#trenchbroom

[new-holocene]

ode to abandoned projects

normally i dedicate my public facing social media accounts solely to sharing my finished artwork, but I figure some reflection on the past few years of my development as an artist would be worthwhile. I was initially trying to find an old gmod map I made (I didn't find it), and in the process I found a number of screenshots of WIPs spanning the past 7 years. for many of these projects, they were abandoned because I got too busy with school/university.

from march 2017. made in unity. I don't remember the specifics of this project. I think I was trying to make a short narrative walking sim.

from december 2017. I wanted to make a short smw romhack. I remember drawing level designs on a spare piece of paper after finishing a secondary school exam early. one day I'll make a romhack, one day...

from may 2018. I had just replayed marble blast ultra after finding it had a PC port. shortly after I found all the textures were just in the game files and could be modified easily. myself and an old friend wanted to make a 'games repainted'-esque mod. I claim full credit for every marble game since that's included a 🤔marble skin.

from march 2020. a mockup of a piece I was calling 'alignment chart' for the first time I had ever applied for a bursary. this used a mixture of generative art pieces i made in processing and graphic design. this piece is interesting to look back on because it marked the development of my art style for the first time, and the psuedo-cuneiform generator ended up being a recurring feature of my art. my application was rejected because i did not read the terms and conditions to realise it wasn't open to university students - and I was still studying computer science at the time.

from may 2020. I was aiming to participate in the low res game jam but never got to finish due to university work taking up my time. I never fleshed out the mechanics of the game, but the goal was to take care of the tree in the center of the map. it doesn't look like much, but I really pushed myself (or rather, tortured myself) by not using a game engine and writing this in C++ with raylib instead.

from april 2020. this was going to be a browser based demake of five nights at freddy's (a game I've never played and have no interest in) titled "five years at yanderedev's". I figured that it felt too close to participating in lolcowing someone and that it was in bad spirits, so I scrapped it.

from september 2020. a mockup of my homepage sharpfourth.net. I kept the logo and general layout for whats on the site currently, but didn't include the scanner warped images.

from october 2020. I wanted to make a walking sim in the quake engine, but once again, university work got in the way. however, this got me familiar with the basics of using trenchbroom (a map editor for quake), which came in very, very handy for later projects.

from october 2021. myself and some close friends had planned to make a zine detailing how to do DIY feminising HRT in Ireland (and maybe the UK). we never got around to writing it (partly because we feared potential legal repercussions for disseminating medical advice lol), but this marked a further development of my art style.

from october 2021. I had hoped to make a first person RPG in godot. once again scrapped because I got too busy with uni. I spent ages trying to implement a wonky movement system that could be exploited, being inspired by bhopping from source or strafe jumping from quake. the dialogue system was the last thing I worked on. I used trenchbroom again - this time with qodot - for making the prototype map. while making this demo, I realised the potential use of godot and trenchbroom in visual art, something i would revisit during my first gallery residency.

from march 2022. this might be the most unassuming piece in this collection, but it marks a significant turning point in my life. I was tasked with making diagrams for a group project in uni, but given that I was facing extreme burnout and apathy towards the course, I instead "doodled" with the elements of the diagram. this spiraled into me writing my zine/short-story EATARTHU, which I then used to apply for a gallery residency. I was fortunate enough to get the residency, and I dropped out of college to pursue art.

as discouraging as it might be to constantly start and abandon projects, it's important to stop and remember that ever single abandoned game or drawing or album or whatever marked a chance for you to learn and develop as an artist. one day you might very well finish a project, and it'll reflect a bit of every single abandoned one of its precursors.

[stomygame]

A run through the start of the new tutorial level. I used to wonder why you don't see many Quake maps with exteriors. I will wonder no longer. It is so much more complicated and time-consuming, you can't really improvise the way you normally do with interior detailing because all of the cliff brushes need to sort of flow into one-another. In future projects I'm thinking I'll just pick a more heavily contrasting cliff texture and stick to simple angular brushes like in Duke3D.

