What It's Like
What It’s Like is the first map I released under the name Defectus. It’s a semi-short walking simulator where the player traverses a series of descending “floors,” where each floor simulates (in a very abstract sense) an affliction of some kind - these being, in order: blindness, deafness, muteness, depression, and death.
The first 3 levels are mostly experimental, I was just curious to see what it would look like to simulate different disabilities in Minecraft. The fourth level was inspired by experiences I went through during the last few months I went by the name SpakeMiner.
Both tonally and conceptually, I think What It’s Like is quite jarringly different from anything seen in the SpakeMiner maps that I published before. This was intentional, as I wanted to distance myself from the SpakeMiner works both in style and in subject matter. To that end, I also wanted the behind-the-scenes layout of the map to be completely unrecognizable from the behind-the-scenes look of the SpakeMiner maps - which was often very messy. For example, here is a screenshot of the command block system in Focused Location 3:
Very messy, very ugly, very SpakeMiner-y. So for What It’s Like I wanted to build it differently. I came up with a tape-like system where command blocks were laid out in straight lines, with a marker entity moving across these lines, activating them in succession with a scoreboard timer to create delays between events. The result is what you see here:
This system also ended up being used in Arrendor, though with some modifications.
In hindsight, there was one detail that remained from the SpakeMiner maps which I neglected to lose (or maybe just couldn’t handle losing): the inclusion of music from the excellent soundtrack of The Beginner’s Guide, of which I was, and remain to this day, a huge fan (both the OST and the game itself). This map makes use of the track “Shutter,” and I believe Focused Location used the track “Va” near the beginning.
On the subject of The Beginner’s Guide, What It’s Like also lifts a design element directly from the game’s third chapter for the corridors:
What It’s Like also contains the first appearance of the NPC that would later be nicknamed “Bill” in Arrendor. Internally this NPC is referred to as BDM (the initials of the first 3 levels - Blindness, Deafness, Muteness). The original idea was for the character to appear in every Defectus map, each time with a different role, and he would act like a kind of benevolent G-Man, linking the maps somehow. This idea kind of fell apart with Internal Admiration, though.
