Hey folks! I just realized earlier today that I haven’t made my mandated yearly Mekworx post. And it was good timing too seeing as how (at the time of me writing this), there’s roughly 6 hours left in 2021 in my part of the world. Guess I better type fast!
Actually I’m going to keep this one somewhat short and sweet. I’m going to focus on Supplice and how things have been going with it this past year. And I’ve got lots of screenshots to share!
Last year’s update post hinted at the future of Supplice, but as you guys may know by now, we’ve got a publisher behind us – Hyperstrange! We also made a showing at Realms Deep 2021; check out our reveal trailer! And on top of all that, we also released a small demo as part of a Steam promotion event. You can download the demo from our Steam page…and if you’re feeling generous, wishlist the game while you’re at it 
So things have been going pretty well for the project this year. I think I still don’t fully grasp just how crazy things have been. There’s no way I could have predicted that Supplice would end up becoming its own stand-alone game with a publisher and a Steam page and…yea, its wild how far this thing has come.
We’ve got a solid plan for Supplice moving forward into 2022. There’s still a mountain of work left to do, but my personal goal is to try and have the first two episodes finished by the end of the year. Thankfully we’ve got a couple extra mappers on board to help out with that (Jimmy and Xaser, so you guys are in good hands). I’ll admit that the pressure has gotten to me a bit on the mapping front, particularly now that we’re pushing the game onto a much larger audience. That’s going to be my main hurdle to get over this coming year.
Speaking of maps, I was finally able to let people play the two finished maps, which shipped in the demo. It was cathartic to have those out in the public after so many years. We got some great feedback on the maps and the demo as a whole. And sadly I didn’t have time to update the maps as much as I would have liked prior to the release (we were doing a mad dash to get the demo ready before the deadline). But on the whole, I think the reception to the maps was very positive. After the demo released and the feedback came in, I spent time on both maps to update the gameplay/flow and to get the visuals up to par.
Outpost Romeda in particular had some really dumb flow problems that I couldn’t resolve. I thought I was going to have to rip out chunks of the map to fix them. But after the demo, I was able to fix most of them after some creative noodling (and address issues brought up by players). Another issue I had with it was how “Doom” it looked. I don’t know how best to describe what I mean here, but essentially the visuals of the map weren’t really in line with what I want in E1. Unfortunately this isn’t something that’s easily fixed, but I did address the fidelity problem. So Outpost Romeda will be somewhat of an outlier map in E1; it’ll likely be the biggest, most complex map in the episode and will deviate somewhat from the mainline theme. Anyways blah blah blah, here are some screenshots of the updated areas.
Terminal Melt, the 2nd map in the demo, didn’t have as many problems as Outpost Romeda. And I didn’t get as many complaints from players for it either. There were a few problems areas that I was able to resolve adequately, particularly the loop-back to the exit path from the double water tower fight. I spent a bit more time updating the visuals here as well. The exit was moved out into the rocky/icy area to the west, which was something I wanted to do for a while, but I didn’t have time to do it for the demo (it required setting up a portal to get around some icky sky walls). Here are some screenshots (which haven’t been posted anywhere else yet).
I realize now that I’ve re-posted screenshots of both of these maps probably 5 times over the years 
. Sorry about that! Here’s something new~ish if you don’t stalk our Twitter or our project threads.
This is Tantalus, a map for Episode 2. I finished up the layout+detailing for this map back in July. And it took me way too damn long to make, but I’m quite happy with the end result. I haven’t implemented any of the gameplay elements yet, but that will come soon. The whole map is a multi-layer spacestation. It centers around some light puzzle elements where you’ll have to drop keys and items down through vertical shafts in order to progress. I went kinda nuts with the portal usage here and I’m hoping that doesn’t impact performance too much. But visually speaking, I think it nailed how we want E2 to look.
Here’s something we did for fun recently – a “Suppliced” E1M1. This came from a fun little Twitter challenge between some of the other retro FPS devs. I spent a couple of days on it, but it actually came out pretty cool looking. Hopefully we’ll be able to release it in some form later on 
In way less interesting news, the site has been updated to the latest version of WordPress. Woohoo 
And that’s all I’ve got! Since I can only muster the energy to do 1 post per year, consider checking out our Twitter page for more Supplice updates. We usually do #ScreenshotSaturday posts when we’ve got something new/interesting to show off.
Take care and have a safe New Years!