Grammatic feel straight away. Somewhere between landscape and void with skybox going narrowly to bottom of screen, lost in clouds. Texturing is highly function-oriented and formal - which works great. Walls: small brick, large brick, blank stone. Horizontal trims: narrow floor level; wider arch base level; widest buttress base. Single tiled floor, single tiled ceiling. Roof: tilted slates or gold spire. Arch/buttress insides so it feels like arches have two slightly wraparound facings, one on each side. Raw rock strictly for bedrock.
Note also a built/wild dichotomy. The formal shapes abut in random stone at its random angles; they're surrounded by soft clouds; they break off in rough ruin.
Another Sock joint. So, we have a composition based on the main conceit, a huge damn sword. All stock textures. Again Sock takes a mean screengrab, working with the leaning walls yet letting the sword's verticals relieve a stereotypical radial.
This could be the best image I've seen. At least, it takes "just a [castle/oil rig/dungeon" iconicity to a next level.
Faint purple mist and a dim red-purple sky, more vaporous clouds, add a lot - obviously the map will be a vertical climb to freedom.
The actual map? Maybe a tad cluttered, although the cylindrical idea keeps it legible. I like the s-curves from a complementary concave and convex mas. The pagoda at the top with 4 hard-shaded floors is sweet. All in all I'm not sure it's a success. Those wizmet textures are tired, even a bit ugly. Purple streaks, algae-dotted stone/steel, it's been good, but....
Yeah, it's a no. Grammar of horizontal bands and vertical ribs notwithstanding.
Let's try sum up more coherently. An impressive image, a triangular composition bisected by a silly-cool giant sword, with gnarly turrets and observation decks and snaking supports. But the forms don't quite come off. I've a feeling he lost faith in the main idea and tried to dickie it up. I mean it's not bad. The curves are cool and the AO-ish lighting is cheery.
Cinematic curse of the pyramids stuff, the elemental opposition of open sky/sunlight and dim rock vault. (Cleverly done with the right fog draw distance and viewing position.) A sophisticated working out of the enclosure imperative.
Sandy floors, rocky cave walls, pyramid slants, entasis, all are expected vocab. So what's beyond that? It's an archeological dig/lost city image of a temple complex in gold and dark grey two-tone. There's monumental symmetry but it breaks for gameishness, a pathway here, a cellblock there.
Kind of a castle and village opposition which reads well, the monumental stuff and then the smaller blockhouses on the sand.
Nice gamey... masonry brackets/ribs, makes no sense but looks great, punctuating the entablature and main temple platform. Some batter to the retaining wall, nice. Ah and top notch, crisp but not OTT wraparound edging, dark seams to make it pop.
Last thing, it's a bit busy as an image. Also, the detailing is a bit naive and missing opportunities to riff on Egyptian source material, like the gloopy rounded stairs around pillars. The floating unfolding obelisk petals do hark back, but feel a bit lashed about the place. But the deep clichés make it work.
A pretty, soft-shaded, delightful image, with a mermaid kingdom colouring. Exceptionally readable, but not for austerity or grimness this time, but for an arcade-y, cute magic castle. Standard textures, by gar. So, a wacky blobs-and-catwalks-in-a-ring plan realised as fantasy swelling towers, made as utterly readable as poss. A game-y logic, prettily-symmetrical parts flung at angles into each other to break the symmetry, carving in or jutting out the joins. The small design element is the sort of armouring 45-deg curved corner bracket, cartoonishly stacked outwards. And big run-around-on-me floors, comically giving onto void, with 5-deep wraparound edge trim that eats a decent proportion of the space.
So yeah, everything is a fat band, whether a tower's collar, a corner protector, some actual tower wall, play-space floor, or a crenellation holder... I mean even the crenellations have horizontal ribboning.
Slanting slate roofs. An eye for the cute focus point, whether spire, battlement or decorative window.
The birds-eye perspective emphasises the leaning walls. Triangular composition with two dynamic balanced heavy points. You could say this is retrogamer kitsch, a boy's fantasy with overdone polishing and perfection. Jagged shapes made safe with ultra-predictable banding and symmetry. Certainly there's not much room for real mystery, the breath of the unknown is comprehensively sealed off.
First: transparent texture vibe (even if it might be done w/ high poly brushwork). An un-Quake-like mood, zigging rusty gantries. And horizontal brutalist flanges defining oil rig cuboids, opened up on all sides, skeletons of squat pillars/members and long ribs. The big pipe, crane and satellite dish are other novel silhouettes. So a cast of ungainly seethrough steelwork elements rather than masonry.
What you don't get much of are neat plush ribbons of trim stitching the image together. No, it's Combine-ish jagged, looming shapes. Helped I must say by a willingness to bust a dark silhouette.
