New paths... blog - iqew

...can be seen ahead!

Click here to visit Mindworld!

We are currently looking for a Half-Life 2 Level Designer, check the Job Advertisement in the forums for more details: Moddb.com

There hasn't been a blog entry for quite a while already and some of you might have wondered why there haven't been any news article for Mindworld. The reason for that is because we were looking for 3D artists all the time and couldn't manage to find the desired amount of artists. Therefor, Leiste and I have been discussing other possibilities for the concept of the game and it took us a few days until we finally made our decision.

It's actually not such a big change as it might seem at first, but we are going back to the Source Engine to develope the first chapter of Mindworld with the beautiful name Shattered Dreams. We are currently in the phase of prototyping and alpha level design. I'm currently doing the level design myself, because it's not as easy to find source mappers as I thought it would be. Looks like I have to develope another talent of mine here. My experience with the hammer editor is close to zero, but it looks like I'm still good enough to block out the prototypes to make the ideas more visual to the audience. I hope that even, if we don't find a good level designer soon, we might increase our chances of finding one, if we can present some prototypes.

If you are a source mapper or know someone who is, please get in contact with me, if you or that person might be interested in working with us. We are happy to have any helping hand in that section right now.

Personally there is not much new stuff going on, I'm still waiting for the reply of that game studio I made those concepts for and I hope to get an internship there. I'm currently working full-time on Mindworld: Shattered Dreams on weekdays and only take the weekends off for some quality time with my girlfriend. Still, working full-time on the project isn't even enough, I'm currently nowhere near running out of things to do, having a schedule for each week helps to not get too demotivated. God, such a good feeling to cross out things on the weekly to-do-list. Today is Friday and writing this blog entry was the last thing I had to do for this week.

I'm most likely going to start college in September and make my bachelor of Computer Science at a university in Germany. Not sure what is going to follow after that, but according to the website I could get a job in the games industry for mobile phones and app development, sounds interesting to me. It's about programming for the most part and since I have close to zero experience in that field, I'm learning HTML and CSS just for the heck of it (and to finally have my own portfolio). Always wanted to learn coding and use it somewhere in the game scene, but somehow never managed to get started with it really.

Not so sure why, but I'm starting to lose interest in creating concept art. I usually had a sudden desire to create something when I had a little break here and there, but it seems like that is slowly fading away. I'm still interested in graphic design, though. For example, the new "logo" (not really a logo) for Mindworld: Shattered Dreams was quite fun to do actually and I still love to learn new things about Photoshop. It's quite hard to decide what road I want to go, I see all those people around me, who are really focussed on things and they make incredible process and get really good at what they do, but I find it hard to focus that hard on one field. On the other hand, I'm a bit anxious about never learning anything in-depth and then ending up being mediocre at many things.

Mindworld is quite the exception here, because that project is running for over a year already (Happy Birthday to us in January by the way) and I still have the willpower and desire to finish that even though it currently looks like that is going to be one tough badass of a challenge. Not like it's never been quite the challenge, but it's not going to get easier, right?

The official launch of the new modpage is coming soon together with an official statement on the indiepage and a private message to every tracker of both current sites (early HL2 Mod and Indie Game). Again, if you guys know any good site for recruiting/finding level designers for Half-Life 2, don't hesitate to shoot me a message or a comment. The job ads are currently running on Polycount Forums, Game Artist Forums, ModDB Forums, ModDB Job Section and World of Level Design Forums. If I've missed any good site, throw it in my face, please.

cheers.