Probably not going to be of interest to anyone here.. but as well as passion for Civ modding I used to have one for good old Doom modding and am in the mood to tell a story!
Back in the 90s I used to muck around with Doom 2 and Civilization 2 modding but never finished any of my projects. My Star Wars Civ2 scenario was never released in the 90s due to aircraft carrier AI issues ruining it however I plan to release it in the near future when I release all my newever Civ2 projects just for the closure as it's always bugged me that I never released it! I had the same frustration with my 90s Doom modding projects too as I remember creating a Wolfenstein inspired level only to lose all the files in a hard drive crash and then I put a huge amount of work into a Star Trek Doom level but never finished that and released it either.
1990s Star Wars Civ2 and Star Trek Doom mod projects:
However in 2015 I was craving a creative outlet, those frustrations about my unfinished Doom mod projects finally boiled over and I decided to learn about Doom editing again. Much had changed from the little old DOS map editors I used in the 90s and these days a lot of the fanbase had moved to the GZDoom engine which similar to the old 'GLQuake' back in the day converted Doom to be displayed using 3D acceleration instead of software rendering and allowed lots of cool graphical and engine enhancements (including the big ones of allowing slopes, bridges & a room to be put under another room which the original Doom engine couldn't do!). I started watching GZDoom map editing tutorial videos and omg.. once I saw all the cool stuff I could do I realised my old Star Trek Doom level was way too primitive and that I could do SO much better and needed to start over (often a fan project death sentence lol) however I wasn't confident in my ability to create the awesome things I was seeing in my head so I decided to experiment and build a different mod instead to get my skills good enough to make the ultimate Star Trek Doom level. I used to be a huge point & click adventure games fan in the 90s, in particular of the Sierra ones eg King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest and my favourite of them all, Quest for Glory (formerly known as Hero Quest until a lawsuit lol). What made Quest for Glory special was that it was a medieval fantasy stile game like the King's Quest ones however it was darker and had combat, loot, equipment, individual RPG skills/attributes to level up (in a very Morrowind & Oblivion style), and you could carry over your character build though all 5 games in the series. Most QFG fans consider Quest for Glory 4 to be their favourite as the hero got trapped in a dark Gothic Transylvanian place with spooky forests filled with the undead, cool NPC characters and full voice work (including narration by the great John Rhys Davies). The game left such an impression on me as a kid that decades later I had this urge to recreate it in 3D as I felt the Hexen variant of the Doom engine had a pretty similar mechanics with 3 characters to chose from, spells and item inventory.
Dark gloomy swamp in QFG4:
So over the next year I rebuilt a huge amount of QFG4's dark world and medieval town in the Hexen GZDoom engine porting across all the monsters, and many of the NPC's too. I used a 'virtual cinema' trick to create cutscenes telling the story and NPC convos as while the GZDoom engine supported proper cutscenes and dialog it was beyond my skills as I'm not a programmer heh. In the end it turned out really cool and I was very happy with the work. I released it and didn't really expect anyone to really care much about a mod for an old 90s game based on the world of another old 90s game haha but oh boy was I wrong lol..
Release announcement:
blakessanctum.wordpress.com
Screenshots:
My full video tour series:
Much to my surprise it got a lot of attention. I went on a holiday to Thailand with a bunch of mates and as usual my stomach went "oh hell no" and had trapped me on a toilet for days. I remember in one rare break from the bathroom hell I miserably dragged myself out of bed to my laptop and popped on the net to talk to friends & family back home to cheer me up and was shocked to find my emails, blog and youtube videos all blowing up with messages and thousands of hits. The rather famous and popular gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun had covered my work!
blakessanctum.wordpress.com
Then something even bigger happened. PC Gamer UK magazine, the largest gaming magazine in the world that I'd been collecting every issue of since the mid 90s to this day decided to cover me too, and not just some little mention but nearly full darn page ahead of other mods that were way better work than mine (power of nostalgia lol). And best of all this one wasn't leaked to me by anyone, I had no idea, so there I was back home reading my latest mag and I opened the page to find the below page and couldn't believe it haha! Then I got messages from fans in America telling me their US variant of PC Gamer mag also covered me too.. crazy!
blakessanctum.wordpress.com
Buoyed by how well things had gone with the Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen level I spent 2016 finally rebuilding my old Star Trek Doom level from scratch. I binge watched the new Star Trek The Next Generation Remastered Blu-rays taking hundreds of photos of the sets as well as purchasing a number of technical books with set photos so I could try and accurately recreate the sets as best of possible. After building these gorgeous recreations I'd then trash them with burns, smoke, sparks, fire, debris, and glowing light tricks to hide my lack of art skills as best as possible haha. Using all the GZDoom tricks I could learn I even recreated a huge Borg cube interior with multiple levels of alcoves and borgs stepping out them to shoot at you.
