I learned how to draw and animate flames in GIMP. It is ridiculously easy if you know how. Uses a q3a animMap shader. I’ll add some particles and whatnot, and I hope to get the billboard rotating correctly. Textures are placeholders.

Walltorch model done in Blender, as usual.

Game making continues with some happy drawing.

There might be more where that comes from.

All rights reserved.

We’ve got an inventory, and we’re getting a first glimpse at Scout (well not quite the first one, but still).

Scout carries a bag with 36 slots in it (no weight limit – it’s a magic bag). Additionally there are 5 slots for charms (think powerups) and 9 slots for weapons and tools. That’s 50 slots. She can carry lots of weapons, but can only ever have one of each type equipped;

• melee weapon;
• sidearm;
• main weapon;
• heavy weapon;
• special.

On top of that she can carry a trap and a couple grenades.

Items in the inventoy slots stack.

The appearance of Scout herself here is pretty final. I wanted her to look likeable but durable, and reminescent of ’90s game heroes. And most of all, no chainmail bikinis.

In case you’re wondering about the look, there is a good reason for it that’ll become clear during the game.

Work in progress, all rights reserved. And this one actually passed the censorship.

We recently made good progress with designing the HUD layout and its various elements. I came up with an art style that ties into the game’s story and developed a workflow to get stuff from the drawing board into GIMP and then into CSQC, and devised a method for animating 2D HUD elements.

I’m also at a point now where I find I really don’t want to share everything with the public anymore, because stuff like the skill tree and so forth just contain too many spoilers. I’m not averse to dropping hints though, for anyone who’s willing to puzzle them out. This is why parts of the tree are hidden.

Anyway. Scout’s Journey has two HUDs.

• the standard ingame HUD which is now completely diegetic, meaning there are no numbers or icons present on the game screen whatsoever, and all the info is inside the actual game;
• the wordy HUD which actually is also going to be diegetic, meaning tied to an ingame thing, but consists of several interactive (mouse) pages of info. The skill tree pictured above is one of those pages.

My thanks go to gnounc for CSQC help, tutorials, mods, HUD ideas, and telling me to drop the stuff that wasn’t needed (in the end, we decided to drop the web browser from the HUD after all). And to Spike for more HUD ideas, technical info and general witchcraft.

I’m sorry to announce that there will neither be an integrated X server nor automatic playing of Binge videos.

Apart from all that, there is now a new game mechanic that should reward exploration even more. This new thing is inspired by literature and has quite some horror potential. It is not connected to loot, rather an extension of the game’s setting.

Finally sat down and started doing hands/arms for the viewmodels.

This is my first attempt at modeling a hand ever, and I didn’t have any reference besides my own hands. It’s not finished, but I think this is more than OK.

There was a point shortly after I began where I was quite shocked at how difficult it was to get the shape right and how bad my mesh looked. I guess it pays off to persevere and keep trying. I’m sure I made all kinds of mistakes here, but I have a hand that looks like a hand.

This was surprisingly hard. It was interesting to really have to push my limits. I look forward to modeling faces…

What are patch meshes and what can be done with them? Read it all here.

Radiant / FTE / Darkplaces / Q3bsp only.

This is a bit like an engineer trying to explain “how does a car work”, because the more experienced level designers do this in their sleep.

I believe these tutorials are worth it, though, if we can get even a handful of people interested in making their own game levels. Hobbyist level design is a dying craft. We need to go out of our way to invite and help new people get into it.

Making your own level is a rewarding experience, even if it may seem like such an obscure thing and such a steep hill to climb. The first time you load up your own DOOM, Quake, Unreal, Half-Life or Tomb Raider level is an awesome experience. It’s like you created this entire new world to explore.

Anyway, here is the tut.

Slow progress on another Herd weapon.

The Herd faction came into being when, faced with annihilation by the Order, human survivors flocked to the banner of one Colonel Hastings, who claimed to have received a vision of the Order’s god – Naruuk the Star-Eater, known to most of his victims only as “The Enemy”.

Grudgingly, when their own god spoke to the Abbots and confirmed Hastings’ story, the Order had to stop short of conquest and leave some power in the hands of this rag-tag band of ex-soldiers.

Within days, Hastings – now calling himself “Lord” following the example of Order leadership – managed to forge his desperate group into a fanatic cult of the Star-Eater, armed to the teeth and rivaling the Order itself in power.

His word was the law, and the Enemy’s worship became mandatory. The soldiers who had survived the failure of Operation Iron Shield were forcibly converted or put against the wall. Five days after the events at the portal, EUFOR attempted to bomb the excavation site off the face of the earth. They were unsuccessful. An advance into the site by an armoured division was repelled by what was deemed to be an unknown enemy force. A foray carried out by an intelligence squad ended in a complete loss.

Weeks went by. Inside the perimeter, among the eerie silence, propaganda graffiti are starting to appear, and not all of them are in favour of the Herd. Has the unthinkable happened?

There are rumours about a “Project Banshee”, and something allegedly called the Sisterhood. Other rumours concern “fraternization” with the Tribals, and species that dwell even deeper in the dimensional core. Some people claim to have had visions, not all of them of the Star-Eater. Some Herd subcommanders are said to have ambitions.

And then, of course, there is the matter of the Intruder. It seems increasingly likely that her continuing defiance is facilitated by others. All is not well in the Herd. Something is rotten, that much seems certain.

My Hexen 2 map — as gnounc put it — “exploded”. This morning, after collecting my teeth from the concrete wall of Hexen 2′s BSP format limit, I gave it a look in FBSP. I think it’s not too shabby. The FBSP conversion messed with the lighting, but that can be fixed.

Actually, I think this is Scout’s Journey material. It might just have been fate’s trick to get me to make another SJ level, after all. Spike pointed out that Hexen 2′s additional clipping hulls eat into the same clipnodes limit that is familiar from Quake, meaning the clipnodes limit in Hexen 2 is effectively much lower than in Quake. Sadly, that makes a lot of sense, and sadly, that is a hardcoded limit. This is too much for poor Hexen 2.

So, while I would have liked to release this as a Hexen 2 map, technically it’s just too complex for that game. But in every disaster, there’s a gleam of hope, or something like that…

Say hello to another Scout’s Journey level — number six in the lineup.