Red Faction

~2003 - January 2004

The VW00x series were my learning of RED (the Red Faction (PC) Level Editor) back in 2003. They ranged from simple creations of rooms and linking them together, to creating skyboxes and getting an idea of scale in the game. That scale turned out to be 1 RED unit to one real life yard.

One of the test levels was the capstone of my worse fear at the time. The level consisted only of a horizontal H shaped platform inside of an invisible box. Inside RF the sky box was visible on all sides. The fear was falling indefinitely. Yay for facing fears and getting rid of them. *looks both ways and continues story*

These levels lead to the creation of The Temple, a port of the 007/Perfect Dark level created by Rare. The Temple took me six months to recreate. I scraped the level twice before getting the scale right. The first of those two I figured I’d created a huge number for the length of the main room, only to test it and have the player end up about 15 feet tall. In the second attempt, I was closer. Until I had made the doors for the level, I’d thought I was right with the scale. The doors were normal sized and far too close to the ceiling. Eventually I began to understand the true size of that monstrous room. 60’ x 48’ x 138’ (DMVWTemple preview image, file)

Some time in the middle of developing The Temple, I created Hex Duel. From design to completion, I spent one Sunday morning. A few minor touch ups were made the weekend later. The basic idea was a Dueling level, a level meant to be one vs. one, and in a hexagonal shape—my favorite polygon. (VW010 screenshot top, inside)

Several months after completing The Temple, I returned trying to create a Capture the Flag map (CTF). In the end, my lack of creativity and self creation lead to incomplete files on my hard drive. For most of my high school years, I was unable to create my own content. If a finished product was available, I could do something with it, like in the case of The Temple. (If you can’t tell, I like saying The Temple….) (VWCTF001 screenshot side, inside)

The hexagonal shape, my piece of Keeping Sanity that had some creative sparks. My second attempt at a CTF map involved several hexagonal and square rooms linked together by teleports. It work so well too—in single player mode. Sadly, the RED editor was unable to use teleportation triggers properly in multiplayer. RF’s creators made teleporting specifically for single player, which is where I tested my maps. In multiplayer, after some tweaking, the teleport trigger will teleport everyone on the map to the destination point. Needless to say, this feature was rather useless. Perhaps some day I can return to that map and make it inside some other level editor.

*The grey box textures show walls where I no longer have the original textures for