Design

The title is a poor attempt at me being clever in relation to claustrophobia. I mean the project and the fear. Eh, nevermind. Recently I haven’t been doing a whole lot. After I finished working on IGPack, I’ve been sorta do-less. Probably because I’ve been long overdue for a break from…everything I’ve been trying to get my money’s worth on my XBL gold account since it expires this month…but other than that, I haven’t been doing a whole lot. What I have been doing prior to this large wave of lazy is work on Claustrophobia 1024. By work on I mean I’ve been chipping away at my final submission to the project, giving feedback on maps when I get the time, and doing general management stuff. Claustrophobia is the last big Doom project I’ve got on my plate to finish….erm, besides secret, not-so-urgent stuff. It’s also the last community project I plan on doing for a long time. Geez, community projects sure can make ya tired…and hungry!

As far as Claustrophobia goes, we’re actually coming along quite well. I’ve been gone for a few days, but I’m pretty sure we’re very VERY close to accepting 32 maps; the overflow makes that number much much higher. So far I’m pretty satisfied with how the quality of the maps are and how well the contributors have worked with me and each other. My only regret this far into the project is that I added too many Quake and Quake-esq textures to the resource :fag: Though some of the more recent maps have taken the high road and have went with a healthy mixing of texture palettes, which should help balance out the theme of the project as a whole. But in the end, as long as it’s fun, I’ll be happy. I also need to think of a good way to do testing. Initially when I gained control over the entire project, I was going to have some friends of mine to help test new maps that are submitted in IRC; that plan fell through since I never get on IRC. However esselfortium has been extra helpful with testing and with having enough patience to deal with all of the ignorant-laden questions I keep asking him. I’ll definitely have to give him lots of credit for that. Since we have so many accepted maps, the project should be pretty close to testing. One idea I thought of was just lumping all 32 accepted maps into a .zip and all of the overflow maps into a separate .zip and send them off to various trusted folks for testing. Beyond that I don’t have any other ideas, though that one seems to be the quickest/easiest way. I also need to set a map deadline pretty soon as well.

All that really remains for me in terms of work for Claus1024 is to finish up my map and fix the resources (and maybe give more in-depth feedback if possible…though the last batch I did took me 6 hours to do). I’m working on a MAP32 replacement. It’s using an entirely different resource set from the 1024-2 set. I decided that I wanted something that looked different, and luckily for me around that same time esselfortium made a pretty awesome batch of new textures (which he’s still working on). So right now it’s using 95% esseltex, and I must say I really love how the map is looking because of it. There are a few edits by your truly in it as well as a handful of 1024-2 resources, but so far it’s coming together nicely. No screenshots yet, though it is pretty close to being completed in terms of layout/detail. I haven’t added any monsters/items/gameplay yet…I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that portion will come together well. Oh, I forgot to mention: the map is somewhat inspired by MAP32 of Congestion 1024. Except that it’s horribly symmetrical (I was shooting for something asymmetrical…yet somehow, that didn’t work). Oh well…enough blogging for today :hurr: