Lots of News - lunaran.com

# Lunaran.com Matthew Breit Level Designer | Texture Artist

## Lots of News

#### Wed, Oct 2nd, 2002 | 11:12pm

I really thought I had gotten used to turning down game company emails. I could have sworn I could tell whoever was suggesting I email them back about whatever open position they had that I was turning them down in favor of continuing art school in the blink of an eye.

Then Raven Software emailed me. It wasn't another one of those "hey, you rock" emails like the one Blizzard sent me. Blizzard sent those to everybody they could find. Raven wanted me. So much so that the whole preliminary-job-prep stuff like conference calls and flights up to Raven's Madison, WI studios were already more or less in my lap.

Working on Quake4 ... how could I possibly turn that down? It was a huge opportunity - industry experience, alongside professionals, two hours from Chicago, level design, cooperation with Id on a Quake title with the Doom3 engine ...

... and dropping out of college? :(

Yeah. There's always a catch, and that was it. Job = no degree, at least for the time being. I was ready and willing to take two years off for the project and come back later ... except if I did that SCAD would be ready and willing to take my scholarship away and maybe keep the housing and tuition payments we've already made for the present school year I'd be skipping out on while they were at it.

With much reluctance, I turned Raven down.

But, it's gotten me quite spurred on a lot of things. First of all, the industry still likes me - enough so that Raven would go to all that trouble just over little old me. So, first things first, finish the website. That plan is two-pronged: first, get this one finally done, and maybe fix it up - get rid of this ugly ass desaturated blue thing and go with a simpler front page (maybe move the giant image to a splash page and just have a simpler title bar everywhere else), and second is a better satellite for the maps page than Fragland.

Sleepwalkr was extremely kind and gracious enough to offer me an account at fov120, his joint map website project with Aardappel. The mapping satellite will be moving there from it's currently dodgy home at Fragland. I'll be newsing that there too, and I thank fragland for at least being gracious hosts if the site was only up spottily.

The second is a new map. Lun3DM4. That's right. I can tell you're excited - I mean, Lun3DM3 was only downloaded a third as many times as Lun3DM1. :P I probably soured the audience with my rather funny looking and cramped Lun3DM2, but Fragland being down for a month starting the day after I released Lun3DM3 probably didn't help matters any. Pity when I feel it's my best map to date ... Regardless, seeing that someone like Raven could be that interested in me makes me thing maybe I oughta stop dicking about with this silly Coriolis Force thing and actually release some more single maps. If CF isn't moving, why waste the time?

What I'm going to make special about this map is that I'm doing a mapping journal for it, which I'll probably be lumping in the news rather than putting on a formal page just because I'm a git. I'll follow the planning and design, the texture work, the construction, the beta testing ... really open the processes up. Hell, maybe I'll release the .map file if I'm feeling extremely nice. :D I've already got some notes and new ideas scribbled down, and the Alien3/WW2 Industrial theme I've got in my head matches the textures I've already done for CF quite well, so expect more news shortly.

The changes are going to start rolling around here again and the screenshots are going to start popping up, so start checking back here on occasion.