Gyro Gearloose Interview

Gyro is the creator of such masterpieces as Torture, The Crucible and Call a Plumber. Here's what he had to say...

Tell us a bit about yourself (like how old you are, where you live, what you do in the 'real' world :)

Howdy. Hot diggety doggies! An interview! I get to talk about me! Oops... I'll try not to look into the camera... I'm a 32 year old network software developer in Seattle, WA, USA - but I'm cool and hip anyway (except for the mondo-baggy jeans everybody at the malls seem to be wearing). I drive a rusty and battered '65 GMC pickup with a B&M blower under the hood. I don't smoke, but I encourage others to - just tryin' to help with the population problem!

Did you edit Doom levels before Quake? If so, which levels did you design?

Yeah, I got hooked on Doom awhile back and did a collection of Doom 1 single player levels followed by a few Doom 2 levels, but I was too chicken to upload them to cdrom. They're still on my page.

How difficult did you find it to learn Quake editing?

Not too hard once I'd gotten over the initial hump. It did turn out to be MUCH more time-consuming than making Doom levels ever was. I can't seem to make a full-sized level in under 100 hours. I did a demo level for Bubbah's Bazooka Babe that was a welcome change because I could do a detailed map and have fun with it, but it took a lot less time than a normal map.

What was the most difficult aspect of it?

The initial conceptual block was the toughest for me. The fact that a six-sided brush wasn't a room, but only a brick took a while for my pea brain to grasp. Understanding leaks and using the .pts file to find them was the next hurdle. Adding graphics was frustrating until I found Newwad13 for wad maintenance and PaintShopPro for palette-matching.

How much time do you spend editing a week?

Ha! Way too much. I think they're onto me at work. I guiltily confess that I haven't been doing much level editing lately. I've been spending as much time as I did editing working on a QuakeC deathmatch bot. I got frantic when Steven Polge of the amazing Reaper Bot mothballed it, and I'm trying to develop something that will be able to carry on where it left off. I probably average about 35 hours a week on things related to id Software. Thank God I don't have any kids, or they'd all turn into psychopathic killers driven by a subconscious need for Daddy's attention.

Which Quake editor do you use?

At home, I'm strictly a DOS user. I have to deal with the seamy underbelly of Win95 plenty at work, suffering through bogus parameters for WSAAsyncGetHostByName passed by Internet Explorer and how they hooked socket handles into the file system using undocumented kernel functions and other things that MAKE ME WANT TO TAKE A ROCKET LAUNCHER AND GIB THE ZOMBIES AT REDMOND INTO SMOLDERING HEAPS OF AARGH YAAAGGGH ACK GAK!!!! (flailing and convulsions, stuff being knocked over, cut to "experiencing temporary difficulties - please stand by" screen)

(wiping the vomitus off his shirt after that last outburst) ...aaahhh, ahem... Quest.

What do you think are its best features?

It's fast and easy to use. My favorite feature is the screen that displays all of the textures in my currently selected texture wad file and lets me pick one.

What features do you think would improve it?

Its interface for setting up scripts - target/targetname relationships is not complete. Chris & Trey released the source code to it though, which rules. It's all in Watcom C 10.0, so I'll hopefully pull myself away from bots at some point and work a little on Quest. I wrote a 2D BSP texture mapper thing awhile back with Watcom, so I happen to have all the stuff I need to play around with it, except time of course.

How do you come up with ideas for your levels? Do you plan or sketch them in advance?

Often when I'm out walking around, I see some cool architecture and want to try to capture it in Quake. Dr. Benway had a book called The History of Western Architecture that had me spoogin'. It had tons of great pictures and diagrams of mansions and cathedrals and walls and buttresses and stuff. The opening scene in Crucible is loosely based on a design that was popular in the southern US for mansions in the 1800s. I get lots of ideas while editing, like the faces and sculptures in Torture. The tough part is taking the time to implement the ideas.

What do you think are the ingredients to make a great Single Player level?

I don't have the foggiest idea. I mean, there's all the obvious stuff like monster placement and ammo and architecture and texture choices and so on, but why one set of things works and another doesn't is something I haven't figured out. Take Placebo and Fear Castle for example - two very different levels, but I absolutely loved both of them. They totally work. Crucible works. Plumber doesn't work. I don't know why that is, but I think if a mapmaker can feel it and is willing to toss big chunks and try again when something isn't working, great levels result.

