A Look Back At Shadow Complex’s Important Map

Thanks to some digging from the MTV Multiplayer blog, we’ve got a glimpse today of one of the prototype maps for the summer Xbox Live Arcade hit Shadow Complex.

The site is running a post-mortem about the game all week, which would be interesting enough based on Shadow Complex’s roots as a dream project of the brothers running Epic-owned Chair Entertainment.

The look back at the game is all the more interesting due to the fact that people who make Super Metroid-style adventures seldom talk publicly about the process of designing the games and the maps that serve as their core feature.

Here’s a bit from Chair’s chief designer, Donald Mustard:

“We created these little grid blocks and lines. We did a lot of it by hand at first, but then we went and transcribed it all into [Adobe] Illustrator…you could literally see a side view of the map, it was all just grey, with lines and stuff. And we had a stick figure that represented the player, and we’d say, ‘Ok, the player can jump this many units high.’ And we had a little graph that showed how high you could jump and how long it would take to build up to a speed run and stuff like that. So we’d ‘play through’ the entire game with this little stick figure guy.”

Check out the MTV post for a bigger look at this prototype map and for more on how the game came together.

Exclusive: ‘Shadow Complex’ Prototype Map Revealed [MTV Multiplayer]