Mekablog

Hello internet, long time no see . Yea, this poor place has been neglected by me as of late. Truth be told, I haven’t felt like posting anything. Mostly because I haven’t done much Doom-related things lately. Chalk it up to lack of motivation/being burned out/etc. But I figured a small update might be worthwhile, at least to make the site not look so dead.

First though, I want to share some links. First, check out Cage’s Corner. Cage is the main graphics guru working with me on Supplice, and he is an extremely talented dude. He also has a portfolio (which he recently updated), but Cage’s Corner is focused more on video game artwork. He has some resources posted there as well as some tutorials and previews of some projects he’s working on. I believe he will be adding new tutorials over time, so be sure to check those out!

The other link I want to share is Doom Radio. It is a podcast which initially started out as Tango TV (I prefer that name because Tango is da man ). The idea was to have interviews with members of the Doom community, including mapper’s, coders, speedrunners, comp players, and so on. The idea grew and its a pretty popular podcast now, which I enjoy listing to! Granted this is probably going to be more interesting to people who are close to the Doom community, but I figured it was worthwhile to mention here. Tarnsman and Alfonzo run most the interviews and discussions I believe, but most of the questions comes from the community at large. I’ve been offered to do an interview, which I think would be pretty cool! But I don’t have a mic so I don’t know if or when that will happen

I’ll be adding both links to the sidebar by the way. So if your looking for them and you can’t find this post for whatever reason, they will be under the links section.

So I guess while I’m here I should say something in regards to my various projects. So hey, let’s do that!

I sent out private test candidates of Vela Pax after I finished up making my fixes and edits to MAP05 (you can see some screenshots in that link). I got a ton of great feedback from the testers that reported in. My good bud Jimmy even took the time to stream a complete run of the finished maps on his Twitch.tv channel. You can check out the streams here – Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Also as you can see above, Vader was able to help me tweak the logo! I had plans to make the logo semi-corrupted by demon flesh, similar to the logo in a NES game called Abadox. But all of my attempts looked terrible. So Vader stepped in and made those awesome edits! A huge thanks goes out to him for his help

Unfortunately I haven’t touched Vela Pax since I released that test candidate. I pushed pretty hard tweaking and fixing the complete maps beforehand, and I think I just burnt myself out pretty bad this time. Usually when I do this I’m ready to do more mapping in a few weeks or so. But lately I have had zero motivation to map or play Doom or anything. I still lurk forums and see what people are making, but that’s about all I’ve done. Attentive readers will probably remember that I was planning on finishing Vela Pax before the end of 2013, which would be a pretty cool thing to do since Doom’s 20th birthday is coming up. Is that still going to happen? The short answer is “no”. The long answer is, I have no idea when its going to be finished, but it definitely isn’t going to be finished by the end of this year. Which really sucks, I admit, but I won’t work on the project when I’m not in the mood. Otherwise I’ll end up making something that will suck and that’s just a waste of time.

I can’t remember if I announced this here or not, but Supplice has been in a state of hiatus for many months now. There were a couple of reasons for this, but the catalyst for the decision was because our resident artist Cage was having some life-related issues. So I just decided to put the project on hold. Though don’t get “hiatus” and “cancelled” confused; Supplice is far, far from being cancelled! The team put in a huge amount of effort before we stopped, and I think most of us really needed a good break. I was planning on finishing Vela Pax before even coming back to Supplice in any active capacity, and I believe Cage was hoping to get back to work on HacX 2.0 after getting some more free time. So Supplice has been simmering on the backburner and, rest assured, we will continue making progress at some time in the future!

Note that I have plans to make some DM maps for Supplice. So what I may do sometime soon is use some of my past 32-in-24 maps and retexture them with Supplice’s resources. That would at least give me some screenshot fodder

When I’m not being completely distracted by watching longplays, TAS videos, or playing Tribes: Ascend, I’m working on the many facets of Retrograde. My creative interests tend to run in cycles, and our current mini-project has been the focus of my mental ponderings. I’m starting to think that the many years of Doom mapping are taking their toll on me, because I have a really powerful drive to create something that isn’t Doom related. And we have been making some pretty awesome progress on this latest project because of that.

I’m hoping that sometime soon we’ll make a dev-blog post about the project. The project in question is codenamed “Build-a-Bot“, and we announced it over a year ago as you can see. Since then the project has been moving slowly but steadily towards a point where we will be able to start making gameplay and visual content. I recently finished a revised design document which has refined some of the mechanics in the original concept. The game is going to be a mix of Armored Core, Bangai-O, Soldat, Gunstar Heros, and some other games.

So far we’ve got the following dudes on board – VortexCortex, Jimmy, Vader, and myself. Vortex is the code guy and overall genius. Jimmy is the musical genie. Vader helping me with concept art and may also lend his fantastic skills to the rest of the game. And right now I’m the main game design creator trying, but failing, to sketch out some game entities for the concept art . Overall the general project’s goal have got me extremely excited and I think that excitement has been pushing me very hard lately. Which could be one reason why I haven’t touched Doom in a while, heh.

Oh, and wouldn’t ya know it? Mekworx’s 5th birthday just flew right past me! So hey, a big ole thanks goes out to Wartorn for continuing to host this place even though I neglect it so badly