Grimm: Quest for the Gatherer's Key mod for Doom III

0 comments by grimmquest on Jan 18th, 2012

Justin Lassen has published his beautiful tracks featuring Naomi Mercer for Grimm on his website. Head out over there and check them out: Justinlassen.com

I am not sure any of you are aware but I am quite the fan of the Underworld film series. I think it has a certain charm that many other films lack, in that it takes itself serious in the exact amount that it should. I liked all movies for a different reason, but basically they put me in a forgetful mood and are just plain old-fashioned good entertainment. Justin has been working on the soundtrack for the latest Underworld film, from his words:

Towards the end of 2011, I was working on new gothic/electronic/rock remix/music for the official Underworld: Awakening Motion Picture Soundtrack, and it was announced last week finally to the world. There are trailers, tv teasers and videos of this movie and soundtrack on YouTube.

I mixed in vocals from Silent Fury’s “Exit Wounds” to the final remix composition for the soundtrack. My reinterpretation is the final closing track on the release!! We all hope you dig the full soundtrack and movie! A lot of work and time went into the making of it. Thank you everyone, and it’s a complete honor to be a part of this awesome project with all these cool bands and artists!

News about Grimm
I've been working on taking out all Doom3 assets one by one and am at 99%, down to some defs and scripts that still need to be rooted out. This makes the current build almost ready for switching to standalone, something which Sikkpin has agreed to help with. So, that's when the fun starts and the true work begins. I'll be working on (re)working Grimm to the hellish state that Purgatory is meant to be in and will also press more on the Persian and Gothic influences in the game. That will be a major step as from that moment on I will be able to reach a far greater audience than currently possible as a Doom 3 modification. Oh yeah, there will be a bit more gore too..

I have read some reviews about the mod, some positive, some negative and I'm thankful for all of them! I've taken some notes here and there and hope to improve upon the points of criticism that I found were valid. So any reviewer out there is welcome to play Grimm and talk about it, you'll be doing me a favour.
Yes, it is not what you expected.. I know.
It is in it's core still a very 'oldskool' game. Why not approach it like you would Pong or Tetris? :-)
Cinematics are too expensive for me to buy, so to say. My time budget won't allow me to buy cinematic time, but perhaps this is something that might come in the future, I'm not ruling anything out. To that end I have been fiddling with the Carnegie Mellon University Motion Capture Library and have managed to create a work-flow to implement them in IDTech 4. You can look at a demonstration video right here:

Speaking of reviews, I've read some questions about the Scythe and how to use it, or that it's sometimes difficult to hit enemies with. I know some players are simply more comfortable with ranged weapons (just as in real life) so I've worked on ways to give players more choice in how they can approach the game. For this reason I've added a new weapon, which I'm pretty excited about. I introduce to you the Stingstaff. This staff shoots nails that penetrate most objects and enemies in the world. It has two modes of fire, one might be approached like an 'automatic' weapon, holding the fire button shoots ranged nails. The other firing mode has more of a 'shotgun' effect, it shoots 5 nails in a spread doing massive damage.

Last but not least, the Patch.
The patch is actually ready for upload but I will be working on a big project the coming 4 weeks which means that giving support for the patch would be practically impossible. Since I don't want to release anything I can't support I've decided to upload the patch in the third week of February. This also means radio silence from this end during that time (I'll be checking in every now and then though).

For anyone having problems with level progression and the torch, I will upload a very small patch this weekend that resolves that issue. If you don't want to wait for that, the work-around is simple: Make sure you don't have the torch selected when you progress to a new map. :)

Peace.