[sonomayeen]

Start of my first Quake singleplayer map

[vikintor]

Work in progress

Not much to show yet.

[nondrip]

New progress on my game!

Hey y'all! today I spent time working on a primitive map for my upcoming social deduction FPS, "Killer V Killer". It's a game where two players hunt each other down in a crowd of NPCs.

Right now I just want to make a primitive that shows off the most important aspects of the game, which includes the NPCs, the vendors, the items, and the weapons. Here is an EXTREMELY ROUGH sketch of the map:

Red - Apartment/Hotel (Spawn) Orange - Restaurant (vendor that replenishes stamina) Green - Park (landmark) Cyan - Train Station (landmark) Blue - Clock Tower (landmark/vantage point) Purple - Clothing Shop Pink - Gadget Shop Light Green/Light Blue/Yellow - Weapon Shops What's white remains undecided, and I'm sure I'll be retooling this plan as I go forward, but I really wanted to get some pen to paper on this map idea.

I even got a little practice with Trenchbroom, a quake mapmaking tool that works with godot!

It's a little early for aesthetic designs but here's another mood board for all the features I want to add!

I love video game cities.....

[dev-posting]

been making a quake map to keep myself from exploding

[vivian-location]

because i wanna start learning quake mapping im making a quake map based off the suggestions of people in my discord server and im slowly coming to realize that i am surrounded by maniacs

they asked me to build the entire fucking family guy house. what the fuck is wrong with these people.

[a-daya]

6th map for the Tomb of Thunder campaign for Quake, named "Her Throne, Now Mine" (plot relevance in the title, oooo~)

It is a short map, but it's one that still took me 3 months to make, mostly for the final boss, which I had to code (even if I was using Cthon's as a base), model, texture, and design the final arena properly

But now it is done (aside from ironing out some stuff with the model like animations and texture) and am now on track to work on the secret level

[segfaulteddreams]

Didn't have too much free time for game deving this week as I was busy with midterms. In spite of this though, I still managed to create a small handful of psx dungeon assets in TrenchBroom for the Daggerfall-inspired dungeon generator that I'm working on (which will hopefully then make its way into my larger, CRPG project).

The project currently has some weird lighting/shadow glitches (which are barely visible in this little loop). I think it's an issue with my pipeline for creating these assets (TrenchBroom -> Qodot -> gltf -> Godot Scene), but these aren't the final assets so I'm not gonna bother with making them perfect for the time being.

As a bonus, here's a little gif of the assets themselves:

[studio-ega]

Twin Peaks (1998, PC)

[disasterous-spaces]

challenge 1 update 2 - lighting, texturing

I've been a bit busy so didn't have a lot of time to spend on mapping lately, but I've been chipping away at my map!

Mostly, I've been playing around with lighting the place up & applying textures. I think this is an especially fun process, as the level really comes to life as I work. I also discover a lot - what looks good, what doesn't, what needs a little extra geometry, what needs less geometry and so on.

A nice comparison is two screenshots I took sequentially. I'd thrown in some basic lights and a few textures:

However, taking the screenshot and throwing in more textures in the downstairs area made clear to me that the region needed more oomph. So I tweaked geometry around while texturing more, leading to the next WIP:

Obviously the latter is also far from finished, but I think it's a cool visualisation of progress!

Finally, an additional screenshot for good measure:

[bigdogproductions]

Nikki.

[stomygame]

It's a little tough making good foliage in BSP format, but after noticing a few tricks in Morrowind and some of the Quake mapjams I've got a system I'm happy with.

[vikintor]

Where do babies come from?

From the tree of babies of course.

[wjbs-aus]

Anyway I ship her with the VTFEdit woman and the Trenchbroom crate.

Ok but like. What's the deal with this lady from the Ultimate Doom Builder splash screen?