Blog

Hey, I have a website! Wow I must have completely forgotten since I never, ever make new posts on it. Ever.

Actually don’t look for my lack-of-posting habits to change anytime soon. I’ve pretty much relegated this place to semi-portfolio status while ditching the blogging aspect of it. I just don’t have the time or motivation to make regular posts, particularly not involving my personal on-goings. I’ll still make Doom and game related posts on a whimsical schedule though.

So hey, what’s the big deal with making a new post all of a sudden? Well, I decided to make some updates to the site, particularly the Design page. I’ve had a few things released and some updates for in-progress projects that really needed to be reflected in the design page. Also WordPress, along with a few plugins, has been out-of-date for over a year now. And while I’m here, I figured some updates on my going-ons would be in order.

So first of all, Mekworx is now running on WordPress 4.0! Is that a good thing? Does it matter? Is it worth 30 seconds of typing to mention it? Too late, I already did.

Oh yea, and something really cool – on October 30th, Mekworx will be 6 years old! Holy wowow

The logo and favicon have both been updated (favicons are notoriously stubborn to update, at least in Firefox). The old logo was kind of rough looking, as was the one before it. This one is…better? I guess its better, but I’ll probably get sick of it before too long. It looks a bit cleaner at least.

A few broken links have been removed from the links section as well. Sorry if I removed your link and it was, in fact, working. I just ran through them really quickly and removed the ones that no longer worked. If you want me to re-add your link to the site, I’d be more than happy to do that if you provide me with a working one. I’m not going to hold me breathe though since 1 or 2 people, at the most, may end up reading this

A few things have been updated on the Design page itself. The Back to Saturn X page has been split into three new pages, one for each of the three episodes – Episode 1, Episode 2, and Episode 3. The Toke It Up project page has been moved to “Unknown” status since I have no idea what happened to that project; it was very close to completion and…that’s it, sadly . And there is now a 32in24-13: A THANKSGIVING WITH NO BURGERS project page…which just goes to show how long I’ve procrastinated this site update.

Two new font sets have been added to the Fonts page – Shatterhand and Denex. Both sets have big and small fonts, so check ’em out. FreeDoom is using Denex, which is pretty cool!

In the future, I will be making a new texture pack release which has a bunch of rejected/unused sky textures I’ve made over the years (mostly for Vela Pax). I made a post @Doomworld which contained most of them, but it was a spur-of-the-moment kind of release. So I’ll get around to putting them in a more presentable package sometime in the future.

In slightly bigger news, I have updated the Vela Pax project page with brand-new screenshots for each map. The project description and releases have also been updated. I’d like to say that I have been making huge strides on Vela Pax in the past few months. But then I would be a filthy, stinky liar if I did. Since my last big push on MAP04 back sometime in June/July, I have stopped working on the project completely. Thanks in part to some other projects, but also because my motivation tends work like a bottle rocket – hot and fast but with a disappointing “pop” a short time later. I’ve given up on setting any sort of deadlines on this project, so don’t expect any.

And Supplice? It’s going through a metamorphosis right now. We’re hoping it will emerge into a beautiful butterfly once its done.

But hey, what about Project Retrograde? I never ever mention it these days…why is that? The last year~ish has been kind of rocky and slow, unfortunately. I’m not going to mention specifics, but we’ve had some personal issues really slow us down. I’ve written what amounts to a novel for one of our design documents (that could be a good thing and a bad thing…). The contents and ideas we’ve come up with so far have me extremely excited, but the problems we’ve been encountering have just bogged us down a lot. Recently we were planning on putting ourselves back out into the public eye. Buuuut that may have to hold off for a bit longer thanks to some more problems. It sucks, yes, but these things have to be expected. Especially since we are working on very ambitious things in our free time without any sort of pay. Real life events must always take priority.

To end on a lighter note, Back to Saturn X Episode 2 public beta was released at the beginning of this month! The Doomworld Megawad Club has ran through the entire thing and given the team lots of feedback. So you should grab it and play through it too!

Want a treat before you go? Here’s a bit of concept art, courtesy of Vader, for one of the Project Retrograde projects. Fingers crossed, we’ll be working on this thing again sometime soon. And hopefully we’ll be posting more stuff like this in the near future too.

Oh, and go buy/play Wrack! It came out today and its pretty dang spiffy! And I’m not saying that just because it has the most beautifully crafted crosshairs ever created by mortals hands…