WizardExt

It's finally here. My single-player mod, Spherical Nightmares, is now released and can be downloaded at its ModDB-page. There are some extra download links on the mod's official website.

Here is the trailer:

Wow.. What a ride. It's been almost 5 years since I started this "small" project. It started as the final project during my level design education and I estimated it to take a couple of weeks to create. Heh.. I had no experience creating single player or create a mod. I had previously only created multiplayer maps, mainly for Action Quake 2. So my experience, even though I felt confident and comfortable with the Source tools, was very non-existent. Early in the development of the mod I got a job at the game developer GRIN, as a level designer. So the mod was put on ice.. It felt great entering the game industry, working with something I enjoyed. I tried to, at times, get back to developing the mod. I wanted to finish it, because I felt I had a great concept and idea. But the project was too ambitious, too big, too many things. I had small periods when I loved working on it, good vibes. Other times I realized it would never be finished and it was easier to not think about it, to do other things.

Then I started to bring it down in scope. Remove areas of a map that played really bad. Change approach on certain designs, just because I couldn't execute them well and remove entire levels... The mod started to become easier to managed, I saw possibilities to tie levels together and not only have a bunch of different levels, with no connection.

In 2009 I showed the first gameplay:

The clip shows an area called "The Playground" and it looks and plays almost the same today. I love that, making it a corner stone. A core thing. A signature for the mod.

I had my on and off's with the mod still, but every push I did got me closer to finishing it. Even though I didn't fully believe it back then. It feel too far away. I had moments when I felt really close to finishing it, but that was me daydreaming. I had a couple of semi-stupid updates on ModDB that I am not too proud of, where I would promise more frequent updates or even set a release date for the mod. That date passed. But I just didn't have the experience..

Good thing was that I kept going. I continued working on it. I had moments when talking about the mod with my friends and colleagues, that always motivated me to keep going. Because I could see their interest about the mod when I explained it and what I had created so far.

In 2012 things really started to take off. I focused on finishing the mod. I put in the hours almost every day that year. I managed to get the mod into a whole package, so you could play it from start to finish. I started to playtest the whole mod, instead of just single levels. Feedback made for faster iterations. I knew what I wanted to create now. Things made sense. It was a mod now, not a map pack. I arranged public playtests and that generated even more bugs, feedback and made it easier to tie everything together. I started to put in more hours, every day and kept doing so up till now..

It's released!

I hope you have a good experience playing it! I will get some rest now, sleep more and breathe. :)