Personal projects

I’m annoyed at my misspelling on descent 

Last year, I started a Doctor Who podcast with a couple of friends. We’ve attracted an audience in the high single figures. We’re the Powell Estate Neighbourhood Watch and are going through the revival era of the show from the start.

Is this a bad time to mention I spent the 2010s doing abridged series of Sonic cartoons where the production value got out of control and I burned myself out?

I made a randomiser for Final Fantasy 8 – Maelstrom
It mixes up boss fights, enemy spells, item shops, etc. with loads of options (but hopefully not an intimidating amount of options!) to make it more or less of a challenge. There are some purely silly things in there too, like randomly deforming the monster models & playing inappropriate music in cutscenes.
I was working on a mode that cuts out the 40-hour story & makes it more of an open-world treasure hunt thing, but 2024 was kind of a nightmare for me so it hasn’t been updated in a while. Hopefully getting back to it in the near future!

Ooh I might check this out. VIII is something of a guilty pleasure for me, I know there are issues with it as a game but I still can’t help but look at it fondly. If nothing else I just love how much you can break the game by abusing the Junction system to make yourself god-like really quickly! A new way to remix the game might be fun to try out.

As for me my main creative outlet at the moment is creating levels for classic Doom (well Doom II to be precise). I dabbled a bit with early level editors back in the 90s but got back into it in a big way last year. I released my first “complete” map on to the Doomworld forums here if anyone wants to check it out: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/145418-wip-my-first-full-doom-ii-map/

I’m currently working on creating an 8 map episode which is probably about 50% complete at the moment, hoping to get it done and released at some point in the first half of this year if I can find enough time!

If the Final Fantasy guys were in charge of Red Dwarf would they have remade series VII about 16 times?

I will try and give your map a go Jenuall.

Aw thanks! Let me know what you think.

As noted in the Doomworld thread this first one was only built and tested on GZDoom as that was easier/quicker to iterate with as a starting point so it does have issues with other source ports (nothing game breaking I don’t think but texturing issues and the like) 

The stuff I’ve done since has definitely evolved from where this level was at so hopefully the eventual episode I get out should be a step up in quality!

Ah nice, thanks for giving it a play 😄

And yes, it was deliberately designed to try and channel some Romero style episode 1 goodness. It was initially going to be a smaller level as the opening for my episode, hence why I generally tried to keep it focused more on the lower tier enemies and avoided trying to throw too much heavy arsenal at the player – it obviously outgrew the “Map 01” scale over time but I still tried not to go too OTT with the enemies!

Currently planning to include a revamped version of this level somewhere near the mid-late period of my eventual full episode

Very good, although I refuse to believe anyone has a cat that runs around their bedroom at night and doesn’t jump on their face/scratch their eyeballs out/try to eat their hair/generally invade any sense of personal space that they might have!

Not a personal project as such but over the next week I’m taking part in a set of charity streaming events hosted by the online gaming forum that I frequent. We sadly lost two of our valued members in the last few months so we’re streaming some of their favourite games over the week to raise money in aid of Special Effect and Child’s Play. I’ll be online tomorrow from 9AM streaming some classic Deus Ex and Doom, if anyone wants to follow along then you should be able to either via our community channel https://www.twitch.tv/grcadeuk or my own channel https://www.twitch.tv/jenuall. More details here if anyone is interested.

Apologies if sharing/plugging this is overstepping the mark!

Hey, I published some more mods! 4 audio-related mods – a mod quad, if you will – this time for a beloved 3D platformer from the 90s. I think you all know which series I mean… !

Clue: It’s not Sonic. All Sonic the Hedgehog games are already perfect, and as such attempting to mod one is both futile and sacrilegious.

https://gamebanana.com/sounds/89152

https://gamebanana.com/sounds/89154

https://gamebanana.com/sounds/89155

https://gamebanana.com/sounds/89156

I think we only had the first, 2D one. My brother and his friends pronounced the name with a soft ‘a,’ like firemən.

I will die on the hill that the definitive version of Rayman 2 is the Dreamcast port.

No dying necessary I hope, as I think that’s a pretty common stance! In my opinion the mods for the PC version at least close the gap, but the Dreamcast port definitely has the edge if you like minigames.

The opening narration on Dreamcast is a bit weird though. Blatant Ly erasure.

Yeah, even Michel Ancel said he thought the Dreamcast version was the best one, so you having the best childhood is effectively an official Ubisoft position. (Although I do think he was underestimating the aura loss that occurred when they replaced The Hall of Doors with The Isle of Doors.)

What’s odd is that they later made multiple ports of the game using the Dreamcast version as a base, but always cut out the Globox Village for them. So either they later decided that those minigames were actually a bit crap, or they wanted to ensure that Dreamcast owners stayed on top.

Nice. I kind of wish I had the self-discipline to not just look up all of the major trivia after my first playthrough of a game, so that there was anything major left to discover.

The Walk of Life is in all versions of the game, although in the PS1 version the entrance is just a regular portal in The Hall of Doors with a lum requirement. Takes away a bit of the mystique.

That’s a good start, prof. I used to really enjoy Macromedia Flash before they killed it, now I don’t have the time to animate but it’s lots of fun.

Here are a couple of Adam and Joe podcast clips I animated around a decade ago.