Hi,

I've been reading and posting here and there on the forums for quite some time now, and being that my current project is taking shape, I think it's time that I introduce myself, and in the next post, I'll share some goals of my project.

Quick Bio:

As a Kid, I've had an interest in game development with my hundreds of hours I put into RPGMaker 2000/XP. At that time, I was mostly inspired by The Legend of Zelda series and other top down games that could be made in the program.

When I was a young teen, I was not really into PC games. I stuck to my old Nintendo consoles while my brother would play Counter-Strike: Source on a daily basis. I remember him once showing me a custom map he made for CSS that be based off our local 7-Eleven store. He was showing me how he made the textures, and a bunch of other simple things. I can't recall if I was blown away, or wanted him to stop talking so I could do my thing to be honest.

After a while, my interest in game development started to fade, and I got more into graphic design for websites and such. But then game called Portal. I was not into first person shooters, but I did like Puzzle games, and this game was one of a kind when it released. My brother got The Orange Box package and I played the living hell out of Portal. The game was so interesting to me and there came a point where I would turn on cheats, take the metal rectangles, move them into position, and save the game. Then a "custom puzzle" would be loaded like loading a saved state.

And it begins!:

To make a long story short, I eventually got The Orange Box for the PC, got a budget build, and made a lot of maps that never got released. Portal 1's gameplay elements where just a collection of base engine entities that worked together. I spent months on end learning how to make breakable glass, the indicator strips, buttons, doors, you name it! After I felt like I had enough knowledge of map making, and the I/O system, I decided to work on my first mappack called Blue Portals.

The project was on and off. I was working on another project at the time, so these maps were totally remade from the ground up with a new art design.

Through out the years and other side projects, Blue Portals was released on November 29th, 2010. The mod got mix reviews, and looking back on the project, I can say that it's not for everyone. But I can say that it does have a cult following.

With the release of Portal 2, of course I was excited to work on custom maps. I first started to to work on a Blue Portals 2 to fix the flaws of the original, and to add other cool elements. But due to the different FileSystem structure of that branch of Source, and my lack of knowledge of it at the time, I canned it. It was a good thing too, because DLC1 made the unused Adhesion Gel weird which BP2 used.

I've made some small mappacks such as A Little Higher, Tornate, and Feather Away. I also worked on most of the test chambers for Alive & Kicking while I was making new game concepts still within the Source Engine. After a while, Portal started to get boring, and the second DLC for Portal 2 (PTI) made me lose interest in making Portal puzzles because now anyone could do it, and it killed the art for me.

I started a project in the Source Engine called Punt and to sum it up, it was me trying to find what I want as my own puzzle game.

After a while, I got the gist that the main core concept of the Puntgun was not fun. That, and the code base was a mess due to the Puntgun being a mod of the gravitygun, and poor tracer code. Also, Valve released a new SDK base to replace the one from 2007, and I really wanted my mod to be less like Portal gameplay wise.

In the next entry, I'll talk more about my project, the goals and why I decided to port it to LE3.

In the meantime, you can checkout my Youtube channel to see what I've done throughout the years. (I hope to put Leadwerks related content on it soon!)

https://www.youtube.com/user/reepblue

And here is my blogger which as more of my writings and thoughts:

http://reepblue.blogspot.com/

Thank you for reading/watching. I hope you are willing to hear more!