https://imgur.com/gallery/cGHmk 

https://i.imgur.com/jwTMTup.jpg 

It's a little uncanny. 

The art of jean-pierre ugarte

https://goo.gl/BNFd9R 

cool find 

.... that most of the images people post here are of giant imposing structures. All fine and good. I love this.

But when I make some giant imposing structures in a map my scale is all "wrong" and my map needs to be "smaller, tighter."

8-{ 

Brutalism is very difficult to do well dumptruck. Brutalist architects often face similar criticism. It usually goes wrong when a designer only thinks about their product in terms of overall scale (i.e. they just make shit big), because good Brutalism is more "complex maths" than just "big numbers". 

You don't make "some giant imposing structures", your whole maps are giant. 

I'm not attempting Brutalism in my maps. Would love to some day. OTP fair enough. 

Vast spaces and imposing structures are awesome but aren't much fun to play in. Most games seem to solve this by making such spaces/structures occupy the backdrop and/or keep parts out of reach of the player (like the cliffs from half-life, for an extreme example). The worlds of dark souls and bloodbourne seem impossibly vast and full of towering buildings, but remove anything that isn't a space the player can occupy and you're left with a much smaller area tailored for gameplay.

Scale is probably the single hardest thing to get right for me and is why I greybox everything and don't even think about art until the space is correct. In my test map, cartographer's nightmare I tried to make spaces feel large while limiting the play space. For instance, the largest space isn't even playable and is first seen by the player while he is in one of the tightest spaces. Other examples include being able to see multiple stories while being confined to a tight footpath, and an 'infinite' ceiling forever out of the player's reach. Despite these tricks, one of the criticisms I still remember is that the spaces were too claustrophobic and the player felt like he was always about to "hit his head". Go figure!

tldr: scale is one of the most important factors in gameplay and therefore one of the most difficult to get right. 

You have to start small until you get gameplay right, then make things bigger. From small to big, that is what works for me. 

...to General Abuse. but thx. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/evilbuildings/comments/7809pb/first_mass_starts_at_666_am/ 

https://www.reddit.com/r/outrun/comments/78176c/red_haze/

Not so Quakey, but damn if that's not a cool picture 

The alley reminds me of a location in DX:HR. 

Just found out about this guy, why didn't I know about him before?

http://70sscifiart.tumblr.com/image/166945384443
https://www.blackgate.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Bruce-Pennington-The-Shadow-of-the-Torturer.jpg
http://www.brucepennington.co.uk/bpenn15.htm
http://visualmelt.com/Johfra
http://ultan.org.uk/claw-conciliator-pennington/ 

great stuff but one of those links is for a different artist named Johfra Bosschart.

I hadn't heard of either artist before. 

I failed to recognize that in my flurry of copy/pastes, but I guess you all get bonus inspiration 

Those are the book covers for The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe. It is an interesting story. 

I just started reading it :) 

I'm planning on replacing those horrible episode finale Shalrath battles with unique boss character battles.

I'd imagine the inspiration should also pull from Lovecraft mythos.

What do you all think should be the three bosses leading up to Shub Niggurath? 

Why not Cthulhu himself? He's a badass if done correctly. 

Maybe we can find some low poly Cthulhu concepts that would fit into the Quake aesthetic? 

Hmm. The problem w/ Lovecraftian stuff in a video game is that "unknowable horror" doesn't fit nicely into "shoot it til it dies".

Chthon was not a great endboss in that light (if any). Shub was kind of good tho. At least the method of defeating her was sufficiently weird.

I'm going to ramble a bit here about the gameplay rather than specific names of Lovecraftian creatures...

Quake is a straightforward action game so you can't go too crazy with boss mechanics. But bullet-sponge bosses in Quake maps/mods have almost always been a bad way to end things. Maybe a fight that requires clever use of the level architecture, or manipulation of other monsters? Or maybe it requires some action that would seem to be suicidal at first glance (e.g. lava diving), until you get hints otherwise as the fight progresses.

For continuity, Shub could be present in some fashion in each fight, just as a sinister presence or actually intervening, but retreat/escape after each of your victories (until the end). Perhaps remix Shub into all the existing end-episode fights; in e1m8 just an observer overhead, but then getting more and more active in each following bossfight. 

It keeps mentioning Shub-Niggurath in the messages but the entity at the end is very clearly The Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath , not the real deal herself.