A conversion project of mine. Toriel, Flowey and Frisk make for useful civilians in other games.

The child, Toriel and Sans are converted from Reaper models. Flowey is made from train set scenery and a lot of green stuff.

Quake 1

I’m replaying Quake. Quake is great.

Not just the gameplay (which is fast and fluid, with a healthy roster of distinct enemies), not just the graphics (aged but still effective) but the atmosphere. Quake has some of the best atmosphere I’ve ever heard. Heard is the word – the lighting and the theme of the graphics are part of this, but it’s the sound and music design of Quake that really make it shine.

Everybody likes to talk about Quake’s multiplayer, but I’m not that interested in Quake as a multiplayer franchise. It’s fun, but for me the real high point of Quake is in the single player. There’s simply no other game quite like it. We have a lot of brown shooters, but there’s only one Quake.

You’re a sci-fi military soldier, from some kind of brutalist retro-futuristic Earth, making his way through countless arcane dimensions and fighting against evil eldritch monsters. The worlds you visit are bleak, dark and very hostile . You are constantly made to feel like an intruder in a strange and darkly oppressive place, waiting for the next eyeless abomination to jump out from the shadows or teleport into the room with a distinct PING sound

Playing through Quake’s E4M2, with the lighting set just right and the sound turned up, was one of the best and most memorable shooting experiences I had last year.

The thought of a modern Quake reboot going back to the series’ dark fantasy Lovecraftian roots is tantalizing, though I wonder if it would be possible in today’s market. You never know though – Doom 2016 happened

Until then – get a sourceport, get the files, and play some Quake.

Quake and Texturing in Video Games

I can get quite anal about texture alignment in levels, so it’s nice to spot even minor errors in the commercial Id games. Quake’s e2m1 has a fairly infamous misaligned wall, but Doom and Quake both have lots of tiny, barely noticeable instances of textures misaligned or cut off due to awkwardly sized or sloped rooms.

Doom: Demonsteele

The Doom community is full of fantastically creative people and the above pictures are one example of this. These two characters are from TerminusEst’s mod Demonsteele. It turns Doom into 1st person Devil May Cry.

The first picture was originally posted on Tumblr by a user known as greenlegacy. The second picture was posted on Tumblr by a user known as
nankakurashiki.

E1M4 – Security Control

An empty version of E1M4 from my Doom 1 Episode 1 remake.

Knee Deep Again was my first foray into serious level design. It was made in Doombuilder 2 and is vanilla-compatible (it runs on the original software).

The aim was to remake Doom Episode 1 but offer remixed versions of the most iconic moments (ie, the stuff I remembered from playing when I was a kid). Level roster is as follows:

E1M1 : Spaceport
E1M2 : Nukage Tunnels
E1M3 : Processing Facility
E1M9 (Secret) : Excavation Site
E1M4 : Security Control
E1M5 : Specimen Lab
E1M6 : Silo Complex

There’s no E1M7 or E1M8 as of yet. I’d like to finish the whole episode but I’ve since started learning some advanced gzDoom tricks and DECORATE functions, and want to finish a project using some of those.

E1M2 – Nukage Tunnels

Knee Deep Again e1m2 – Nukage Tunnels. Part of a Doom 1 episode replacement I made in 2016, my first grown-up exploration of Doom level design.

This is only the second level, so I’m still new to the software in this screenshot, but you can see an increase in complexity as my confidence with the software grows.