Marathon

I remember playing Marathon a little on a Mac long ago, but I ended up playing Dark Forces more instead, for now unknown reasons. Marathon is an early first person shooter (trilogy) developed for the Mac by Bungie. At this time, FPS engines were sort of just straddling the fence, going from 2D and 3D. I've heard that Marathon uses some kind of portal engine, meaning, the maps are made out of rooms which have connections to other rooms, allowing a wily designer to make impossible structures.

Marathon makes heavy use of "go somewhere, push button" mechanics for the level designs. But, unlike many other FPS games of the era, Marathon has a story and world description which is accessed through the consoles scattered around the various levels. It could perhaps be argued that the player is just used as a way to tell the story of the main character, the AI "Durandal".

NPC soldiers called BoB's, and floating tanks occasionally join the player in battle, so there's a cool NPC coop thing going on sometimes. Most of the enemies and items in Marathon are colorful hand drawn billboard sprites (2D images), which puts it in contrast to FPS'es with a more gritty/realistic inclination.

Charity drive poster

Early summer 2011 I was contacted by Bungie who wanted me to do a poster for their 20th year anniversary charity event. My art director was Lorraine McLees, someone whose work I was familiar with since I did a (rather terrible) Oni fan-art piece a decade earlier. As usual when working with a large company, they were very professional and helped me with reference and answers to some (prying?) questions. I'm always a bit quirky to work with because I obsess about the lineage and relation of creatures and characters.

I started looking into their other games, like Minotaur, Pathways into Darkness, and Desert Storm. The idea was to do some sort of mixed character group shot like Capcom often does. Eventually we settled on using just the Marathon characters. Unfortunately I'm terrible at doing interaction between figures in an environment, so the final result was a kind of jumble of figures standing around. I tried throwing in some text to make it more of an anatomical poster, but I was late and didn't have time to come up with clever annotations so the final went without text.

The three Marathon games share many of the enemy designs, but they do change appearance a bit. For example, the eyes on the Pfhor guys were flipped from ('.') to (.'.). Apparently the lower center eye looked too much of a clown nose, so it was changed for the sequel. Personally, I felt that having the center eye in the "enlightened position" (forehead) made the Pfhor too human looking so I insisted on using the original arrangement.

Greeks aside, Marathon takes its name from the spaceship UESC Marathon, which is actually a conversion of the Mars moon Deimos. There are not a lot of pictures of the exterior of the ship, but I wanted to include it as a little easter egg. Deimos is rather asymmetrical, and I wanted something a bit more structured and egg-like, so I imagined that machinery had reworked the surface a bit, hence the little panel/field lines. Deimos has a lovely color structure, so I kept that. A Death Star trench suggests some kind of main plane at the center, but it's entirely my construction. The crew of the Millennium Falcon would have been even more confused if they had approached this ship.

There are probably little masts and view ports all over the surface. It would have been nice with a mission taking place in a spacesuit, traversing the strange altered moonscape to get to a new level. The thing is over 20km though.

Rough older art

These were done in 2010 using pencil and/or Photoshop. I played around a lot with extrapolations of the existing designs (or interpolations between them).

Pathways into Darkness

PiD was one of Bungie's earlier games, and it was released for Mac in 1993. Its engine is similar to Wolfenstein's, but it does angled walls and floor and roof casting as well. I haven't played it, but I did read a thorough Let's play.

Just like Marathon, it's a quite story heavy game where the player is required to pay attention and actively pursue information. There's still a lot of shooting though, with upwards 2000 enemies in the entire game. Limited ammo supplies quickly becomes a problem for trigger-happy adventurers.

Primary qualities

PiD has a few interesting features which sets it aside from most other FPS games.

You know how some adventure movies begin with a scene of Conquistadors or Nazis raiding some ancient temple... then they all die and the movie skips to present day? In PiD the story is actually told by people who died (i.e. corpses) in the temple that you're exploring. Actually, the story isn't told. You have this yellow crystal which can be used to talk to corpses. Interestingly, you're not given the typical 2-4 dialog options with sentences being put in your mouth. You have to throw (type) words out and the dead person will free associate around those. This makes the dialog feel alive and unlimited. I found myself morbidly curious in the fate and relations of the dead people. Also, several prominent characters are mentioned, and even though they died long ago it's interesting to catch up and finally discover their fate.

All corpses are permanent, and you can travel back and forth between the levels as you like.

I normally don't like time limits in games, but in PiD it seems to work. Time manipulation is important in several puzzles (slowing down and speeding up), and it becomes a resource with some depth to it, rather than being just a stressful countdown timer. You'll replenish HP when resting I think, but time will pass quicker and you might be caught off guard. It would be interesting to further expand on this with a more persistently simulated awakening temple.

Lovecraftian setting with a colorful twist.

Bad things

PiD is an old game, and as such it exhibits some features common in old games.

You are in a maze of twisty little passageways, all alike.

Dilution. The game doesn't have enough enemy variants, corpse images or textures, which makes it look a bit repetitive and artificial.

The game doesn't have any intro images, title screen aside. I haven't looked in the manual yet. Craig Mullins painted at least two PiD images, but these were done much later afaik. It would be interesting if talking to the dead people created some form of telepathic reality of speech and images (explaining how the player can talk to the Germans and Cubans).

I don't like how the player death messages break fourth wall.

