had fake shadows painted as part of the image. This made it difficult to generate accurate height maps.

The technique proved expensive in terms of performance and the frame rate took a hit as a result. I stripped out some of the geometry from the map to make it run faster and shuttered the windows in the corridor.

Congratulations. You are now richer for the experience of having seen these screenshots.