36 Your Eyes Only

Tips and Secrets

The player starts on a beach, with no weapons and little health. Head down the beach and to the left to reach the entrance to a cave. Keep to the left side of the cave wall until it opens out into a large area. Stick to the left and climb up the steps there until you reach a platform area. By side-step running (press the run, forwards, and side-step keys at the same time) you can make it across the gap to the ledge on the other side. Continue forwards, through an outdoor rocky area, until you reach a gate. Open the gate, and you will reach a courtyard area facing a large building.

Go up the stairs, into the building, down the steps, across the large hall, and up the stairs on the opposite side. There is a small room at the extreme westward side of the second floor which contains a book/terminal which gives you a clue as to where to find the key that opens the next door you will see.

Head down the north side of the second floor to where the Mona Lisa is hanging on the wall. Notice a locked door there with a key lock. You were given a clue at the end of "The End" which you should interpret in the following way: punch Mona in the nose. You may have to do this several times until you hear the distinctive "kerthunk" sound of a Tempus switch operating.

Clever lad that you are, you will have properly interpreted the clue contained in the book/terminal in this level to mean that you should look for the key near the beach area.... head back down into the caves, and stick to the right-hand side, and follow it around to find an area that is opened up and a key sitting there in the light. Grab it, and head back to the key lock in the building.

Opening the locked door, you will come to a disappointingly spare room... but you are encouraged to do some furniture hopping until you reach the top of the cabinet there... a switch will open on the wall. Hop down, and flip it. A door on the other side of the second floor will now be open.

Head around to the other side of the second floor, and enter a room containing a painting easel and a taboret with a painter's palette with daubs of paint and a brush pointing at one of the colours.... take note!

Head down the stairs there, to reach a cellar area lit by flickering torches. There are four doors here, each marked in a particular colour. Three of these are instant death-traps. The fourth, marked in the same colour that the paint brush points to, is safe. When Borzz played this map, he missed the clue on the palette, but thought "green means go" and he found the safe door. Clever lad.

Go through the safe door, and head either way around and up to a dim-lit area with a set of swinging doors at the top of a flight of stairs... open the doors, and you will have gained access to the final area of the map.

One last tip -- be nice!

Map Making Notes

The first step was the girls.. an obvious choice was to use Fractal Design's Poser 2 program (which I had originally purchased in order to put some new guys into Megiddo but Fractal Design kept delaying the release of the program until the Bungie contest deadline passed. The bastards.. If I had put new guys in... I would have *really* won that contest).

Poser has several problems, which particularly show up in the nude female figure model they include. The shoulders become crushed and distorted when moved down to a normal "relaxed" position, and the texture map tends to slide around, particularly in the groin region. I had to repaint, nearly from scratch, a texture map for the nude female figure that had enough resolution, and the right "features" to make the character look the way I wanted it to. Extensive tweaking on the actual proportions of the figure were worked out between Borzz and myself to get closer to what each of us considered to be a good approximation of an "ideal" woman. Luckily, Borzz and I have similar tastes in that regard. Once all the poses for the various positions were worked out, and camera positions created and stored with the model to provide Marathon with the eight views of each pose that it needs, I could begin rendering. Once all of the renders were finished, I had to manually retouch each render to remove the flaws in the model that Poser introduces... I had to paint by hand in particular the shoulders, buttocks, breasts, groin, hair, and some modifications to the facial features on each and every pose.

Once that was done, I created some additional "monsters" for the level... namely the torches and painters palette. I had long run out of animatable scenery objects for Tempus, so I created the torch as a "monster", and used the Trooper with extensive physics modifications to change the appearance, and behaviour for this level. Similar reasons were used to turn a fighter into the palette... I had run out of scenery objects.

Borzz's wife Beth provided the voice for "Ursula", our female character. Some of the stuff she came up with was priceless. Unfortunately, I could find no way to make the character say most of the stuff she was supposed to... limitations either in the way that Marathon handles the sound samples for monsters, or limitations in my understanding of how those samples work, prevented me from getting the characters to say much of the "friendly" chatter that Beth came up with. Those are still in the Tempus Sound file... the adventurous can hear them all with Anvil.