I'd like to see more traces of the firefights mentioned by your fallen team mates. There probably needs to be more rotten monster corpses laying around too. There are a few but for some reason (lack of appropriate sprites) they look fresh. PiD does well in the "sense of history" department thanks to the dead people, but the architecture and litter has a much more sterile feel.

Idea time!

It's impossible for me (and probably everyone else) to play/research a game without getting ideas. I wrote mine down so I can expand upon them later.

The temple has been around for a very long time, unless it was changed by the dreaming dead god every now and then. I can imagine that it would have to be tidied up every 500 years or so at least. Perhaps aliens visited the temple at some point? I'd like to see gothic rune weapons and alien stuff, hinting at this.

More textures, landmarks, 'furniture', enemy variants. Wall and ground/roof textures should connect and be in context with each other (and not clip badly). I'm not sure if the rooms, corridors and general architecture should make sense. The purpose of the pyramid is unclear. If it was just the manifested insanity of the dead dreaming god, then why make it look like a temple at all? Why fill it with doors, monster guys and puzzles? This will have to be addressed at some point. One option is to use mysterious furniture and create the impression of some sort of alien function.

The replicator box is potentially overpowered. Aside from the time limit, perhaps it can only crudely replicate things (like a jittery printer). This way ammo and knives isn't a problem, but electronics and advanced alien artifacts would be. Replicated ammo magazines could jam weapons sometimes. If I were to technobabble on its design, I'd say it's a 3D scanner/printer which pulls mass from a miniature black hole.

Insanity. Some of the dead people have gone insane, but in a Lovecraftion setting the main character should go insane too. I'm not sure how easy it is to implement in a game. A few games have tried it, Dead Space 2 being the most recent.

Character classes. I don't like them, especially not when it means that medics magically can't use machine guns or whatever, but it could be interesting for the sake of replay value to allow for characters with different base skills. At the beginning of the game, the player could tick a number of check boxes, imposing restrictions on himself (each box could have a difficulty score). Perhaps the character's name and appearance is a result of the boxes ticked. () Male, () Female. [] Strength. Male characters are stronger, can carry more, and hit harder. [] Speed/Dexterity/Stealth. Affects movement speed and melee. [] Techie/Engineer. Can repair broken weapons, improvise gadgets and figure out some artifacts. [] Archeologist. Can figure out certain engravings and artifacts. Might give the player expanded descriptions of some items. [] Medic. Knows stuff about potions, herbs, poison, etc. Heals faster. Weapon proficiencies. [] Melee, [] Machine guns, [] Explosives and grenades, [] Pistols, [] Sniper rifles. The character knows how to maintain the weapon type, keeping it in top condition. This affects Damage (higher muzzle velocity?), Accuracy (steadier aim), Reload time (mag exchange). Jams are less likely, and faster to fix. Melee weapons are kept sharp and blows are stronger and swifter. Explosives would be faster and easier to set up.

Several stories can be written from the point of view of the adventurers who stumbled into the temple. Natives, Conquistadors, Nazis. Perhaps they took slightly different paths down into the temple, giving the player some replay value depending on which path he chooses. For example, he can choose to listen to the clues given by the dead native and end up exploring that story more.

Strange animations. Rather than the monsters doing their idle, walk, attack animations, it would be interesting to have some plain strange things going on to freak the player out and keep things unpredictable. Perhaps an enemy is found laying on the floor, and has a seizure when the player approaches. Another one could be busy groping a wall before noticing the player. It could also be simple stuff, like "ticks" or enemies running off on some urgent errand.

Time manipulation and anachronisms?

3D walls in a Wolfenstein type engine

I think there's a cheap way to do 3D walls in a simple raycasting engine. Instead of drawing the wall slices (columns) right away, we store them in a buffer, along with the ID of the wall that was touched, and we also make a separate list of the different walls touched. When the ray cast sweep is done, we go through the touched walls and calculate their angle to the camera because that needs to be consistent for the entire wall tile. This angle is simplified to a resolution of say 8.

An engine like Wolfenstein would just look at which texture a wall tile has, and draw that (and maybe pick a shadow version on the texture based on wall facing). But in our case each wall texture has 8 pre-rendered view angles (though the texture is still square). The view angle to camera (per wall) that was calculated before is used to pick the right sub texture (angle). I don't think switching angle in the middle of drawing a wall segment would look good, since the angle switch will misalign details, so that's why I suggest making sure the angle is consistent for the entire wall surface. Anyways, I think this method, whilst requiring more memory, is very affordable CPU-wise.

I'm not sure how all this would look in practice, and how many frames would be needed. A 3D program could of course be used to prerender all of the textures needed. But some clay, a mirror and a camera would also work. I mention the mirror because the textures might have to be symmetrical to save frames. The vertical edges (the frame) can't have any indents, like in my drawn example here. Of course, this only works in a primitive raycasting engine where you can't move vertically, and it won't work with floor casting.

Some mip-mapping with blur might reduce jitter for far away walls... but it's also possible that horizontal blurring could be used to make the texture compression of walls seen almost side on look better. Also, I think the farther edge of the texture will have to be slightly more blurry because of diminishing perspective. Here are some blurry photos of a clay+mirror experiment. Doing a clay-animation type FPS would be cool, but also rather time consuming.

- by Niklas Jansson, 2010. The Marathon (trilogy) setting was developed by Bungie (1994-1996). No infringement intended.