All things come to an end. news

It was a good run.
But I cannot continue.

I can't really figure out how to say this, and I am having a lot of mixed emotions about this, so I will just post a timeline of the mod.

When I first got the idea for a mod, it was about December. I had no idea what do to make it come to life and I didn't really have a drive to. I was completely unorganized and very "nooby" at Mapping, or modding period, and it was a very tough ordeal for a beginner like me to handle.

About 2 months later, in February, I was beginning to think very deeply about the mod, to the point where I was staying up brainstorming. How it would work, what kind of content I would put into it, how I could even get this stuff to work. It was tough but was very cool to think I have that creativity/ imagination.

Around the beginning of March, I started working on a tunnel map, fairly better at mapping, but obviously not very good considering I didn't know how to make a half-circle (for the top of the tunnel) and spent days trying to make one out of blocks in which I messed with their vertices. This map was to be a test, to see if I could really do this, and I decided to take the idea forward.

March 2nd, 2013, The Abstract mod was born.
I released 3 concept pictures of a map I named Tunnel of Bullet Hell, which would involve the player fighting through a large tunnel of very advanced and difficult NPCs. Namely, making it a bullet hell.
A full 26 days later, I finished the core of the map. To think it took me 26 days to make that... WOW/

April 14th, 2013, I renamed the mod and gave it a story, it was called Why?.
I began putting together a full story and slowly tried to make a team, which didn't bode well.
The map hadn't changed much, but more in the way of detailing. I got an idea to add some jump scares too :)

May 12th/13th, 2013, Alpha build was released.
The Alpha was up for a day before it was pulled back. Negative feedback got to me. I understand, the map was finished and I had just slapped a few waves of combine in there. It was very childish of me.
On May 14th, Why? was put on hold, and I got into other things such as UDK, which I dropped awhile later. On May 31st the mod was back in production and I decided it would be best to put the mod into Episodes, to relieve some of the stress. The mod was still pretty crap, but a lot better. I even put down a new beginning to the map, which was VERY buggy.

June 1st, 2013, My SDK crashed 3 times, the third ending up deleting every entity in the map.
I immediately got to work, redoing some of the brushes completely, and adjusting lighting too.
4 Days later I scrapped the map and got a brand new idea to remake the map, but without the tunnel. In that one day, I created way more content than I ever did in the first 2 months of development, and it felt great to be alive. After this, things slowly declined, and I got stuck with the story, and how to go about it. I started production on the apartment a few days later. It was very tedious, in fact I was so stuck, that I had to draw a map for myself.

About around my Birthday, June 15th, I slowly worked on the Apartment and actually got a lot of the lobby done. I decided to add an outside too, as a kind of area that the player might be able to go to later as an easter egg (it would start locked).

Since then, I haven't did much, and recent viewings of other mods have given me ideas of much better things, things that I can't put into Why? or that would require renaming the mod and remaking it again.

So I am sorry to say, that this mod is dead.
Maybe some day, after I actually release something worth viewing, I will go back to this mod, and start again. Anyone who helped in the mod, I will keep your additions to the mod for future projects, and will give due credit.

This mod was truly a very educational experience and I am glad I learned so much in the field of mapping. It gives me hope that when I am older, and have even more patience, that I can sit down and produce something amazing. Because I am actually not quite as old as you think.

This is Muffinz (Lead Developer and Mapper) and Hammy (Texture Artist and Moral support), signing off.

For now.