Design

Things Mek has been working on the past week and a half:

– My MAP32 replacement for Claustrophobia 1024.
– Two speedmapp’d contributions to the Duel Surge II project being directed by Wagi (because my DS1 contributions were god awful).
– Contributing a font set to Blasphemer, a free-game project similar to Heretic. The latest version is actually using my font set!
– Graphic replacements for Vaporware (notice there is no link this time…MWAHAHAHA). Currently working on a new font set; BIGFONT, smallfont, and console font.
– Reading and re-reading the IGPack review by Xaser in /newstuff #336. IGPack can now be downloaded via it’s /idgames page. The download link to IGPack on it’s ‘Design’ page has been updated to the /idgames link as well.
– Admiring the Cacoward nomination of IGPack by ScubaSteve. But then realizing that it’ll never beat out GvH or UDMX :scared:
– Trying to find the soundtrack to this game. I’ve been looking for 3 or 4 years and still…nothing :/
– Destroying my digital camera.
– Trying to figure out why I’m slowly descending into madness before it’s too late.
– Presenting a list of things I’ve done in the past 9 to 10 days on the Mekworx blog in the 3rd person.

First, let’s take a look at this map I’m working on for Claustrophobia 1024. The latest checkpoint for contributors to post progress of their maps was Jan. 31st. So I posted screenshots of my final contribution to the project for my report. The name I came up with during it’s development was ‘Claustrophopolis’. Didn’t I cover some info on that map in my last blog post? Yea, I think I did…anyways, here are some screenshots:

For those of you with keen eyes out there you’ll notice the textures probably aren’t very familiar. That’s because these are esseltextures, and they are awesome. Essel’s texture pack is still a work-in-progress right now, but what he has made so far looks excellent. I made a few variants based off of his textures to be used in this map. Also, some of the textures are out of date in the current version of my texture resource, so I have to update it before I work on the map again.

Moving on, we come to my contributions to Duel Surge 2. The original Duel Surge was pretty good; it had it’s good and bad maps, just like any other community-based project. Maybe it’s just my creator’s bias, but I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the two maps I contributed to the original Duel Surge. Then Wagi started Duel Surge II with what promised to set a much higher bar for quality control. Initially I wasn’t planning on contributing anything since I was busy. Erm, well of course I was busy…I’m ALWAYS busy. But I got bored doing graphic work a few nights ago so I did a quick speedmap for DSII. Turns out it came out pretty well! So I decided to do another speedmap which, I think, came out even better than the first. Wagi has already said that both maps will make it into the project, which is very cool :dance: Here are some screenshots of the first map I did entitled ‘Gavel’.

The map is the better-behaved, non-offical sequel to the duel map ‘Ushasu’ (which currently doesn’t have a page yet). The only thing linking the two maps is the CR8 textures I used; that’s it. The original Ushasu map was a speedmap I did when I got bored one day (hmmm) after playing a game of Judas. I was working on the CR8 texture pack at the time (which also doesn’t have a page yet) so I decided to do a duel map similar to Judas using the CR8 textures. It was Boom compatible but it was never really played by anyone, so I figured tweaking it to be used in Duel Surge would be cool. Too bad the original map was entirely too confusing and cramped :(. The 2nd speedmap I finished in about 2 days – 30-ish minutes for the base layout and then a few hours to detail and iron the map out completely. I actually love the layout of the map, but after finishing it up I thought it might be too big for a duel map. Wagi disagreed with me when I released it. He said, and I quote, “It’s just the right size for a Duel map. Playing the map, I have never seen a map flow so well in my life!“. So I was pretty happy :D. I named the map ‘Disengage’. Screenshooters ahoy!

To end this image-filled blog post on a celebratory note, I’d like to wish a Happeh Birfdeh to Carnevil and Catman. Have a good one guys :yay: