January 24th 2006

Hear, hear! Pyroclasm was kind enough to make a HighDefinition Model pack for Halfquake Amen (first seen here). You can download the pack here. To install, just create a directory in halflife/hquake2/ called "models" and extract all files of the package into it.

Seems like everything is slowing down a bit around here. I've been working on PHQ the last few weeks and I still have a few things to do (balancing, for example).

I read the latest squidi blog about ideas. It kinda got me thinking if PHQ really is a new idea, or just a bunch of old ideas in a new kind of implementation (mmorpg ideas converted to a browser game, mostly).

PHQ is so old already, it's been re-written three times if not more often. I can't see why it should end soon though except that it would get really, really boring after a while, if I don't keep updating it at least once a week and add more content and fix more bugs and balance more issues.

Thing is that PHQ is taking up almost my entire free time. Sure, once in a while I grab my guitar and make some music, but since there are real people playing this browser game and I can't and don't want to let them down, I'm going back to PHQ and fix, add, balance again at least once a day.

Where do I want to go with PHQ? Where do I want to go with IAD, which is still not playable again? Is it that good of an idea to really go through all the work that it needs? I've got one small list for changes and updates for IAD that would cost at least 1-2 months of constant work. And then what? When I release it I'll have server issues again because - let's face it - even if I fix all those bugs and revamp the code, once there are 40 people playing it, the server will be dead again. And would I want to afford a better server for like 60 bucks a month for 40 people playing an experiment?

IAD is not meant to be. At least not now. I don't know if PHQ is meant to be. It seems to be going pretty well and the ad I bought recently brought at least some attention (which has almost faded away entirely again, well, what did I expect from a 1-day-ad)...

The HQS soundtrack on the other hand is really going well. I can't say that for the actual game though. I'm currently talking to Vino again and trying a few things out to eventually fix a few bugs. There are still a lot of ideas to be used in HQS, which I really want other people to witness themselves.

But what about those ideas? I think my ideas are all abstract experimentations. The good thing is that people can expect something new (or at least something that looks and feels different than the average stuff out there), the bad thing is that I throw it out of my brain and implement it into my games without knowing if it's going to work actually.

Some may think though, that success doesn't necessarily depend on the idea, it can also depend on the presentation. Worst idea can have the highest sale figures if it's presented well. Talk about manipulative commercials.

Apart from all that I feel really tired. I feel like I'm slowly giving up my life for something I don't want to become. I can't even say for sure if that would not happen if I had a lot of free time. Everything's kinda changing and evolving around me, and sometimes I'm really worried about where everything and everyone is headed. Question is though, what would I want to change if I could?

I don't know the answer.