Coriolis Storm - lunaran.com

# Lunaran.com Matthew Breit Level Designer | Texture Artist

## Q3SP - Coriolis Force

#### Oct 22, 2002

I was hungering for the chance to map single player with the Quake3 engine, and revisit the Lun3DM1 theme in a manner sufficient to exhaust its possibilities (and capitalize on how popular it was), so I started an ambitious project to make a small single player mod for Quake3. Two years later, we still didn't have a single dedicated coder and the project languished.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Actually, some of the ideas still seem pretty good, it's just that they were murdered by close proximity to other ideas which were all very, very bad. One of these ideas was that I would assemble a team to help me finish this mod. I was well aware of how many mods died because they consisted mainly of one guy with ideas who wanted everyone else to do the work, but I figured I'd be different because I'd be doing a lot of work myself, and that people would be much more willing to help me because I was "that guy that did that desert map."

The premise was simple enough: take the theme I established in Lun3DM1 and use that as the base for a Quake3 single player mod. I'd use the game's preexisting player models, reskinned to look appropriate in the desert environment, as monsters, the game's items, the game's weapons and sounds, and I'd have a strong chance of success. All I had to do was make the maps and textures (which I did for a long time) and find a skinner (Harlequin filled that role for a while) and a programmer (cue evil music).

First there was Skull, whose intentions were good but succumbed to time constraints. Then came Hypnos, who flaked out. Then there was Mickey, who went broke and disappeared. Paul came and went quickly, as did Shazzz, and the closest I came to having a working mod was with Juz, who assured me he had an entire Q3SP thing already programmed that would fit my needs, that he never gave me, until the day he finally announced it had all been lost in the death of an IBM hard drive.

At that point, having made lots and lots of textures and several large chunks of several maps over several years, I threw up my hands and admitted that my mod was no different. I got quite a bit done - scorpion beasties were modelled and skinned, a few weapons were modelled, and I even started messing with the code myself (only far enough to alter the HUD).

I still maintain that, had it worked out, it would have been pretty damned good (certainly a lot better than the Dark Conjunction), but I'm obviously going to think that anyway. The design document was clearly too ambitious, because the project grew from maybe a map or two and some bad guys to a whole big involved thing with story and new weapons and etc. I think perhaps that I had inklings very early on that I wouldn't get far with the project, and got all the creative amusement out of it that I could by letting feature creep take the reins.