1/20/24: Seven Stories Underground

Between Two Hearts

A lot of inventive care and creativity went into the Voideville stash-house - I could hardly tell you how it started, looking back, but it's one of my favorite locations in Vaughan; it feels fully fleshed out, lived in, and self-contained. There's a darkness and a charm to this lonesome apartment building sunken into the swampwater, offering warm respite to its denizens of coke-dealing communists, computer technicians, mojo-handed blues-slinging junkie deadbeats, and academics.

So what if you could revisit it in 3D?

I don't have a witty music reference this time

Let me be perfectly candid about something - I hate making maps in Source.
Okay, maybe "hate" is a strong word, but to be more specific, I am unhappy with the maps I've started for this mod project insofar.
Being a Faust game, they are - accordingly - dark, low-down, gritty, and unpleasant. They are miserable by design, and I can only take so much of that shit before it makes me sick to the back teeth.

That being said, I still want to stay in practice, so I've taken up the side-task of adapting certain Vaughan maps to fit Goethe.


This was fun, and ridiculously so. I am - for once - really enjoying myself, even just simply reconstructing a map I'm already intimately familiar with. I'm learning new tricks and techniques within the Source engine itself to buff out and improve my maps, and I think it shows.

I set out with a mission in mind to create a map evocative of the early 2010s vibe of custom-map-rotation Team Fortress 2 servers, with all of their wacky and inexplicable aesthetics, and creative use of Source engine mechanics:

(Harbl_Hotel)

(dm_mariokart)

(balloon_race_v2b)

I cannot think of anything more deeply evocative of nascent internet nostalgia than community Team Fortress 2 servers - internet culture bled into them just as much as Source engine material (Garry's mod videos, per se) bled out into the larger forum of the internet, feeding the culture and comedic diet of an entire generation. It's my ultimate ambition to capture some of that fun and nostalgia in this project.

I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with my water texture, because it moves in the map editor, but then refuses to animate in-game. We'll fix it soon enough.

Dark Night

So, working on this dark, dirty, swamp map, I needed some light sources - the only thing is, I don't like to just have lights floating idly by, you catch my drift?

I'll let you in on another secret - the only thing I hate more than miserable Source maps is modeling in Blender. Sure, I fall in love with the end result - check out the playermodels, no? - but Christ almighty, man. 

It's a lot of fucking work for a small audience. Not to gripe - I'm fortunate enough to have had the freedom to choose my own suffering, and to ache and strain for my passions is a gift unto itself. And not only am I grateful for this unique privilege, I'm - as ever - always grateful to you, my small audience, for caring.

Ultimately, what frustrates me about modeling in Blender is my concern about "good practice" - I can't help but feel like I'm violating some invisible and unspoken set of rules for how these things *ought* to be done, so I can only employ a rookie's DIY ethic, a novice approach - that being said, it's an opportunity to fall back on my punk rock laurels to knock something out and call the job done.

Aesthetically, I think I've done well with this gnarly little lantern here, and all that remains is texture work.

Anyways, moving on . . .

Paid the Cost to be the Boss

Speaking of Blender models, who's this bad motherfucker?

It is Tskarface, head of the violent, gun-laundering, body-chopping, politician-massacring Tskartel, who will have an alternate chicano costume featured in Goethe:

Last Wordz

Progress has been stultified for a while for a number of reasons - chief among these is that I've had to pick up a second job to make ends meet. City living ain't cheap, lord knows it ain't easy - and it takes me away from my passions - but I'm sure I'll see the shore sometime soon.

Thank you all, and I send much love out to you and yours.

JC