software, gameware, strangeware
hi everyone (and the girl reading this). for the last three weeks me and my partner evie have been hard at work on a huge content update for our award winning game BITCH HELL , which we originally released on October 31, 2024. this update will include a new level that more than doubles the length of the game, a new weapon, and a new enemy type. here are some delicious screenshots! "it's BITCH…
yeah yeah yeah i know i haven't posted in a while. whatever. look at what i've been working on this month!!! this project started out a few months ago as a " rotozoom " engine running under MS-DOS, but has blossomed into something more as i came up with an actually good game idea. as of now, i'm planning for it to be a browser game called TRANNY WINGS , where you (a mythical harpy…
well. i've been doing some heavy research into Half-Life 2's choreography system and all of the related subsystems - facial animation, lipsync, and general scene management. here's my current working theory (in the broad sense) of how the choreography system in the Source Engine works, as of 2004: the character model is authored with morph targets corresponding to several standard…
previous devlogs: 2025-09-03 - DOSember game jam devlog #1 2025-10-13 - DOSember game jam devlog #2 well as per usual with my attempts at participating in game jams, i did not "finish" anything substantial during the time of the jam. however, i did decide to release something that i hope is interesting for the DOSember jam: DOS Junk Drawer 2025 by erysdren it's a little collection of demos…
EDIT: Please see the end of this post for some corrections! So I was digging around on Blue's News and the Wayback Machine looking for information on Valve's game Ricochet (yknow, as you do). It's a $5 multiplayer mod for Half-Life created by Valve that has been widely lampooned since its original release. It was even the subject of Half-Life 3 jokes in the early 2010s, when people…
well, it's been over a month since my first DOSember game jam devlog , what have i done so far?... um, well, i have a lot of little discarded prototypes but nothing i could seriously call a game. oops. here are some screenshots of what i've done in the meantime though: around mid september i had this going. it's using Quake 3 BSP files for the level geometry, and the Plush software…
In VGA Text Mode , the font bitmap can be updated by the currently running program using Int 10h . Here's how do you do it under both the DJGPP and Open Watcom C compilers. I was having trouble figuring it out, so here's some example code that worked for me. With DJGPP, we can use the DOS Transfer Buffer to hold the font data before firing off the interrupt: #include <go32.h> void…
i've seen some confusion lately about the intended viewing aspect ratio of Quake and its art assets. i was confused myself, so i decided to dig in a bit. while Quake was indeed intended to run in the low-resolution VGA and VESA modes like 320x200, which would have been stretched to fill a 4:3 monitor, actual stretching/distortion would have only effected the 2D screen elements like the…
polyrobo.mdl rendered in the Plush software renderer see the end of this post for an explanation of the full set of tech used here! before i talk about the gif above (which i made), i first wanna give a short history lesson: recently, my old friend polyrobo.mdl re-entered my brain out of nowhere. for those you don't know, polyrobo.mdl is a 3D model file included in the September 1997 press…
Source: The University of Utah The Utah Teapot is a very famous early 3D model created in 1975 by Martin Newell at the University of Utah. I recently nerdsniped myself and went looking for the original dataset that made up the teapot... and found it somewhat difficult to find. I had to dive through a Wayback Machine link which led to a random FTP server still hosting a file named teaset.tar.Z…
The VUE file format is a very old text script format for defining simple animations and the rendering of models. As far as I can see, they could be created with early versions of 3D Studio for MS-DOS. Documentation is very scarce because the format shares the same name with a few other tools and a JavaScript library. It is a text script format with ASCII encoding. Data is parsed line by line.…
