Quake Map Magazine - Carson Utz

#### With On Sacred Ground Jack Davis combined a hauntingly beautiful temple themed area with the thrill of exploration and tough combat.

I live in Hesperia, CA, a smallish desert community about 70 miles North of Los Angeles. I grew up near downtown LA. I am a musician at heart and on the weekends I teach guitar and bass at a local music store. I'm also going to school, getting my AA this semester. In September I was lucky enough to get a paying level design job with a new company called 2015 who's currently working on the first SiN mission pack. I'm currently working from home designing some DM levels for the pack, and am hoping to soon land a full-time job in the gaming industry, which would be a dream come true for a video game nut like me ; )

Of my released work, Sacred Ground is by far the best.

O N S A C R E D G R O U N D

I've gotten inspiration from so many different places. First and foremost, id's Quake 2 levels. I spent a lot of time in each level just staring at them and studying them and getting ideas. Also I found Xatrix's Reckoning pack to be very inspirational, they had a lot of cool and fresh ideas. Also I like to look at real world architecture for ideas. I got into checking out architecture books from the library. There's some great shit there I'm telling you. Get yourself some books about Frank Lloyd Wright, some classical Greek or Roman stuff, or technological future stuff or whatever and you will have lots of cool ideas to pick from. As far as ideas for plots/storylines, movies/books/mythology are always good...pretty much anyplace where there's good stories. In making a level I first and foremost attempt to make it fun and playable. After I think the fun factor is good, I work on all the little itty bitty time consuming details that fill in everything else.

On the pro side, Tim Willits and Levelord are a couple of my favorites. For user
made levels, Neil Manke of course makes top notch stuff. I also enjoyed James Parkman's maps, and one of my favorites was Carson Utz's "What The End Is For". And then there is EutecTic, who has made hands down the best prefabs for Quake 2. On the DM side Headshot and ZTN are my favs. Also I like the work of Chris "Guf" Cummings from The Fugue. I'm not sure if he's released anything yet (forgive me if ya have Guf : ) but I was working with him on a project a while back and his stuff kicks ass.

Quake II kicks ass. It's held my attention for almost a year now and I don't see
it wearing off any time soon. id does it again, what else can I say? : ) Editing in the Quake II engine is a blast. You can build *almost* anything you want, or at least give the impression for sure. Can't want for the Quake III engine and those bezier curves : )

O N S A C R E D G R O U N D

There's so many cool looking games coming out, the one's I'm currently jazzed about are SiN, Half-Life, Quake III, and EverQuest.

For Quake II editing I use QERadiant by Robert Duffy.

Almost all my free time is devoted to editing or playing video games, but when I'm not doing that I like to jam on the guitar or piano or hang with friends. My city is a cultural armpit in the desert, so there ain't much to do but sit around and play video games :)

I must have about 50 links bookmarked related to Quake II, but some of my favorites are RUST, BluesNews, PlanetQuake o' course, Lt. Dans SPQ2, Quake Map Hotel, Lotus Look, The Fugue, Ramshackle, Terra Fusion, and Crash's SPQ2.

For the next few months I will be working on the maps for the SiN add-on, and at this point I don't have any plans beyond that, besides to hopefully land a full-time level design job. I have an unfinished level set for Quake II that I would really like to finish and release someday, but right now it's impossible to say when that might be.

I just want to say thanks to all the reviewers and webmasters out there who pimped my maps, and to the players for playing my maps...sometimes one dude writing you and saying "that kicked ass!" is just as rewarding as a glowing review : )

~Jack Davis - November 2, 1998

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