Although the gentle noise-sprinkle concrete and harsher streaked grime are important, this is brushwork>texture. The heavy tan fog does a lot to flatten shapes, and goes very well with the faint smoggy wisps of cloud (a nice compromise between pure fog and a strong matte painting) and yellow sun. Void, yes, but the naturalistic skybox and very weighty elements feel realist, not floating.
A) It looks like you could just jump in and start playing. B) 'The Final Threat', cool name.
So this one speaks in game language, and says something complex. It makes me think of sniping, health top-ups, enemy variants. Lines of sight across this big space, then cover where the platforms tuck underneath an arch. The possibility of jumping down a level. Protective overhangs.
Okay, got that out of my system. Visually, this is about the volume in the middle. A tall rounded cuboid, but hipped, then with a cap, and a connective sort of vertical belt of ribbed metal that follows the indent but then leans out to meet the cap. A damn good shape. Texturing is streaky-rusty industrial, evenly articulating the hipped part with a rectangular wireframe. Lighting is crude but workable spotlighting down from the overhand. And the cap gets another rounding/hipped effect. Greatly chunky all in all. Around this thing is a kind of eagle-tail-shaped platform, and an elegant higher surrounding arm and lower descending arm on each side of it. A *very* clear 4 levels.
And that's it! Nothing unconventional, a single texture trim, metal plates, the base wall panel shape, a brown base floor, slime, rock, done.
I like how this one says "base!" as ludically as others say "castle", but it's a lot cooler. This isn't a child's plaything.
I had the strongest emotional reaction to this one. Industrial-fetish feel? 5 cool things make this a cold-sweat thriller of a screenshot. The big ribbed double chain/rail cutting diagonally hits first. Mean and sharp - not cartoonishly chunky either. Just a dangerous, functioning machine that could cut you up. The filthy lower level featuring a gimp masked enforcer (it looks like) and some kind of cage to hold a health box. All in filthy water. Here crates are not a dumb joke, this is a working facility. The masterstroke is the heavy crate hanging, grabbed by some meaty crane/claw, framing part of the sickly-lit lower level, and *half-obscuring a mysterious red-lit tech slot/door*. Here the little beads of bright light texture work hard, you notice the few pinpricks of bright red and it all feels like it has a machine logic, appearing where the chains meet metal and over those mystery doors.
The last cool thing is that there's forced perspective! The chains are actually diagonal!
No open skies, not even honest rock. You're held in a clammy grip by dented tan metal panels that curve around. Your feet are in the filth. There's a ruffian below you have to kill. You have to find out how the machine works, power it on. This is a place of violence and power. You might feel sick but you have to move. To greedily peel back the veil of metal, to find the secrets.
We're in safe hands. Familiar textures taken to a cusp of crispness, a winning-formula dim blue fog on orange brick. That's handsome.
Low-poly curves dominate the composition, some flattened, some tall, marking belts of contrasting colour: dark, mid-grey, mid-brown, bright brown. 7 of the same yellow light reads clearly, plus a line of 4 red runes. (About 12 textures.) Ah yes, and those runes delineate the central idea, at the intersection of the ellipses: a slice cut out of twin cylinders, which also get the fanciest ribboning, skulls plus light and dark. 3 very clear flat planes: the underneath (it's over void, but visually an ellipse of brushwork takes up the bottom of the screen, so not floating-castle feel), the floor itself, and a low ceiling over that. Then it vaults up in the centre, but those planes contain the foreground meat. The light fixture lines reinforce them. Also nice how everything beneath the underneath is suddenly blackish silhouette.
Um, otherwise, some pretty standard, very very clean trimming and lips. Subtle seethrough brushework. Some receding reticulation of the underneath shapes. Oh! Notice the duality and the reinforcing - those quirky shaft/bearing shapes below continue the line of the twin chimneys.
Last flourish - a brick pipe (not very physically plausible) thrusting to vanishing point talks to the vertical cylinders. Oh, and green-runic wall paneling (w/ subtle light trim on top!) at the floor line just faintly strengthens the main level and the horizon line. That's the idea - to look through those cut through cylinders and see that paneling, those lights. Whoa, Sock!
In general, it's just really neat trimming and aligning to strengthen an already-strong combo of 2D and 3D - but not everything is trimmed, there are raw brick bulks.
Toy castle making an excellent irregular lobed diamond shape. Scaled up textures, particularly rough rock, like the cracked driveway. Vastly wide swooping trim ribbons that delineate the entity. Top-notch brush-to-skybox transition I only noticed now. Nice baleful sun. Okay, texture-wise: grey-green vs. dull pink and burgundy. Ribbed dirty walls clothing the strictly cylindrical or flat walls (okay one is leaning). A pale floor rule and strong dark curving horizontals, about 5 (not gramatically strict), for a layer cake feel. The lighting, although surely effortful, is smooth to invisibility. Characterful round shapes, the dome, the bullet-like towers, the fire pots, plus some arches, are the fruit on the confection.