back in early august i decided to revisit the Plush software renderer again and give it some more touch ups, as well as some new features i was thinking about. i seperated the concept of "Objects" (essentially actors in a scene) from "Models" which just contain vertices and triangle mesh data. previously Plush had the mesh data contained with the Object class, which meant there was no way to share…
a new MS-DOS game jam has appeared ! so of course i must try to make something for it. here's my first(?) devlog about that! last week before the jam started i was experimenting with some VGA raycaster stuff, which didnt really go anywhere, but i did get this cool glitch art out of it (when i completely fucked up and wrote all over the video memory during a hard crash): after that, i set my…
this post started out as a rant about the current state of media preservation on the modern internet... but ranting and complaining rarely helps anything. so instead, i have written a few short guides and notes about ways you can help contribute to media preservation by doing it your damn self. most of the guides lean very technical, but i try to give appropriate explanations and links to the…
Note: All integer values in these descriptions are in Little Endian format, and all strings are ASCII encoded. Most of the information in this post was gleaned from the TD3Extract tool and and the Test Drive 3 Thread on Accursed Farms . Huge thanks to the creator of that tool and the posters in that thread! You can find some of my own code for dealing with these files here . PLAYDISK.DAT TD3.CFG…
i forgot to make an announcement when i deployed it, but you may have noticed that my website looks hella different, again! huge thanks to my friend wavebeem for doing most of the legwork in the redesign :3 i'm hoping to run a level design jam on the Quake Mapping discord server centered around the Jolt Physics in FTEQW stuff i've been doing over the last few months. watch this space,…
sorry for the lack of updates... for the last month or so i've been head-down working on implementing Jolt Physics into the FTEQW engine. i've kinda been keeping quiet about it because i wanted to "drop it" all at once when i had a playable demo ready for people to download, but alas... the progress has kinda slowed down so i don't have anything cool like that yet. so this is me…
In FTEQW, you can use CSQC to give you more control over weapon viewmodels. Here is a chunk of code showing how to spawn a viewmodel entity in CSQC, with the appropriate flags set. static entity viewmodel; void CSQC_Init ( float apilevel , string enginename , float engineversion ) { viewmodel = spawn (); viewmodel . drawmask = MASK_VIEWMODEL; viewmodel . renderflags |= RF_VIEWMODEL; viewmodel .…
on friday me and my wife evie attended the inaugural Nebraska Indie Games Expo, hosted by the University of Nebraska Omaha. i submitted our game BITCH HELL to this expo back in early April and was honestly surprised to see us accepted, especially with our game being... like that. but we were put into the running for the Nebraska Indie Games Expo Commercial Game of the Year award! we brought a…
for the past few days i've been going all in on writing plugins for the FTEQW engine, and i've been making good progress so far! i started with prototyping a model loader for CPJ models, a format created by 3D Realms for use in Duke Nukem Forever back in the year 2000. here's where it's at currently: as you can see there are still some issues with the texture coordinates, but…
i want to show you some cool art from the late 90s and early 00s. this art was only ever intended to be seen by the developers at a select few games companies, and thus may contain obscure in-jokes and references that nobody outside of the company is likely to understand. needless to say, i love this shit. Worldcraft the originals. these are the only icons included with the Half-Life version of…
The FTEQW engine offers many improvements in changelevel functionality over the original Quake engine from 1996. In the original engine, your only way to send player data across a level transition was through the parm globals in the QuakeC server code, which meant you had exactly 16 floating-point numbers to use to store any data the players needed to remember across a level change. Everything…
me and my wife's queer FPS game BITCH HELL is 50% off for the next 16 hours!!! the sale will end this coming midnight in the CST timezone. get it while its hot! support two struggling trans artists and their weird game!!! stay queer, ya'll. don't let the bastards win. thank you!
