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Inspiration & Reference
I just wanted to know if people had any links to good websites for either level design inspiration (photos, paintings, concept art, etc.) or just for architectural reference. We had a thread like this on the old qmap, but we know how much good that does us.
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Inside The Home Of A Saudi Architect 
Looks Like A Dream I Had Once 
It's a little uncanny. 
Jean-pierre Ugarte 
The art of jean-pierre ugarte

https://goo.gl/BNFd9R 
Brutal! 
cool find 
Ironic 
.... that most of the images people post here are of giant imposing structures. All fine and good. I love this.

But when I make some giant imposing structures in a map my scale is all "wrong" and my map needs to be "smaller, tighter."

8-{ 
 
Brutalism is very difficult to do well dumptruck. Brutalist architects often face similar criticism. It usually goes wrong when a designer only thinks about their product in terms of overall scale (i.e. they just make shit big), because good Brutalism is more "complex maths" than just "big numbers". 
Dumptruck. 
You don't make "some giant imposing structures", your whole maps are giant. 
@text_fish 
I'm not attempting Brutalism in my maps. Would love to some day. OTP fair enough. 
#4012 
Vast spaces and imposing structures are awesome but aren't much fun to play in. Most games seem to solve this by making such spaces/structures occupy the backdrop and/or keep parts out of reach of the player (like the cliffs from half-life, for an extreme example). The worlds of dark souls and bloodbourne seem impossibly vast and full of towering buildings, but remove anything that isn't a space the player can occupy and you're left with a much smaller area tailored for gameplay.

Scale is probably the single hardest thing to get right for me and is why I greybox everything and don't even think about art until the space is correct. In my test map, cartographer's nightmare I tried to make spaces feel large while limiting the play space. For instance, the largest space isn't even playable and is first seen by the player while he is in one of the tightest spaces. Other examples include being able to see multiple stories while being confined to a tight footpath, and an 'infinite' ceiling forever out of the player's reach. Despite these tricks, one of the criticisms I still remember is that the spaces were too claustrophobic and the player felt like he was always about to "hit his head". Go figure!

tldr: scale is one of the most important factors in gameplay and therefore one of the most difficult to get right. 
Dumptruck 
You have to start small until you get gameplay right, then make things bigger. From small to big, that is what works for me. 
We Should Move This Convo 
...to General Abuse. but thx. 
First Mass 
Red Haze 
https://www.reddit.com/r/outrun/comments/78176c/red_haze/

Not so Quakey, but damn if that's not a cool picture 
#4020 
The alley reminds me of a location in DX:HR. 
Bruce Pennington 
 
great stuff but one of those links is for a different artist named Johfra Bosschart.

I hadn't heard of either artist before. 
Ah You're Right 
I failed to recognize that in my flurry of copy/pastes, but I guess you all get bonus inspiration 
Shadow Of The Torturer 
Those are the book covers for The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe. It is an interesting story. 
Yeah 
I just started reading it :) 
Quake Episode Bosses 2-4: What Should They Be? 
I'm planning on replacing those horrible episode finale Shalrath battles with unique boss character battles.

I'd imagine the inspiration should also pull from Lovecraft mythos.

What do you all think should be the three bosses leading up to Shub Niggurath? 
@Chillo 
Why not Cthulhu himself? He's a badass if done correctly. 
@dumptruck_ds 
Maybe we can find some low poly Cthulhu concepts that would fit into the Quake aesthetic? 
 
Hmm. The problem w/ Lovecraftian stuff in a video game is that "unknowable horror" doesn't fit nicely into "shoot it til it dies".

Chthon was not a great endboss in that light (if any). Shub was kind of good tho. At least the method of defeating her was sufficiently weird.

I'm going to ramble a bit here about the gameplay rather than specific names of Lovecraftian creatures...

Quake is a straightforward action game so you can't go too crazy with boss mechanics. But bullet-sponge bosses in Quake maps/mods have almost always been a bad way to end things. Maybe a fight that requires clever use of the level architecture, or manipulation of other monsters? Or maybe it requires some action that would seem to be suicidal at first glance (e.g. lava diving), until you get hints otherwise as the fight progresses.

For continuity, Shub could be present in some fashion in each fight, just as a sinister presence or actually intervening, but retreat/escape after each of your victories (until the end). Perhaps remix Shub into all the existing end-episode fights; in e1m8 just an observer overhead, but then getting more and more active in each following bossfight. 
See Here's The Thing About Quake. 
It keeps mentioning Shub-Niggurath in the messages but the entity at the end is very clearly The Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath , not the real deal herself. 
 
Also consider this bit from The Moon-Lens:

The gof'nn hupadgh Shub-Niggurath is the name given to the favored, once-human worshipers of Shub-Niggurath. When the deity deems a worshiper to be most worthy, a special ceremony is held in which the Black Goat of the Woods swallows the initiate and then regurgitates the cultist as a transformed satyr-like being. A changed worshiper is also endowed with immortal life.

That's basically what happened in end.bsp, did it not. 
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