Release announcement:
blakessanctum.wordpress.com
Screenshots:
My full video tour series:
While it didn't generate quite as big a buzz as the QFG4 3D Hexen level did after release it was still quite a hit as I got covered by PCGamesN, Dark Side of Gaming and bunch of big youtube channels as well.
blakessanctum.wordpress.com
blakessanctum.wordpress.com
And that was it! I ended up using so many new crazy tricks for Star Trek Doom that I kinda wanted to return to QFG4 3D Hexen to apply those tricks to that to make it even better but after sacrificing 2 years of my life (& screwing up a long term relationship I was in at the time) on all this I was burning out bad and wanted a break for a few years but sure enough my break from creating didn't last long lol. As in 2018 my equal frustration over never finishing my Civ2 modding would eventually bring me to this site and kick off years of new Civ mod projects (based on Heroes of Might & Magic, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Dune, Master of Magic and many more), a Civ video series, Civ mod preservation work, a staff position and who knows what else is to come haha. However I think when all my Civ2 and ToT projects are finally released to the world I will very happily retire from all mod making and just stick to playing other peoples stuff lol. Although never say never as creating mods for Civ games is so much fun, maybe my Civ mod releases will create a similar buzz (something about crossover mods that add one game into another that always excites a lot of people like me) tempting me to do more, and I still have a lot of fans in the Doom community at me to return Star Trek Doom and Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen and do more with them!
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Back in the 90s I used to muck around with Doom 2 and Civilization 2 modding but never finished any of my projects. My Star Wars Civ2 scenario was never released in the 90s due to aircraft carrier AI issues ruining it however I plan to release it in the near future when I release all my newever Civ2 projects just for the closure as it's always bugged me that I never released it! I had the same frustration with my 90s Doom modding projects too as I remember creating a Wolfenstein inspired level only to lose all the files in a hard drive crash and then I put a huge amount of work into a Star Trek Doom level but never finished that and released it either.
1990s Star Wars Civ2 and Star Trek Doom mod projects:
However in 2015 I was craving a creative outlet, those frustrations about my unfinished Doom mod projects finally boiled over and I decided to learn about Doom editing again. Much had changed from the little old DOS map editors I used in the 90s and these days a lot of the fanbase had moved to the GZDoom engine which similar to the old 'GLQuake' back in the day converted Doom to be displayed using 3D acceleration instead of software rendering and allowed lots of cool graphical and engine enhancements (including the big ones of allowing slopes, bridges & a room to be put under another room which the original Doom engine couldn't do!). I started watching GZDoom map editing tutorial videos and omg.. once I saw all the cool stuff I could do I realised my old Star Trek Doom level was way too primitive and that I could do SO much better and needed to start over (often a fan project death sentence lol) however I wasn't confident in my ability to create the awesome things I was seeing in my head so I decided to experiment and build a different mod instead to get my skills good enough to make the ultimate Star Trek Doom level. I used to be a huge point & click adventure games fan in the 90s, in particular of the Sierra ones eg King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest and my favourite of them all, Quest for Glory (formerly known as Hero Quest until a lawsuit lol). What made Quest for Glory special was that it was a medieval fantasy stile game like the King's Quest ones however it was darker and had combat, loot, equipment, individual RPG skills/attributes to level up (in a very Morrowind & Oblivion style), and you could carry over your character build though all 5 games in the series. Most QFG fans consider Quest for Glory 4 to be their favourite as the hero got trapped in a dark Gothic Transylvanian place with spooky forests filled with the undead, cool NPC characters and full voice work (including narration by the great John Rhys Davies). The game left such an impression on me as a kid that decades later I had this urge to recreate it in 3D as I felt the Hexen variant of the Doom engine had a pretty similar mechanics with 3 characters to chose from, spells and item inventory.
Dark gloomy swamp in QFG4:
So over the next year I rebuilt a huge amount of QFG4's dark world and medieval town in the Hexen GZDoom engine porting across all the monsters, and many of the NPC's too. I used a 'virtual cinema' trick to create cutscenes telling the story and NPC convos as while the GZDoom engine supported proper cutscenes and dialog it was beyond my skills as I'm not a programmer heh. In the end it turned out really cool and I was very happy with the work. I released it and didn't really expect anyone to really care much about a mod for an old 90s game based on the world of another old 90s game haha but oh boy was I wrong lol..
