Design

So Doom’s 16th birthday has come and gone. I was gonna celebrate by playing some Episode 1 while eating some cake, but I was too busy most of the day (I did play a little bit…no cake though ). For you Doom-heads out there, I’m sure you caught this year’s Cacowards. It’s been a really great year for releases and quite the busy one for me. Of the wads that won awards, I really enjoyed and highly recommend Harmony by Thomas van der Velden, Mapgame by Ravage, Plutonia 2, and UDMX by UniDoom. I’ve still got to play though some of the other awarded maps, but those that I listed are definitely my favorites this year. (I’ve heard very good things about Demons of Problematique 2 and Legacy of Suffering). But the biggest surprise of all…I won the award for the year’s best mapper!! Wow…, I think it didn’t really hit me until today. It’s really a huge honor and I’m still kinda dumbstruck by all of it. Of course the irony in all of this now is that my popular nickname of “Lazyadon” is now more ironic than true, which I find hilarious! Anyways, as I said in a comment of Carn’s Vega post about my award, I realize that in the larger scheme of things, this is just an award from a community of a 16 year old game that most of the regular video game population pays no attention to these days. So maybe my shock and appreciation seems a bit out of place given that. But for me, I find it too awesome for words. Doom mapping…well, mapping in general, has become a significant activity in my life and I enjoy it very much. This award only shows that people truly do enjoy my efforts and work and it makes me want to stick around for the long haul and keep contributing to the community at large. And that’s most likely what I’ll do . So thanks to everyone who thought I deserved this award! I cannot put into words how much I appreciate it and I intended to stick around and keep mapping for a long time to come. Also congratulations to everyone who won an award and to everyone else who was nominated! I’ll be looking forward to what’s in store this coming year with much anticipation. I can’t wait to get my trophy in the mail Scuba Steve!

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Oh, did you think that was it? Well, it’s not. pcorf happened to mention that he would love to see a “WOS” style wad by me in the Cacoward thread at Doomworld. Incidentally, I’ve been planning just such a project for a really long time now (since IGPack release…maybe a little earlier). I wasn’t sure when I wanted to announce it to the public, but his comment made me want to just post a little snippet about it. The name of this project is “Supplice” and production officially started 6/14/2009 (around the same time I was having those computer issues and was unable to work on Vega). I’m planning on another post later on to discuss the overall goals of the project, but I’ll go ahead and say just a bit about it. It’s going to be a Boom compatible, singleplayer map set (possibly COOP compatible). Lots of my inspiration will likely come from wads like Scythe II, Suspended in Dusk, etc and from mapper’s such as Vader, Espi, esselfortium, Dutch Devil, Agent Spork, afterglow, and a few others. One big thing I want is for the majority of the content to be made by me and me alone. So things like new textures, monsters, graphics, music, sprites and maps (duh) will all be made by my own hands. Certain things I’ll probably have to outsource (like monsters sprites and, possibly, music). I want the general theme to follow closely to Doom’s theme but at the same time I want it to have it’s own feel and atmosphere. It may even have some sort of crudely written skeleton story that will stem from the Doom saga in some way. At the moment I’m doing ALL of the resources first; mapping will only start once that’s out of the way (I can only focus on one thing at a time). So far I’ve made some graphics, a bunch of textures, and some new monster behaviors but that’s it. I haven’t been able to work on it (or much else) since I’ve been working though. I’ll make another wordy, drawn-out post about it later on where I can go into more depth about the project’s goals. So let’s leave it at that for now.

However, if your reading this and your getting excited, then just get yourself unexcited . The biggest reason why I didn’t want to announce this was because I have no timeline set for this project. As in, I’m putting the largest majority of my free time into Project Vega first and foremost. I will only work on Supplice when I can, and I have no idea how often that will be. And given the project’s scope and size, it’s likely it will take a very long time before anything of interest is presentable. But I can atleast say this; I plan on working on it and finishing it as long as I’m able. So if you are truly interested, keep your eye’s peeled for my official announcement post sometime in the future.