Spent the weekend making a Quake 3 engine game
Did a short jam with friends to make a Quake 3 game of some kind. We had a plan that we didn't quite achieve... but we got SOME of the way there, and I had a lot of fun. I ended up mostly being the audio person because we didn't quite get far enough to implement the narrative material.
We started with a version of Quake 3 that had all the assets stripped out of it. We had every sound playing a default noise, which meant i could just torture the poor player character and slowly identify which sounds I was missing for him. I really enjoyed kind of reverse engineering movement, interaction with water, etc.
I also reskinned some portion of the menus and replaced the game's entire font, which was a stupid call but did look pretty good when I finished (it was appropriate for the game text to look kind of... serial-killer-y).
Some things I ended up getting caught on were:
- Layer masking in GIMP. I am not a fan of that program's UX
- Trying to rename all the bots to be named "Hellcop." We didn't quite exercise enough control over the bots to get that implemented.
- Trying to get a levelshot to appear for our level. I have no idea what I was doing wrong, but it never ended up being functional.
Had a good time overall!! This old engine was fun to work in... you can have minimal experience with the tech and zero engineering expertise, but still exercise a lot of control over assets like art and sound so long as you're willing to experiment.