Design

Starting a few days ago, I decided to take a break from all of my projects. I was starting to feel a little burned out, and the only solution for that is to take a break and do something else. Like play games! And so that’s what I’ve been doing…playing Armored Core, Soldat, Lumines, and Final Fantasy Tactics. Of course, games tend to get boring after a bit (moreso the older I get, it seems). So I’ve been keeping myself busy with a slew of other actives as well. Every year my folks and I put out a vegetable garden. So we planted the majority of our vegetables a few days ago. The past few years the weather hasn’t been very kind to our efforts. One year it was too dry and a lot of our plants didn’t put out very much. The year before that, we got too much rain and lots of the vegetables rotted before we could even get a chance to pick them. So far this year it has been very wet, but recently the sun has decided to peek through the clouds. So we have our fingers crossed. Some other things I’ve done are pick some strawberries at a large farm, rearrange my room, made a list of things that needs to be repaired around the house, cleaned my old PS2 that has been sitting in storage for a few years, and reorganized my game collection. One thing I’ve learned so far is that I don’t really have that many other hobbies aside from Doom modding…which makes me wonder if I should be expanding my horizons or something . But that probably won’t happen, heh. Before my hiatus, I found a couple things on Ebay that I wanted to buy. But since I almost never use my Paypal account, I had to verify it again before I could send any money. Soooo that has been the main reason why I’m even on the computer to begin with (don’t even get me started on the nightmare it has been to get all of that figured out). It’s about 1:00 AM here and I’m bored after talking to Ebay/Paypal customer service 4 times today…so here I am making a post.

There’s not a whole lot to bring up on the Doom project front, although progress on Supplice has been moving along pretty steadily now. I have been trying to work on map textures since I started working again, but it has been a little rough going since I’m an amateur. I really wanted to get someone else more talented on board. So I contacted Cage from the ZDoom forums to see if he would have the time and interest to help out. I don’t have any links handy to show off his work, but if you are familiar with him, then you’ll know that he is very, very talented. At first I didn’t think he would have the time to contribute, but he surprised me by joining up and even going as far as setting up a Dropbox folder to keep the project organized and accessible to everyone working on it. So far the work he has done is amazing and I think it will be safe to say that Supplice will definitely look very cool. In the mean time I have been working on the dehacked and some minor texture/sprite/graphic work (well, I was before I took a break ). I’m hoping to have a test map finished to show off the new textures and sprites to the public sometime soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that!

Somehow I doubt anyone here actually noticed, but I mentioned a few posts ago that I have been working on a design document for a brand new game. It has probably been a year since the big Project Vega cancellation mess, but that event is what has been driving me to make this design document. I got a taste of what making a game is like, and I was really disappointed and frustrated when development hit a brick wall. So I figured that perhaps I could give it a try. Granted my skill set is more on the art-side of game creation and not on the technical/engine side…but I’m getting some great help with that now :wink: . The general idea behind the game is to create a first-person shooter that is very fast paced but varied and focused on oldschool visual aesthetics with some modern features to enhance the experience. We also want to make it very modding and mapping friendly and we also hope to release the source code to the public down the line. If all goes according to plan, we hope to be able to sell the game for a modest profit and then maybe even start a small indie game design company with the team that ends up working on the game. So far the kicker for us is the art style I’m hoping to use – oldschool, early 90’s, low-res, pixely-style realistic FPS. That may not make much sense as you read it, but the idea is to place as much emphasis as possible on a sort of “pixel art” style where art assets are intentionally low-res and very crunchy looking. Your probably thinking to yourself “how is that realistic?”. That may not be the case today, but with games like Doom or DN3D, they were “realistic” for their time (or at least very immersive). So instead of going with a cartoon or modern-day realistic approach, I’m looking to take an olschool aesthetic that some think looks bad and dated and turn it into an art style. In fact you see it pretty often these days with the indie game movement…many developers are going back to the oldschool roots and the results have been very surprising (Minecraft is a good example as far as visuals are concerned). I’m hoping the end results will look something like Doom’s software render, except without the color or freelook or map limitations (maybe Quake’s software renderer would be a better example). And that’s all I’m willing to divulge about the project right now

I’m not usually so hush-hush about my projects during their planning stages. But I am with this one in particular because of its nature. In terms of scale, it is a massive and ambitious undertaking…and that’s just the design document! I’ve been trying to plan and detail everything single thing I can including the theme and setting, the game entities, features, maps, editing process, the engine, the user interface…you name it, I’m conceptualizing it. When I started working on it, I didn’t think it would be this mentally demanding. There are so many different facets that need to be covered (sometime in deep detail), especially since the game is planned to be entirely from-scratch. At the moment my small team has made some excellent progress on figuring out some of the various features and mechanics that the game will employ; while I haven’t organized all of the discussions into the document yet, it will place me over the half-way mark once I do. My plan is to distribute the finished design document to various candidates to try and pull in some talented contributors. From there, if we’re lucky, the real work will begin! Until that time, if anyone is interested, we would love to have a few more talented (and discreet) people on board to discuss and help pull the design document and technology together. If you are interested, please contact me via email or through this site. Be prepared to have some materials to show what your capable of doing too!

Well I guess this post turned out to be more about my projects rather than the other stuff I’ve been doing. So much for my hiatus