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Andrea Rosa

LEVEL DESIGN WORKSHOP

20 Years on the Level Design Scene

As you all probably know, it is not my habit to indulge in self celebration. I always try my best to be humble, positive and social, because if you think you are the best, you will never improve (and you will also look like a jerk). That being said, this is a very important anniversary for me, one that is filled with a lot of great memories: exactly 20 years ago on this month, I opened the Scenario Builder of Age of Empires and started working on the first map of The Senate And People Of Rome, which would have been released two years later on Age of Empires Heaven (AoEH). To be fair, I had been messing around with the editors of both Age of Empires and StarCraft since 1998, but sadly those early works are lost forever, because my first PC, a Pentium 200 MMX, crashed in 2002 before I had access to the Internet, and I had no backups. Hence, November 2001 marks the month when I started working on something that would have been actually released to the public. Thinking back to it, The Senate And People Of Rome was a pain to make: since I hadn't Internet, I knew that I could not publish the campaign, so I was not truly motivated. As a result, I got stuck countless times on it, seriously thinking to abandon the project, but luckily this didn't happen. Even more luckily, the campaign survived the crash of 2002 because I had a relatively recent backup of the scenarios on a floppy disk. Later that year I acquired a new machine, a Pentium 4, with the much needed Internet connection, and I eventually discovered Age of Empires Heaven. I downloaded The Martial Emperor by Rich Parker, I started the first scenario and I nearly fainted: how can I describe my amazement when I started to gradually uncover that wonderfully crafted map? The inspiration I got from The Martial Emperor was just so much, that I resumed working on The Senate And People Of Rome, which I released on AoEH in December 2003, honestly without high expectations. However, much to my surprise, the campaign was well-received, and the positive feedback encouraged me to persist.


At that point many things changed. Using the Scenario Builder became easier, because I was much more confident in my skills, and ideas kept coming at an almost alarming rate. Early in 2004 I joined the AoEH Hittite Campaign Contest. The rules were quite simple: contestants had to create an historically accurate campaign based on the Hittites, with a minimum of 3 scenarios, one of which had to feature a naval battle. The allotted time was less than two months. After some research I decided to embark on a six-missions campaign named Underhand Dealings From The Hatti Archive, and still to this day I don't know how I was able to complete it in such a short amount of time. Finally aware of the capabilities of the Scenario Builder, I began to develop my own style, but I also wanted to include some new trick, and I providentially found one: at the same time of the contest, AoE designers were discussing about the possibility of having reinforcements automatically appearing into the game after some minutes without having to discover them manually, something very outside of the possibilities of a game that lacked a trigger system. I decided to include something like that in my Hittite campaign, and after some thinking and tinkering I came up with an artificial pseudo-trigger which allowed to automatically reveal new units after roughly 30 minutes. Eventually I won the contest, but in a sad way: all of the other participants withdrew from the event some days before the due date, leaving Underhand Dealings From The Hatti Archive as the only entry and thus the default winner. This campaign was also notable for getting a flattering review from legendary designer Ingo Van Thiel, fully compensating for the lame conclusion of the Hittite Contest and further feeding my addiction to map design.


Indeed, 2004 was a very productive year, with two more AoE campaigns crafted in less than six months. Memories Of The Gupta Dynasty was released in August and it was met with critical acclaim: considered by some as one of the best campaigns ever made, it has been leading the AoEH downloads ranking all this time. Angkor Wat And The Khmer Legacy came out in December, and its reception was equally positive, even though the high difficulty level and numerous puzzles made it less accessible to casual players. Also in 2004 I launched my first website, AoE Last Resort, which remained active for roughly six years. At the same time I bought Age of Empires Gold Edition, which contained both the original game and the expansion pack Rise of Rome. However, while I enjoyed the innovations in gameplay and queueing of units, I really disliked the fact that some graphics had been altered for the worse (think to those awful microscopic rocks, or the new trees which simply didn't blend with the pre existing flora). Hence, I decided to keep designing for the original Age of Empires.


