cerv.id Classic | New Neocity
The cerv.id Classic is a map jam, where creatives and hobbyists get together to make maps under one, unifying theme.
It's also an excuse to just go out and do some mapping, of which I did the mapping. I wanted to walk any readers through my thought processes on the different layouts and setpieces I've gone over. Not many people bring to attention the process of actually making a map, because it's highly iterative and versions of maps just get buried and lost, when there's a lot to learn from them.
Inspiration
I think the earliest inspiration of this map came in the form of a little game known as Broken Reality, which I personally believe is one of my favorite "walking sim" games next to Yume 2kki (which you will soon see a lot of 2kki inspiration in my future maps).
This area in particular is known as "Geocity," and while the game is dripping in this Y2K aesthetic with computer-generated graphics and artifacts as textures, this was extremely hard to capture in my map, partially because the pixel textures did not make for good, grossly anti-aliased computer artifacts.
An extremely old version of New Neocity, harvested from #graphics-lua-misc. The offroad texture was this horrifying, glitchy mess, and while it looked cool, it sucked to look at.
This aesthetic still made it in for the additive green lights. This is especially visible in the "WAFFLE HOUSE" text up close, with the JPEG artifacting.
As for the name itself, I had originally came up with it myself, until I realized I had made a horrible misattribution; the name "New Neocity" actually originated from a vague, young memory of me playing Robot 64 on Roblox:
By the way, the developer of this game is also a musician, and composed my favorite track for this level in Robot 64. I was originally going to use it, but it wasn't really high tempo enough.
First Iteration
The original copies of this map are lost to time, but I did want to talk about a concept I was originally toying with on this map.
Voltage
The original intention of the alt path was to allow heavier characters to really cash out on their voltage from the skate park section, and also to let boost stackers dash through it, with a damage sector to check both of them. At 100% speed, the damage sector is fairly easy to dodge, but otherwise some players may find they have to cut through offroad or eat the hit.
In previous iterations, this sector used to do tumble damage, which would send unsuspecting players flying over the fence, often taking longer to respawn than if the sector had just instakilled you. This was removed because it was inhumane.
Second Iteration
Right in the middle of that screenshot, there's a main path further to the left and a tripwire to the right as a Ring Box cut. This was a pretty normal cut, but it was pretty easy to just slam into the wall just to the right of the cut, especially at the weird angle in the wall its in. Moving the tripwire any more to the right would mean I would have to move the stairs, or create some really unnatural and stair-janky terrain to drive over.
But then, something horrible was discovered that I could not ignore, and would eventually lead up to an iteration simple in execution but cascading in construction.
There are loads of time trials where the player will take tripwires (Regal Ruin sees a lot of tripwire action), so I wouldn't necessarily say they're exclusively a catch-up mechanic. I think it's good practice to primarily focus on the catch-up aspect of tripwires when placing them, though when things like this happen, I don't think the tripwire needs to get trashed or the map re-iterated.
However, in this specific case, a heavier character can clear the tripwire without Ring Boxes. These guys get a huge lead, and it also essentially means the track is now split between the more skilled and less skilled players (and heavier and lighter characters). Here, it's really bad, because this is literally the higher-skill players driving one half of a different course.
The only two solutions I saw in front of me were pull the open area at the bottom of the map further away from the tripwire or scrap it completely. Of course, I chose the latter:
Note: Oops! I wrote "lighter characters" when I meant to write "heavier characters." It's very easy to driftboost with the extra width of the road as lighter characters anyways.
In the end, this actually worked nicely with the battle-side of things, since there are no longer any tripwires getting removed for the arena, preventing a strange behavior that causes the tripwire sound and frame stop to happen when crossing a removed tripwire linedef.
In this iteration, there is also a new tripwire that is scarily close to some boosters (so close in fact that some bots will just fly into it on Gear 3). With some testing on the heaviest, highest speed character I could play, it's extraordinarily difficult to go through the tripwire even with a max drift boost and voltage. If I feel that it's still too close, there's lots of room for refactor on that top part of the map, though nothing will beat just moving the tripwire down.
Here are the maps at this iteration, with the race map in red and the battle map in green:
Final Submission Iteration
I believe the most notable layout change was the removal of "mini-hell," adding springs to allow escape off of that section, if you really needed. The problem is this sent you into "HELL," and your pursuer could easily chase you (though that means they'd also be surrendering themselves to "HELL," so you got the last laugh, literally).
At this point, you can probably see that the layout was pretty locked in. Most of the additions are decoration on the outer sides of the map; I wanted the player to feel boxed in and show as little skybox as possible and make the city feel claustrophobic, with the exception of the alt path just after the finish line as a sort of breath of fresh air as you rush down.
Post-Submission Updates
The bird's-eye view didn't change much. However, if you actually jump into the game, you'll immediately notice a big difference.