Release announcement:
Quest for Glory IV 3D (GZDoom Hexen mod) Announcement
The time has finally come to announce the first of my 2 big projects that I’ve been secretly working on over the last 2 years, Quest for Glory IV 3D! QFG4 3D is a total conversion single player 19 …
blakessanctum.wordpress.com
Screenshots:
My full video tour series:
Much to my surprise it got a lot of attention. I went on a holiday to Thailand with a bunch of mates and as usual my stomach went "oh hell no" and had trapped me on a toilet for days. I remember in one rare break from the bathroom hell I miserably dragged myself out of bed to my laptop and popped on the net to talk to friends & family back home to cheer me up and was shocked to find my emails, blog and youtube videos all blowing up with messages and thousands of hits. The rather famous and popular gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun had covered my work!
I made it to Rock Paper Shotgun!
Well it’s been a pretty crazy 2 months since I released my Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen and Star Trek Doom mod projects. I went overseas to Ko Samui Thailand for a month and around it I did my…
blakessanctum.wordpress.com
Then something even bigger happened. PC Gamer UK magazine, the largest gaming magazine in the world that I'd been collecting every issue of since the mid 90s to this day decided to cover me too, and not just some little mention but nearly full darn page ahead of other mods that were way better work than mine (power of nostalgia lol). And best of all this one wasn't leaked to me by anyone, I had no idea, so there I was back home reading my latest mag and I opened the page to find the below page and couldn't believe it haha! Then I got messages from fans in America telling me their US variant of PC Gamer mag also covered me too.. crazy!
I made it to PC Gamer Magazine!!!
Two months ago you saw me excitedly posting about discovering my silly little Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen mod had made it to Rock Paper Shotgun, one of the largest gaming news websites out there! S…
blakessanctum.wordpress.com
Buoyed by how well things had gone with the Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen level I spent 2016 finally rebuilding my old Star Trek Doom level from scratch. I binge watched the new Star Trek The Next Generation Remastered Blu-rays taking hundreds of photos of the sets as well as purchasing a number of technical books with set photos so I could try and accurately recreate the sets as best of possible. After building these gorgeous recreations I'd then trash them with burns, smoke, sparks, fire, debris, and glowing light tricks to hide my lack of art skills as best as possible haha. Using all the GZDoom tricks I could learn I even recreated a huge Borg cube interior with multiple levels of alcoves and borgs stepping out them to shoot at you.
Release announcement:
Star Trek Doom Project (GZDoom Doom 2 mod) Announcement
Wow guys, things have really taken off in the week since my Quest for Glory IV 3D (GZDoom Hexen Mod) announcement. The site has reached over 19,000hits, this blog has also had hundreds of hits and …
blakessanctum.wordpress.com
Screenshots:
My full video tour series:
While it didn't generate quite as big a buzz as the QFG4 3D Hexen level did after release it was still quite a hit as I got covered by PCGamesN, Dark Side of Gaming and bunch of big youtube channels as well.
Star Trek Doom featured on PCGamesN in 2019!
Well it’s happened again! It was a real thrill a while back when my Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen mod got featured on Rock Paper Shotgun and then in none other than PC Gamer Magazine US & U…
blakessanctum.wordpress.com
More Star Trek Doom and Quest For Glory IV 3D Hexen reviews!
Red alert! Clearly it was a good idea to create those ModDB pages as another youtube reviewer playing my Star Trek Doom Mod for his Patreon page has been detected. This one is really good! His pres…
blakessanctum.wordpress.com
And that was it! I ended up using so many new crazy tricks for Star Trek Doom that I kinda wanted to return to QFG4 3D Hexen to apply those tricks to that to make it even better but after sacrificing 2 years of my life (& screwing up a long term relationship I was in at the time) on all this I was burning out bad and wanted a break for a few years but sure enough my break from creating didn't last long lol. As in 2018 my equal frustration over never finishing my Civ2 modding would eventually bring me to this site and kick off years of new Civ mod projects (based on Heroes of Might & Magic, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Dune, Master of Magic and many more), a Civ video series, Civ mod preservation work, a staff position and who knows what else is to come haha. However I think when all my Civ2 and ToT projects are finally released to the world I will very happily retire from all mod making and just stick to playing other peoples stuff lol. Although never say never as creating mods for Civ games is so much fun, maybe my Civ mod releases will create a similar buzz (something about crossover mods that add one game into another that always excites a lot of people like me) tempting me to do more, and I still have a lot of fans in the Doom community at me to return Star Trek Doom and Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen and do more with them!
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