Game Design
Custom Maps
Starting with Quake III: Arena, I was introduced to Game Design and Mapping in general. The first person action and graphics was just to awesome to ignore. I installed GTK Radiant and spent at least the next 5 years tinkering with it, producing maps for a number of games (most running on the same id-Tech 3 engine). The bulk of my maps were created for Return to Castle Wolfenstein, including a Wild West themed map, ported over from Western Q3 to the first mod for RTCW; The WildWest. The RTCW gamerbase was starting to dwindle right around the time another inspiring game was coming out – so I switched platforms. Read More…
Modding | Project Phi – SR2053
Around the time of the pre-release buzz of Half-Life2, a few of us RTCW mappers decided to take a stab at mapping on the entirely new HL2 engine. We formed a team, RTK Development, and set out to create a HL2 multiplayer mod; ShadowRunner 2053. It was a thrilling experience, mostly… Sadly SR-2053 never made it out of the alpha stage in development – despite the large amount of content we created for it.
Years later, my brother and I were looking to work on a project together. We ended up pulling in numerous other artistic friends, co-workers, and the like. This time the goal was to create a Single Player mod using the same HL2 engine (updated 2009 source code). The work was tentatively title Project Phi, due to obvious correlations in the story. A tremendous amount of content was created for Project Phi, running the gamut in everything from professional soundtracks, character models, story script, concept art, maps, prop models, and more… Unfortunately, Project Phi also went the way of SR-2053. We officially shut it down in early 2010. In both cases, the take away was biting off more than you can chew. A hard lesson to have to learn twice. But I like to think it has finally stuck. And who knows.. I do still have all this mod content laying around… Project Phi | SR-2053
