Nods to Mods Interview: Underdark Overbright & Copper for Quake

Enjoy eight maps to barrel your way through in our re-release of the legendary shooter with the community-favorite mod Underdark Overbright, available to download now in the Add-on menu. This Add-on also includes Copper, adjusting the original game for a tweaked experience.

To tell us more about the development of Underdark Overbright and Copper, we now take you to our interview with the Add-ons’ creators, Matthew “Lunaran” Breit and Sean “Scampie” Campbell:

Thank you for joining us! Please introduce yourself to the audience.

MATTHEW BREIT: I’m Matthew Breit, known to the community as Lunaran for no special reason, and originally from the Chicago area. I was hired into the games industry by the Quake 4 team at Raven Software as a level designer and have contributed to a variety of other games since as an environment artist, including Unknown Worlds’ Natural Selection II and Davey Wreden’s The Beginner’s Guide. I currently live in a foggy wizard forest.

SEAN CAMPBELL: Hi! I’m Sean Campbell, also known in the Quake community as Scampie, and I’m a 39-year-old long-haired queer dude living in the frozen woods of Maine. I’ve been involved with the Quake level design scene in one way or another ever since I was too young and impressionable for the multiple RSAC warnings on the box.

Other prominent mods I’ve been involved with over the years include ‘Head Hunters 3’ for Quake 3 and ‘Arcane Dimensions’ for Quake. I first worked as a professional level designer at Raven Software on some of the Marvel Comics games in the 2000s’, and now work as an indie game developer of little repute. I also like to bake cookies.

How long have you both been making Quake mods/levels?

SC: Since 1997, but I think my earliest surviving map I can still find is the Quake 2 map where a young Scampie thought it would be funny if they made all the lighting neon green.

MB: I’m also the right age to have gotten in mostly on the ground floor in the late 90s’. I’d already been in love with the magic of tracing out DOOM levels and then actually walking around in them. It seemed like a given at the time that the next game you played was always going to be cooler and do more stuff and if you had a modding mindset, that meant to you that you could do cooler things with it, too.

How big was your team to make this a full new episode-worth of seven levels?

MB: Just me and the shrimpster at first, with custom audio provided by Michael Markie. It was just a project of my own for a while, but Sean is good at quickly shaking design truths out of my head that I’m taking too long to recognize and shooting down my worse ideas just as easily. He also had a mostly complete level to toss into the pot as UDOB7 and when I lazily asked him for some side areas for the boss map, he overdid it and created UDOB5 too.

What tools did you use to create the Underdark Overbright Add-on?

MB: This might be the most quixotic aspect of my mapping for Quake but I use a homebrew editor based on a Win32 port of id’s original QuakEd, so it’s a bit of an alternate-universe QERadiant that only supports Quake. I started using this port before the amazing TrenchBroom existed, when Quake1 support in Radiant wasn’t that great and never really got out.

It’s pretty great, to be honest. If I find myself wanting a feature, I can flip over to Visual Studio, put it in, and return to the editor and use the map I was building to test it and find the crashes. (These can be very long diversions.) The levels would all have been utterly un-compilable with the original command line tools, so I have to acknowledge the years of work put into refining them by EricW, Tyrann, Aguirre and others. Copper was also developed with the aid of Spike’s FTEQCC advanced QuakeC compiler. I cannot imagine modding Quake without either.

SC: I still use the incredibly old and outdated editor GTKRadiant 1.5, as well as the spiffy and awesome compiling tools that EricW has been maintaining and various old utility programs like TexMex and PakExplorer. It’s frankly astounding that so many of these old tools can even work on modern machines.

What was your main inspiration for this full new episode Add-on?

MB: I had envied the DOOM mapping community for the strong slate of very technical, gameplay-challenge oriented level packs like Sunlust, which didn’t seem to have counterparts in Quake. For the longest time, my usual approach had been to think of an interesting world or theme, build it out in a way that felt fun to explore and then add monsters and items as if gameplay were window dressing.

Being able to build levels in full 3D with lightmapping (…) naturally pulls you in that direction, I think, of seeing the level as its own character and making the rest secondary. I was motivated to try mapping from gameplay concept first, to make levels that felt more like the designer was present and playing with you. How about you try a deathmatch-to-singleplayer remix? How about a Ch’thon fight with the rocket buttons from Honey?

SC: Lunaran and I have been pals in the Quake scene forever, and we’ve worked together in real life and online before this, so most of my motivation throughout was helping my buddy with his project!

Early on, Lunaran mentioned how he wanted to make a single player remix of the Quake3 map Q3DM6: Campgrounds as a testbed for what has become Copper, and I thought that was such a neat idea that I also started my own remix of a Quake3 map (I ended up choosing Q3DM2: House of Pain). After that, most of the maps really came from jamming, shower thoughts and last-minute panic being the mother of all good eldritch horrors.

How long did it take you two to complete this episode Add-on?

MB: According to the Discord log, I first told Scampie “as i was falling asleep last night a tiny angel came into my room and whispered ‘make a q1sp remix of q3dm6’” on June 21, 2018, and we released 1.0 of the mod and the episode a year minus one day later. Each of my levels, including the Start and End maps, were about a month each, give or take.

SC: UDOB7.bsp was made off and on during the approximate year of spare time we worked on the episode while I was also jamming on some other maps that never went anywhere. UDOB5.bsp got cobbled together from a bunch of quick map sketches that I later cleaned up further, so let’s say a month-ish? UDOB8.bsp was strictly a weekend project, and remixing it was a late April Fool’s joke I played on Lunaran after the initial release.

