Path to Arcane Dimensions - Episode 10 news - Quake "Epsilon" Build mod for Quake

So, this is my last post before the release. I just thought I'd tie up a few things and mention a few things I haven't gotten around to so far. My total playthrough time (minus deaths and reloads, and without all the secrets) for AD was 8.5hours - the median level time was 35 minutes. That's not including the test levels, which are pretty large in places, and collecting all the runes. So it's a big game.

In case I haven't actually mentioned it yet, the Arcane Dimensions release will be it's own build - not an addon for the original epsilon installation, as that uses a different version of the darkplaces engine and also has different requirements. It's basically much easier to simply release this as a standalone package. Total download size will be about 2.3GB, and as per usual there will be a secondary download location via google drive. A quarter of that size is the soundtrack! This is the longest musical project I've ever done, 2 years of weekend work and counting. The total soundtrack is comprised of 73 individual pieces of music. Picking up an instrument at the moment, I don't feel much. That's unusual.

I did try some of the alternative sound packs out there (eargasm, a few others) but didn't find them convincing. Part of it is subjective bias - this is the way I like things to sound, etc - but part of it is misconceptions and mistakes - mainly looking for realism rather than tonal consistency, and the idea that 'more high freq content' is somehow better.

I thought I'd mention one more thing:
at some point I really hated working on these blood-and-guts dark, grim and gory 2d sprites. I'm a bit older now. I look back on my youth with some fondness, but largely I think I wasted a bunch of productive time playing games that didn't really do anything for me. Personally, I'd love to see this type of game, but without the grim-dark-ness - but that's quake - you can't make quake Quake without dumb angry gore.
So at some point I had to focus on what I was really doing this for - did I want to fill the world with yet more dumb violence and anger? Not particularly. In case you haven't noticed, there's already enough of that.
What did I want to provide the world with? Atmosphere? Yeah, I could get into that. Music? Yes, I'm all for that. Catharsis? Not really. Decades of research show that catharsis really only temporarily staves off impulses, while feeding them in the long run. But cool graphics? ... yeah, okay.
I can get behind cool graphics. I can get behind cool music. I can get behind atmosphere, and a cool game.

I don't play games much anymore. But I kinda enjoyed compiling this. Smoothing the corners, spotting the odd texture that looks like caked smeared over a polygon - or the water texture that looks, for some reason, more like tox-slime. Can't catch them all, but I try.

Alright, enough gloom. See you on the other side!