Some screenshots are bitty, this is chunky. Low-poly rounded corner curves textured with lines following the curve for a powerful, nearly NPR faceted, look. Deep in the abstract, no monsters, only a hint of fairly diminutive eye height. Okay, but two or three noisy - of course all in the strict steel-blue colour scheme - articulated textures (as well as some pretty round lights) step in to ground it. Big blocks, irregular-widths in courses, *going vertically and crawling up the curve to become ceiling*; a more orthodox decorative combination of block layers, a fancy big middle course, smaller top and bottom, and extra inset band, with brushwork juttings forming a very impressive stolid maze wall line; a delicate trim framing a view to a higher concourse made by continuing these logics; and a crunchy no-further-fuss octagon-and-square tiled floor.
We note an exceptionally beautiful fat quarter arch segment masonry light housing 3x, echoing the main rounded-corner idea (which is also similarly lit from beneath, the lighting works hard in this image, it's spatially clear and also creates high frequency interest at the plus signs between a dark ceiling and mid floor). And a frankly brilliant detail, a tall rectangular facet facing the player, the end of the rounded plus signs' arms, spells it all out.
All emerging from basic techniques. The plus sign inner curves are 22.5, 45, 67.5 standard stuff; all the rest to make the faceting is 45 only.
And one more important visual idea: broken members. There are multiple plus signs and they line up, strongly suggesting lines continuing through empty space. The distinctive walls-to-ceiling curving slab sits between 4 plus signs and makes the briding explicit. Very thick, muscular, simple, orthogonal, 3D stuff. And that's it. A flat-floored main room with this motif, and fadings off to more suggestions.
Crisp. Elegant. Grey. Like a teacup. I think it's the neat, two-tone-ish two-lined trims, plus the clean simple triangular arch. And a good deal of blank wall receding into brownish fog/shadow rather than any profusion of shapes or great contrast. A feeling that articulation lines abut and stop rather than looping all about. An English reserve. A Quake-y grimness and dimness. Plus the logic is kept in hand: basic symmetry, obvious focus points.
There's a cut-out, broken-member thing with the main bulkhead. It has some nice symmetrical indentations, a whiff of Baroque, as does the neighboring wall, all stretching remorselessly up into darkness.
A child-like simplicity, only one floor plane (although it ramps up), even before the self-conscious D&D style. Unsurprising that it's a mod team project, it has that literalness of carefully limited artistic goals. In a square plan, one wall has a window, one has a door with flanking lava pools. The items and monsters continue the "I made a dungeon" feel, dotted symmetrically. The purpose of the space is to afford low-fantasy romping. High contrast decorative textures with painted pointy flame curves adhere to this.
With all that, it's nicer to look at than most Quake levels! The jagged-toothed roof hole is cool (original Quake sky here). Another crunchy floor texture helps a lot (one really feels floor textures with the soles of the feet, as it were) and the 64x64 square wall blocks (brick layout) do their job. (The pouring lava sewer mouth texture has baked lighting too.)
K, this is the AD aesthetic (inspired by, not part of, I see) and I rather like it. Khaki, maximal, fucking arcane! The space is a shoebox, essentially (though the slice of gauzy greenish night sky does a lot for the atmosphere, together with khaki fog), but filled with actual architecture - arcades, vaults, buttresses, perched over some old school Quake rock "cliffs" (little attempt to buckle them). Liberally and symmetrically dotted torches and ye old stained glass texture, and some very old school zig-zagging wooden plank walkways over brown water like E1M4.
The mood is, a lot of game for your dollar. We note too that the draw distances are not at all old-school, that's the maximalism. I just dig the rhythmic brushwork and pointy tops and slate rooflines against the sky and lit up yellow windows. Cute, but Thief 2 living city cute, rather than scale model cute.
Does it actually look good, I'm not sure. I think not. Dim, smudgy, not great control of light and dark, piled up crates. It's that ramshackle boyish thing. Plus we miss any bold formal 3D thinking (although the downward spears, trailing like creepers, are cool). Still, a good feeling. A promise of a good time.
Texturing: conventional. Articulation is by brushwork and mostly vertical. One floor level gets a sandwich of trim textures, but it's pretty ugly.
I didn't realise until now how important visually establishing levels, flat planes, is to a Quake level.
Strongest when it's one (more or less independent) element or a hole formed by one or more elements; not cast light and shade. Apertures could be strong but they're not suited to panoramic screenshots.
This relates to seethrough. We want to suggest organisation and harmony and subsuming into a unifying logic, the simplest of which is a larger, simple volume. But we don't want to block sightlines. So we establish the corners or the rumps only of the shape. Like seethrough, this can tell a crude physical story, of ruining, or of design intent.
They girdle volumes, delineating curves and reticulations of a mass, most typically horizontally. The provide contrasting colour and tone. They provide eye fizz, esp. light and dark trims and decorative trims.
Honestly, with mist and generous smooth lighting and modern filtering, (and potentially near-limitless brush detail if desired) they only lightly suggest physical material.