GETTING BETTER
Practice makes perfect. My outdoor areas have always been my strong point, but I used to have little patience to work with the indoor areas. It was because my approach was all wrong. I used to spend way too much time detailing one room at a time, never really laying out the bare bones concept of the level. I finally branched out of that in June when I started making the disowned 99 Bolts maps. The zombie tunnels level is the first level I laid out completely before going into any detail work. If you remember the beginning of that second map, the detail level went from great to shitty pretty fast.
Well now I feel that things have changed a bit. I'm feeling a lot more confident about designing interiors. Now I'm trying to use displacements (instead of brushes) as walls. Keeping those things sealed is a big hassle. But I think it's going to turn out well as I continue to practice. So keep practicing your own techniques and read up on the techniques of others. Check out this awesome article on displacement techniques. Chinese Room
LONG STORIES
Even though I have been out of Hammer, I have been working on 99 Bolts almost incessantly. I have been doing a lot of research and sketching. After my honeymoon, my wife and I took a long road trip through Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. I took nearly two thousand photos and drew a lot of diagrams and maps, occasionally writing notes like "good place to hold up" and "assassination point" and "gunship ambush" and along the way.
I've been brainstorming the exact route through the wasteland since I began 99 Bolts and I can tell you this. There will certainly be an interstate in the wasteland. There will also be a dilapidated residential neighborhood, a blown up train station, and an abandoned country manor. (Please don't think the three notes in the last paragraph correspond to these locations, because they don't.)
In addition to planning the route through the wasteland, I have been writing extensively on the story of 99 Bolts. I have found a wealth of information online, and I have come up with some very interesting ideas that merge the apocalypse factors of Fallout with Half-Life. I have been writing script dialogue and planning out custom scripted sequences. Over the next six months I hope to both learn Face Poser software and design my own sequences. Or perhaps I can attract a faithful and talented individual who can do it for me. I have already attracted a modeler and a texture artist this way, so let's see what happens.
MARRIAGE AND THE LIKE
I got married on September 26th. It turns out that my lover decided to disown a life of slumming it with a certain wise-cracking, car-racing, bad-mouthing punk who spends his Sundays making tragic mockeries of decent podcasts. (Rock on, Emanuel and co.) I'm having a great time with married life, but (as I expected) I'm having some trouble getting used to working on the mod with a lady around all the time to interest my attention. I'm sure it's only temporary. At least I have a new full-time playtester at my disposal. Heh, GIGGIDY.
GOOD BYE, HAWKEYE
Well folks, that's all I have for now. Like I said...a very short, relatively boring update. I will not be updating in November. I'm going to wait until December 15th to really bring 2009 to an explosive note. Plus, with Assassin's Creed 2 and Left 4 Dead 2, I should be pretty distracted in late November. I can use late October and early November to get a lot of work done, and then come back to it in early December to put final touches in.