I found the fog settings, which are unfortunately named "fade color." It is an accurate name, but not a descriptive one at first glance, and under the heat of a deadline, I couldn't justify spending time tweaking it, but now with post-submission time, I figured it out. This was the original intention of the map look; a brightly but hazily lit city district, akin to Northern District. It really brings out the highlights of the city colors and, most importantly, handles a couple important visibility problems (particularly with slopes blending together in a single color). Big lesson: Remember to tweak your fog settings if you find the mood of your map working against you.
Besides that, there was only one other big change to the map and layout. This turn:
Before. Sorry for HVR screenshot; old versions of this map were giving me bad WADNAME errors that I didn't care to fix.
After.
I'm surprised this change came so late; I wasn't actually constrained at all by the layout to improve the visibility on this turn, and it took until after the stream to realize this. There was some gameplay detail to taking a turn after stairjank, though I didn't really want this for the map; it felt more like that kind of thing you play over and over so much you become completely blind to how it might feel on an initial play.
There was also a couple changes made to the straightaways before and after the turn, just to make these setpieces more interesting. A middle of the road divider to force quick decisions and a change to the offroad in the section after to account for the new turn and tripwire placement.
With that big change out of the way, I wanted to discuss my responses and changes to a couple of the suggestions made on-stream. Thank you to Eldog for making the VODs so easily accessible.
Dash Pads
On this turn, there is this street-wide dash pad, which was an attempt for heavier characters to preserve their wavedashes through this road. However, in older versions, it was pretty easy to take the dash pad at an angle to take the shortcut for free, so trap springs were added, ultimately culminating in a cascading setpiece that... well, wasn't really fun in the first place. Not to mention, the trap springs and dash pads worked against players who really needed to take the tripwire. This was the only trip on the map that offered a good lead.
I removed the dash pads, which allowed me to remove the trap springs and make the tripwire a lot friendlier, though JugadorXEI suggested something that quickly became my favorite setpiece on the map:
You can instead opt-in to a dangerous route that does what I originally wanted it to do; preserve wavedashes easier, but it's now a risk management decision, instead of it being forced on the player. If you take it too close, you bump into the wall and get thrown completely off-course, and if you take it too far, you miss the dash pad. Most players are not gonna care about it, except for the ones that think they will need it. I didn't preserve my wavedash in this clip, but you could easily see how that works.
This Item Box
This item box got pushed into the little path its in. This wasn't really a change I toiled over, but I think it says something interesting about pickups and obstructions; if a player can see a pickup, item boxes especially, they will be naturally drawn to them, and their decisions will be influenced by them.
This is definitely a no-brainer when you bring it to the forefront of your thought like I am doing now, but when making this layout and placing item boxes and rings, this was genuinely not in my thought process at all. In fact, you can use rings in very surprising ways; particularly to make ambiguous elevations more obvious.
The left path is a sharp upwards elevation change, aided by stairjank. The right path is a gradual slope. It may be obvious in still images like this, but when you're taking this turn and needing to react fast, the addition of rings makes it significantly easier to react.
This is just a cool detail that this experience has taught me, though I hadn't noticed it until now.
Subway Turn
Originally, there was an intention of difficulty for this turn; take it properly or die. The Ark Arrows assisted in this intention, and in the VOD you can clearly see they were doing their job, but something was wrong.
I think this only would have worked properly if the player's vision wasn't obstructed. The view obstruction, the slope acceleration, plus the stairjank, all came together for a turn that can easily blindside players not preparing for it, which isn't what I wanted. The compromise I settled was something like this:
HELL in Overtime
This area I have aptly named HELL was very much supposed to be a place you really didn't want to be in Battle mode.
A huge, open area where you were visible from most vantage points, and the single exit is a 128 fracunit road with railings with a booster that could easily accelerate you into a trap. However, in Overtime, purely because of the layout, being stuck in here was a death sentence, even if you could react to the sound of the Overtime music playing.
In Overtime, an extra area now opens up that lets players escape to the skate park, which allows them to get into the annex building and hopefully to the kiosk. This is certainly a band-aid solution, though there weren't any clever ways of creating a path to the annex building without adding to the FOF complexity of the layout. I'll probably have time to add an extra door between the interior and exterior of the building so players aren't forced to take the one obvious path to the interior.
There is a path through the subway, but it is basically impossible to clear this path without running into lasers and dying.
Conclusion
And that's it.
This isn't my first map; I had a map I made that never got released as it was more of a toy than anything, though I really appreciated getting the chance to hear honest feedback and suggestions about my maps, and focused feedback at that (which the #custom-courses channel in the KKD discord doesn't really scratch that itch).
It was also a delight to see all the other maps get received by the staff, as the staff generally walked through some common mistakes, pitfalls, and other things I wish I knew before mapping. It was also just cool to see the maps that got submitted; good job to everyone that participated.
We'll see if I keep up on map design, but I do think this is a pretty good outlet and hobby to have just in general while life is happening.
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