Out of the Frying Pan - lunaran.com

# Lunaran.com Matthew Breit Level Designer | Texture Artist

## Out of the Frying Pan

#### Mon, Jul 2nd, 2001 | 9:43pm

With the final completion of high school, the shipment of Lun3DM3 for my own sanity, and the end of the evil dreaded Contract Work, I've finally been able to devote the whole of my attention to Coriolis Force. What I found once I devoted it there wasn't very pretty.

There are a million things that all have to be done. I've scaled back the project again and again and just the bare minimum of having to produce a single player PC for Quake3 is almost too daunting. It doesn't matter how many maps I cut out of the design or shrink and merge, there's still a certain minumum threshhold of things that need to be done, content that needs to be generated, and work that needs to be completed in order to get this bird to fly. At the moment this bird is a fucking ugly ostrich with no feathers.

Ever since the original Q3SP mod collapsed underneath me, trying to finish Coriolis Force has been one long string of failures. I just can't fucking get anyone to help me, and those who I do manage to get to join in working on CF hardly do enough to actually help at all, if anything, and then disappear. Harlequin did a couple skins but now he's got a girlfriend AND a job so I can pretty much kiss him goodbye, and he's the only person that even responded to my initial call for a skinner. I've had even worse programmer problems than the ill-fated HeadHunters3 project; at least theirs actually did something before dropping off the face of the earth. Skull: nothing. Hypnos: nothing. Mickey: almost nothing. Paul: so far, not even a word. Bob: haven't even heard from him. Sound guys have come and gone without doing a damn thing. Modellers have floated briefly over my mailbox without doing jack shit.

(Out of all this there is some glimmer of hope - Bal and Nunuk have both tentatively agreed to take two of the now six planned maps off of my hands, and only time remains to tell how that'll actually turn out. I have no lack of faith in their abilities, of course - just in the fate of this godforsaken project.)

I'm really beginning to understand why games like Daikatana were such lemons. It's a miracle that they even made it to the stores in the state they're in let alone actually finished.

How much do I have to scale this half-assed project back until it's within reach? Until I can reasonably expect to not sound stupid when I ask someone if they'd be interested in helping me? If you listen to me describe the PC as it's planned now I sound like every other pansy world-conquerer who wants to make a mod that's mailed all of us twenty times asking us to do all the work for him so he can see some dumb idea he came up with flower into the world's most popular mod. And someone's dumb idea has only flowered into the world's most popular mod once.

What if I just turned this into one map with only three new monsters, no new items, and hardly anything new in the way of single player gameplay other than just programming the bots to stand around and wait until they see you? How small and worthless do I have to make this project before I can actually get someone to help?

Is that even the problem? What if it doesn't matter how small I make this project, I still can't find anyone with a fucking scrap of interest in helping me with this? Am I going unnoticed? Or are there just so few skinners and coders available?

Why the fuck isn't the rest of the world going to let this happen? What the fuck am I doing wrong?