File Header Version 1 Games using VPP Version 1 Version 2 Games using VPP Version 2 Version 3 Version 3 file compression Games using VPP Version 3 Version 4 Version 5 Version 6 The VPP file format stores uncompressed files in a table. It usually ends with the .vpp file extension, though it can have extended suffixes defining the target platform such as .vpp_pc and .vpp_xbox2 . It was introduced by…
i updated this here webbed site with a new page called playlist ! i wanna use it as a media diary to write down what stuff i've been enjoying. my hope is that it might show that cool stuff to someone who has never heard of it! probably will be focusing mostly on music and games, but whenever i watch a movie i'll throw that in too. this is not to say i'll be updating it every day,…
after a lot of blood and sweat and tears, i finally got TrenchBroom running on Haiku ! i'm so happy that i finally got it properly working. when i started tinkering with Haiku about 2 years ago, this was the big thing that i always wanted to port, but never had the knowledge or patience to do it. but over the last 3 days or so, i finally found those qualities in myself to get it done! at time…
hi everyone! i've been preparing a new series of updates about my work-in-progress game prototypes and software! some of those updates will end up here, but others will become Patreon exclusives. i've had a Patreon for many years now, but i've never really given it the attention it deserves. this is me trying to fix that! i have a whole slew of new game prototypes i'm working…
honestly, i've been killing a lot of free time lately by working on random tools and non-game projects. i feel kinda guilty for this, because i should be working on my big game projects (like IRIDIUM VERTIGO) but i just haven't had the motivation for it. oh well! i'll get back to it eventually... here's some stuff i've done in the last week or so: worked together with…
Please note that I will NOT provide any support for this. The game is finnicky, frequently breaks, and is hard to get running in the first place. Please make sure you have followed my instructions to the letter, and even then it may not work. Download This repackaged version of the game and put it somewhere on your Steam Deck. I've packed in all the necessary game content, fixed case issues…
me and my wife's queer FPS game BITCH HELL has been featured in Indiepocalypse issue #60 ! we are beyond excited to be featured! huge thanks to Andrew and all the people who have bought BITCH HELL so far!!!!! keep making weird games. keep being undefinable. keep being as queer as you possibly can. thank you!
From May 2020 to April 2021, me and designer Kim Riswick created a massive sandbox level in the Source Engine on commission from Radio TV Solutions , a popular Twitch streaming group. The spec we were given asked for a large section of a fictionalized version of Albuquerque, New Mexico to be mapped out for use in a Twitch stream event. We were asked to include several recognizable locations from…
as of today, Rise of the Triad is 30 years old! i wasn't even born yet when the game came out, but it's become easily one of my favorite games of all time simply because of the beauty of its presentation. the art, the sound, the music, and yes even the gameplay. its so hectic and crazy and creative that i just can't help but love it. you get a distinct sense that the developers had…
hi everyone!!! my gamedev work continues apace... the game i talked about in my last .plan update is now called IRIDIUM VERTIGO! this is probably the final title. me and a good friend have been hashing out the story and framing for the game, such as it is. originally i had planned for it to have no story, but i also planned to have it done by now... things change, yknow? i've made substantial…
In March 2020 I collaborated with level designer Kim Riswick on a Half-Life 2 level for the Map Labs #8: Companion Piece 2 mapping competition. We evenly split the work of both the level design and the environment art. Over the course of 27 days, we created what I consider to be our best work in the Source Engine together. The result was RESIN-ATOR, a short but tightly packed map full of classic…
as promised in my last .plan update , i'd like to talk a little bit about what my "next project" is! if you know me on discord then you probably know that it's not a secret by any means, i've just taken a little while to realize that this is what i wanna focus on for the next month or so. the working title is VERTIGO! it's a short first person shooter set in the top floors of a…
WARNING: this post contains me being overly sad and makes passing reference to self-destructive habits & behaviours. i'm a fairly emotional person nowadays. getting on HRT in 2019 and then getting older has led me to this interesting place where almost anything can make me cry, even if something isn't sad... it's just beautiful, for example. i'm not complaining; i actually love…
I personally had some trouble getting the Half-Life 2 Leak (as well as patched versions like LeakNet ) running on my Arch Linux desktop. I eventually got it working and I will document my steps here. Create a new 32-bit Wine prefix using winetricks --gui or manually. Install dxvk 2.1 onto the prefix you just created (you can also use winetricks for this). That's it. The first time you run the…
