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Name: Tim Willits
Email: twillits@idsoftware.com
Description: Designer
Project: Quake 2
Last Updated: 12/12/1997 14:10:00 (Central Standard Time)
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Hello -

Now that Quake 2 is finished I thought I would update my .plan again.  I
first want to thank John Romero for the great compliments he has given us
on Quake 2. It really means a lot to me.  John has always been my design
hero in a way. When I first got to id I shared an office with John and
tried my hardest to design like him. The style and design techniques that
you see in Quake 2 were heavily influenced by the things I learned from
him.  There are two things I want to clarify from his .plan update.  The
first one is that Paul Jaquays was the designer on the base secret level
"train", not Brandon.  That was Paul's first real level he built for Quake
2 and as a first time level it's simply amazing with its vertical scale
and complexity.  Second, I would also like to add that Brandon did a ton
of clean-up and monster placement work for the Waste unit and the Mine
unit.  At id no one person does all the work on any given map.  Because
the design of Quake 2 was so large and complex a team effort was needed to
get everything finished. When you look at a list of names and maps you
can't really understand everything that went into creating them. For
example, the "security" map was originally started by me, it was later
passed on to Christian to finish. After I realized that I needed to add a
connection to "mintro" from it, I took it back to add an end.  When I was
done with that it returned to Christian to add a basement area. Then the
last day before we shipped I changed the top area again. As you can see I
built its foundation, but Christian also added a ton of stuff to it.
"Security" isn't the only map with such a long history - power1, mintro,
hangar1 (especially), and hangar2 all have similar stories. The list of
maps and names in Romero's .plan reflects the person who built the level's
foundation but does not reflect all the clean-up and tweaking done by the
others. If anyone has a question about a map feel free to ask any
designer, chances are they did some work on it and can answer your
question.

I want to publicly thank and congratulate all the designers here that
worked so hard to make such an awesome game. No one person could have done
what the team did. We have become so strong as a team and I believe we
work so wonderfully together that I can not wait until we get started on
the mission pack.

-Tim