Tell us more about the Copper mod source port – how did you come up with it and what does it add to Quake?

MB: I was working on a separate single player episode that I started way, way too long ago (look for LunSP2 in 2047, maybe) and in the course of adding custom monsters and beefing up mapper support with quality-of-life features, I couldn’t shrug off the urge to tweak the mechanics in little ways for the same purpose.

I held off touching any of this for the longest time since I didn’t want to saddle LunSP2 with the extra responsibility of providing effective teaching moments for any such tweaks as well as teaching its own new things. I was eventually itching to work on anything for Quake that wasn’t LunSP2, just some off-the-cuff maps for fun like we all used to sit and build when we first found the hobby but didn’t want to leave all my QoL additions behind, so I separated them into their own codebase.

At this point I decided to go ahead and give myself permission to make those gameplay tweaks as well, and quickly realized just how many of them had been building up behind the dam. The off-the-cuff maps became a testbed for all of them, and eventually a slate of showcases to subtly illustrate them.

SC: I was mostly along for the ride as far as the mod goes, much of my role was being the cheerleader, soundboard and tester for Lunaran to discuss his ideas and plans for a stripped down mod to improve Quake as a game and to be an expanded toolset for other designers to keep making more Quake.

As for any of my reasoning, let me put it this way: we made the Perforator shoot two nails at once, instead of one nail. We also increased the velocity of the nails shot by the regular Nailgun to be precisely ‘1996’ units per second. Lunaran will give you the well-reasoned justification of the “why” behind these changes, but for me, the most important reason was that shooting more nails is more fun, and it’s funny to set the velocity of things to a fun secret joke number. Quake should be fun!

What was/were the biggest challenge(s)/hurdle(s) you had in making this Add-on and Copper mod?

MB: Everything is a sacred cow to someone and while you can’t please everyone, I constantly felt like I was walking a very fine line between doing polish that nearly everyone could appreciate and just provoking the grognards. This was where the ‘minimum pressure’ philosophy of Copper came from, where I looked for only changes that could add a lot of gameplay value (especially emergent value in the form of consequences and rule interactions) without being big splashy changes or additions that might make the mod feel more like a fork or branch of the game than a tune-up and successor to the trunk.

SC: It’s surprising how tough it can be to balance how many resources the player has available to them across an entire episode of Quake on all the difficulty settings (it’s harder to make Easy skill fair than it is to make Hard skill a challenge) where there are secret areas inside of secret areas, while also endeavoring to support 2-4 player cooperative play without that also being unbalanced, plus the self-imposed challenge to ourselves that all the levels can also be completed without any of the items from the previous levels.

Who are some of your favorite modders in the Quake community and what’re your favorite things they’ve done?

SC: First let me give a nod to Quaddicted. The archive maintained there by Spirit has been instrumental in keeping the Quake level design scene thriving for quite a while and hopefully into the future! Also, SleepwalkR for creating and maintaining the editor Trenchbroom, which really helped make Quake mapping much more accessible for so many new designers!

But obviously I need to choose Sock and the ‘Arcane Dimensions’ team for this answer. His vision of a big huge Quake mod that brought together a lot of the best from the expansion packs, as well as from older mods like ‘Nehahra,’ ‘Rubicon’, and ‘Quoth’, plus his ability to make some of the best looking and well-designed levels that are always pushing the limits of an old engine.

MB: Yeah, you can’t mention Quake without mentioning Simon ‘Sock’ O’Callaghan. He’s a retired pro level designer who came back to conquer Quake and did it by releasing levels that broke apart everyone’s aging concepts of what Quake maps could be and how they could be structured, and he did it repeatedly with new texture sets inspired by his world travels as well. Then he made Arcane Dimensions, which is such a big and impressive collection of tastefully integrated Quake and Quake-adjacent mod and game content that I’ve heard people say, “This is just what Quake is to me now.”

Wanna give any other shoutouts? No time like the present…

MB: I have to offer gratitude to everyone who’s used Copper as a platform for their level design, like the teams behind SMEJ and SMEJ2, Dwell and The Punishment Due. Of course, id Software for always making the next game something cooler we can use to do more stuff. John ‘metlslime’ Fitzgibbons for Fitzquake and for carrying the QBoard torch for so long with func_msgboard and everyone who’s willingly shared their tools, their knowledge, and their effort to water the garden of the Quake community for a quarter of a century.

There’s an incredible body of experience, talent, and new software that’s been built up over that time and it’s available for free since everyone contributing felt rewarded by loving the work. All you have to do is bring love to it, too.

SC: Good friends from Raven and the other studios in the Madison area I’ve worked at, wherever you all are now, and especially my pals at Flippfly Games. The @Slipseer Twitter account for highlighting so many custom Quake levels to a wider audience on social media. All the folks working hard to make gaming and game dev a more fun, welcoming, and inclusive place for everyone.

Gaming friends who I’ve spent way too many late nights with. Everyone who has been patient with my sometimes overzealous nature. My Gram for buying me Quake 25 years ago, who still loves hearing me tell her about building ‘little rooms’ for it and about all the neat people I’ve been honored and privileged enough to have met and worked with in the Quake community all across the globe. Thank you all, and especially thank you to id Software for the game! We obviously enjoyed it quite a bit.