Happy Doomsday - lunaran.com

# Lunaran.com Matthew Breit Level Designer | Texture Artist

## Happy Doomsday

#### Tue, Aug 3rd, 2004 | 10:40am

Christmas and Doom are the only things I really update for anymore, it seems.

Best Buy opens at 10:00 AM, so I have to wait at least that long to partake in the nerdtastic ritual of paying too much on opening day. I could tolerate waiting a few days, you know, having a day job and all to occupy plenty of time, but I've already started working a little bit on my first planned project for Doom3. Although, don't ask how I can start on a mod for a game that isn't in stores yet. :ninja: More on that in mere seconds.

The QMap people (now the cellophane.net "func_board" people) long ago were all being, well, doomsayers about the game and how much it would suck. I recall playing the voice of reason and insisting the game would be totally awesome instead, but based on the alpha and early reviews I've read, the player's maddening slowness combined with some apparent cheapness on the part of id software in their level design (monsters continually spawning behind you? hadn't we moved beyond this by 1994?) may just ruin the experience.

It's also not an undocumented phenomenon for me to wind up hating highly anticipated and praised things. (See: 'Kill Bill,' 'Return of the King,' and '2001: A Space Oddysey' ... or, better yet, don't.)

Which brings me to the single player project I have in the works for this game. Lessons were learned with Coriolis Force, that lesson mainly being if you want it done right, ie at all, you have to do it yourself. It currently bears the working title of 'the Byzantine Project,' after the voice actor I recruited expressed concern that the original title was too close, ie identical, to the original Q1SP on which it is very very very loosely based. You intensely hardcore classic Quake guys out there might be able to figure out the project based on that info alone, so consider yourself lucky because that's all I'll reveal publicly for quite some time. I want to be able to back my shit up before I make noise this time.

Now, with this whole thing planned and underway, what happens if I turn out to hate the gameplay? Simple: I'll have to change it. I'll tweak monster damage, attack rate, player move speed, jump height, weapon damages, whatever it takes to move the gameplay in the direction I'd want it for this add-on. Quake's single player gameplay is still one of the only things I can go back and thoroughly enjoy (my special thanks, therefore, to mappers like czg and vondur who keep cranking out extremely original and fun maps 11 years after the game's release), so don't be surprised if an eventual Doom3 SP add-on from me doesn't sport wildly more Quakesque gameplay than the original Doom3.

For those of you who have emailed me asking where the mapping tutorials are, those are on the backburner until I sort out new hosting for this website. It's getting to be a burden being hosted off of an ADSL line, and while the efforts and resources of Monseigneur Eubank remain highly appreciated, due in no small part to the fact that they're free, tenbux a month seems a reasonable expenditure for the ability to host video and bigger files off of my website. It's not as if I can't afford it. As soon as I get off my ass and make that happen I'll be able to pull up stakes at fov120.com as well, having made a total ass of myself by asking for a site there (also free) solely for the purpose of having a better server for people to download my 5mb Q3 maps from and then not really doing much of anything with it except color it green.

For those of you who have emailed me about certain Q3 maps I'm supposed to be finishing up for you, I've written you back and I don't plan on abandoning your map so close to being finished. See 'getting off my ass' in previous paragraph.

Also, the site looks slightly different now, again. Eventually it'll mutate entirely into a blog, complete with a shift from Verdana to Georgia and a proliferation of dotted lines all over the place, and yet probably still somehow retain a lack of updates.