BBelief 2008 – Burning The Midnight Oil

If there haven’t been a lot of updates on Beyond Belief 2008 lately it’s because I’ve resisted the urge to post simple editing blurbs like “And now I’ve added this room! Take a look!” With nobody having played the level those posts wouldn’t make much sense, anyway. And if I explained every little detail you wouldn’t have to play the level anymore because I’d already have spoiled everything!

With that said, my output has definitely decreased in the last couple of weeks, and that’s for a very simple reason: the Olympics are over.

I’ve always been a night owl. I’m at my most creative after 10pm, just when it should be about time to prepare for bed. Put me in front of a computer at night and I’ll churn out stuff like there’s no tomorrow. Over the years, I have trained/disciplined myself to do good work during the day – you have to when doing professional game development. But yeah…nights make it come so much easier.

So making Beyond Belief during the Olympics was a great throwback to 1996, when I cranked out Memento Mori II Map 10 while watching the Atlanta Olympics in the middle of the night (German time). And I did the same for this new map, cheering on Nastia Liukin…uhm, I mean Michael Phelps… yeah… Phelps… while working on my stuff. Of course Bejing has been over for two weeks now, and that means that I just haven’t started up BSP as much in the evenings. Even Giants games end at 10, and there isn’t as good of an excuse to tell my wife to go to bed without me Besides, “Well honey, it’s the Olympics! They only happen every four years!” works a bit better than “Well honey, it’s the Giants! Who have a losing record in their 162 games season, have no chance of making the playoffs anyway and won’t play again until…well, tomorrow!”

With that said, I had a pretty damn cool setting for work yesterday: Infineon Raceway, while Speed TV was shooting Pinks All Out (which I posted about here).

So I’m still making progress… just not as much as a few weeks ago. And if I wanted to measure this progress in any shape or form, I could do it by the much-increased VIS time of over 30 minutes (on a super-fast P4, mind you). I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Or by the time it took me to seal off the level again after completely ripping it open to add a cave area in the back. Boy, I certainly wasn’t missing leaks! Even though DarkPlaces makes finding the area where that leak occured a lot easier than back in the day.

By the way, Warren has unveiled some “classified photographs” from his latest Quake map. Looks cool so far! Some nice texture mixups to give update the old base look.