What is your favourite id map (or maps) in registered Quake?

I have to admit that I still get lost in most of the registered levels, so I don't feel like I know them well enough to have qualified favorites. There are a number of elements that stuck in my head from a few of them though, like the art-deco style (or whatever you'd call all those lamp obelisks) of E4M5 and the backlit windows on the wall with the sky behind them on the "second floor" of E2M6. It's hard not to find something cool in every level.

What is your favourite user created map (or maps)?

Same deal here - I see things way cooler than anything I can come up with on my own in most of the user levels I look at. I get a new favorite every time I make myself take the time to download some levels to check out! I'm too chicken to start naming some levels that I thought totally kicked batooty because I'd leave someone's massively spoogematic level out.

What is your favourite monster :) ?

The zombies! They are just gross. We should all consider ourselves DAMN LUCKY that smell-a-tron scent generating peripherals haven't been invented yet. Hurf!

What is your least favourite monster :) ?

Newt Gingrich. Newt and the Tarbaby. The Tarbaby jumps around like a frog on a hot skillet, but what I really want it to do is act like the Br'er Rabbit Tarbaby and glom onto players and slow them way down if there are any other monsters around.

What advice would you give to people wanting to build their own Quake levels?

Take your time and enjoy the process itself. It's an art thang as much as a math thang, so focus on getting into the creation part rather than the hustling-product-out-the-door part.

What are the worst and/or most common errors you have come across while playing user created maps?

Hmm... I think the most common mistake made is to not be able to see the level through other people's eyes. People will play your level who have never seen it before, and it's very hard (certainly for me) to do test walkthroughs of the level over and over trying to pretend that I'm in it for the first time and that I don't know where any secrets or monsters or traps or anything is.

Who is your favourite id level designer (hint: you can choose people who have left the company :)?

I like the dark moods of Door to Chthon & DM2 - metal and lava. All the great aerial moving stuff in Satan's Dark Delight was interesting too. American kicks llama butt.

Where do you go on the internet for Quake editing help and information and Quake news in general?

Blue's News is probably the first page I hit every day. The text format makes it so fast and easy to go to, and his content's great. I like QuakeLab. For editing and reference material, I tend to use search engines even more than bookmarks, so I've probably hit just about every site out there at one time or another. I like finding small and obscure sites too. I'm a Netscape 1.1N user, so frames-only sites bite it for me.

How did you publicise the release of your last level?

After doing lots of testing on plumber, I put it up on my web page and sent a few emails to folks who I knew I could count on to give it a whirl and let me know if they hit any problems. It included a progs.dat and mdl files, so trouble-free installation with pkunzip -d was a must. After I was convinced that everything was okay, I uploaded it to ftp.cdrom.com's idstuff2 incoming directory and posted a message to rec.games.quake.announce.

Did you get a lot of e-mail response?

For the first 3 weeks after the other levels, I was getting 2 or 3 emails a day which seemed like a lot to me. I got the most for Torture, which I attribute to all the begging and pleading for feedback I put in Torture's readme. Not much mail on Plumber. It was really useful info, but it did tell me that there are a lot of different players out there. Some people love claustrophobic areas (I tend toward it), and some people really dinged me for it. It's a challenge to strike a balance. All the mail is probably gonna end soon though - I had to change ISPs, and of course all the readmes have the nwlink address. :( (Matt's note: Gyro's new mail address is gyro@blarg.net)

Finally, what features would you like to see in Quake 2?

Man, that's a complicated one. As far as the game features themselves go, I'm happy to just be surprised. Id has never let me down there. Mostly, I want to be able to continue to run under DOS, and although I'm presently unclear on how the whole 3D graphic hardware thing is going to shake out, I'm hoping that something like OpenGL drivers for DOS will exist for whatever video adapter I buy next, and that Quake 2 will use them for outrageously fast graphics. I get stiffies from the technology and software behind all this even more than I do from the games themselves.

Gyro, thanks for your time!

Thanks Matt! Keep up the excellent work at SPQ!

Interview © Matt Sefton and Gyro Gearloose, 1997.