today we are in celebrations! 20 years ago today, on November 16th 2004, a couple of very cool things entered our world: Half-Life 2 by Valve Software Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines by Troika Games MM..FOOD by MF DOOM crazy, right? three utterly amazing and influential releases from various respected artists and developers all landing on the same day! me and evie have spent the day blasting…
with BITCH HELL 's launch being pretty much a success, i've been trying to figure out what game project i'm gonna tackle next. i've written a bunch of notes, pros and cons on the projects sitting on my backburner to try and help me pick one. no luck so far, but i'm hoping to have a blog post about whichever project i go with in the next week or two. fingers crossed! but…
BITCH HELL has been me and evie's on-again-off-again pet project since it was first conceived in March and April 2022. i always loved evie's way of describing our development process: "created during chaos". we originally made the game for the TRANS FUCKING RAGE JAM hosted on itch.io, and they were a big influence in shaping the kind of angry, grimy, aggressively transgender game we…
i love being trans. i love taking control of this body and living the way we want. there is nothing more we want in life than for others to feel the same, trans or not. i want everyone to feel this control in their destiny. for us before transitioning it was ... no control. no way to direct how the body looked. external things happened to it, and we had no part. we just let it happen. <deadname>…
BITCH HELL v1.0 is out now on itch.io!!! i'd like to give a big thank you to everyone who supported us while we worked on this, we couldn't have done it without you. a special thank you to my wife evie, who has been my guiding light through all of this. i love you <3 sometime in the next few days i'll be posting my post-mortem on BITCH HELL, such as it is. please remember: LIFE IS…
this week has had my energy focused almost entirely on getting BITCH HELL ready for v1.0 release on the 31st. i'm so excited for ya'll to play it! it's so much better than the 2022 jam version, and i hope everyone likes it and sees how much effort we put into it. it really is the culmination of all my gamedev skills ive been working on thus far, and we're proud of everything…
i set up a Forgejo instance on my domain! it's like having my own private github :3 finished preparing the source code of RUNANDGUNS!'s 1996 PC game Wild Ride! for release on github. download here ! added a pull request on Taradino switching over our blit functions from SDL_UpdateTexture() to SDL_LockTexture() and SDL_UnlockTexture(). SDL2 docs says that this is faster and intended for…
for the last 6 years, i have been trying to crack open some files. in early 2018 i was given a bunch of video files with the .AVS file extension, from a cancelled FMV game from the early 90s named Duelin' Firemen . at this time, i was deep in a project to document and interview as many people from the company (RUNANDGUN! Inc.) as i possibly could. the files were given to me with the…
here's some stuff i've been up to this week, and some todo items: removed the random form feed characters found in the TEDHELP.EXE section of my last post . in light of SDL3 becoming ABI/API stable, i've updated Yamagi Quake II to support it in the sdl3-current branch. pull request here . i keep thinking about making a cool sector-based level editor that can export to both the…
id Software's Tile EDitor v5.0 (TED5) was originally created in 1990 by John Romero while working at Softdisk. It was used by Romero and the other employees on the following titles (some at Softdisk, some at id Software): Slordax Shadow Knights Rescue Rover I Rescue Rover II Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion Hovertank One Keen Dreams Catacomb 3-D Commander Keen in "Invasion of the…
i fuckin love software rendering. the act of creating a fully realized 3D scene entirely in your own program, without the aid of OpenGL or DirectX or any GPU whatsoever. something about that is so charming to me. it leads to so many interesting technical design decisions and shortcuts taken to get it to run fast (if that is the goal). i've been on this kick bigtime since like 2022, when…
As I detailed in my other post , the Finger protocol is extremely simple and easy to implement. But I didn't show any details on how to actually implement it! A while back I wrote this test server/client pair in Python 3, so I will print the code here for posterity. The following code snippets are licensed as CC0/Public Domain, and I claim no ownership or responsibility thereof.…
i'm really gonna miss that goddamn website. i hate feeling so melancholy over something as simple as a website shutting down, but i met so many cool people there and made great friendships, i can't help but feel sad. i don't have much to say beyond that. i hope everybody lands on their feet and finds new spaces (both online and offline) that make them feel welcome. there are some…