Early in 2005 I published a remake of The Senate And People Of Rome featuring enhanced gameplay and improved map design, while in October I released my fifth campaign, A Short History Of Lost Sumeria, based on an old idea which came to me in 1999 after reading the Epic of Gilgamesh. Shortly before the Sumerian campaign was finished, the long quest for the so-called 'beta units' suddenly came to an end, as a clever guy from Hong Kong, Scenario_t_c, found a way to unlock all hidden units buried in the game code. Therefore, A Short History Of Lost Sumeria became the first campaign ever to display these innovations, as I took some extra time to incorporate them into it. In between these two projects I decided to learn 3D mapping for Quake II, and I was instantly hooked: despite being complex and time-consuming, the whole process was also highly rewarding, with endless possibilities and a true feeling of world shaping. I quickly found myself at ease with the popular editor Quake Army Knife (QuArK) by Armin Rigo and with Geoffrey DeWan's Compiling Utilities, all of which became my tools of choice. Sure as hell the early steps were not so easy, with tons of weird errors popping up all over the place: leaked maps, getspace errors, index overflows, missing entities, and so on and so forth. However, with some perseverance (and many hours of trial and error) I managed to figure out what I was supposed to do. Quake II is also well known for being an open-source game, so I could easily learn modding from the get-go. My first experimental levelpack, Deus Ex Machina, was developed to incorporate the Lazarus entities and modifications, and despite being a bit rough on the edges, it nevertheless gained some attention on Func_Msgboard. Most importantly, I received via email a lot of useful feedback, links to tutorials and suggestions which greatly helped me to improve my fledgling 3D mapping skills.    


I spent most of 2006 and 2007 working on a new Quake II levelpack named Citadel (which would have ended up as my biggest project ever) but parallel to it, I also worked on Little Big Nordic Adventure, an AoE campaign based on the Viking Age. A difficult subject in its own right, given the unusual setting and environment, this campaign featured some very large maps and complex AI interactions. Both Citadel and Little Big Nordic Adventure took about 18 months to be made, and they were released in May and November 2007, respectively. However, the history of Citadel had merely begun: feeling that the levelpack could be expanded, I kept working more or less discontinuously on it for two more years, adding two maps to the initial five and releasing version 2.0 in 2009. It is not an exaggeration to say that I was obsessed with it. I mean, sometimes I become so involved in a project that I start to literally live it, breathe it and dream it: more often than not, my nocturnal visions became splattered with Quake II textures and colored lights, as I wandered aimlessly through strange buildings, perpetually looking for a way out.  


I remained pretty much inactive from 2010 to 2013, except for a failed attempt at 3D mapping for Unreal: basically I could not get accustomed with the reverse mapping method, in which you are supposed to carve out rooms from a solid world, whereas in Quake II you build rooms into an empty world by using solid shapes, which is much more intuitive in my opinion. In 2014 I finally decided to resume StarCraft mapping, even though many ideas regarding the Blizzard universe had been floating in my mind all that time. Over the following six years I produced three campaigns, one for each of the races featured in the game: Tales of Halcyon (Terran), Voices of the Swarm (Zerg) and Champions of Khandia (Protoss). Since their stories tended to gravitate around Enslavers (the bonus custom campaign included with StarCraft), I also released an improved version of it, dubbed Enslavers Special Edition, which was particularly well received thanks to the popularity of the original concept. All of these campaigns were announced on Staredit Network and Campaign Creations, where they were usually met with polarised opinions: basically, people either loved them or hated them (which is still better than indifference, if you ask me). At the same time, I remained active in 3D mapping, further expanding Citadel with a third iteration, released in 2017, which I announced on Func_Msgboard and Quaddicted. Boasting nine levels, immersive gameplay, a combination of Rogue, Xatrix and Lazarus entities, countless enemies and loads of secret areas, Citadel is undoubtedly my flagship product and what I am best known for (it's also notable for being the only work in which my ugly face can be seen, in fact the picture at the top of this article is actually a Quake II texture).


So that was the summary of my first 20 years as a designer. Surely it has been a great journey so far, and I wish to pursue this journey as long as time allows me to. Yeah, now I'm 46 and some may think it's time for me to retire and grow a garden, feed the ducks at the park or shit like that, but I think I still have some tricks up my sleeve. As always, a big thank goes to all of you who have been supporting my work all of these years, often sending me kind words and providing me with useful feedback and constructive criticism. This hobby got me in touch with many nice people, whether they were skilled designers or devoted players, often resulting in friendships that have lasted for years. Really, thank you very much! Now let's all get back to work.

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