Now I'm playin' it real straight, and yes, I cut my hair.

It's been a long, long time. But during my absence, I was working on a game with a bunch of friends across the globe called The Adventures of Square! It's a standalone game for the ZDoom Engine. We're going to be making a full 3-episode game, but we decided to release the first episode to create some buzz out on the indie scene.

You should really be playing it. Why aren't you? GET IT! PLAY IT! LOVE IT! Be there and be Square!

So the 20th Anniversary of Doom came and went, and another edition of the Cacowards is presented.

And wouldn't you know it, I actually won one for Forsaken Overlook, which is quite a surprise, and is my first solo award (others were due to project collaboration).

I'd like to thank the staff at Doomworld, Brian "Snakes" Knox for the Secret Santa project which was the impetus for making such a map, Chris "lupinx-Kassman" Kassap for having a distinct enough style to use as guidance, and everyone who played and nominated it.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, Happy Dooming.

So, this week on Doom Radio, me, st.alfonzo, Tarnsman, Joe Pallai, and RottKing got together and each made fully-playable maps for Doom in 100 minutes.

It's not purely audio - Tarnsman put up a video of everybody chatting while you see footage of him making his map. Better that it isn't just the audio - plenty of the airtime was silence and the click-clack-click of keys and mouse buttons.

Head on over to Doom Radio and have a look! You can also download the maps that we made on another link on that page, if you so wished.

I have finally released Forsaken Overlook now that it is finally finished, and I have posted a postmortem of it here, which you could also find bundled in its archive in plain-text (although it would have 100% less screenshots and general eye-candy).

Forsaken Overlook was created in the end of 2012 into 2013 for a project headed by Brian "Snakes" Knox called the "Secret Santa Imitation Project." For this project, map authors in the Doom Community were told to create a map in the style of another author, but you were assigned one at random out of the pool of participants.

Another month, another update.

But this is not about the "Secret Santa" project - this is about a project that I haven't talked about ever and finally got around to releasing! Introducing, Coffee Break Episode 1, a set of 11 short maps designed with gameplay in mind, rather than length.

Anybody who knows me knows that my Achilles Heel is long maps, so I decided to remedy that with a group of several short maps. Originally, this was going to be a megawad of them - 32 maps replaced - but I guess laziness and lack of interest got the better of me, this time. I started making this in 2009, and planned on finishing it around the end of 2010. Totally not the case.

So a while back, I was asked by Mike Mancuso to contribute to this project he was starting - a mapset for Doom featuring all new textures, themed in such a way to evoke feelings of another planet, inhabited by humans for mining purposes or something.

You know what? I'm sure that there's a wonderful story, given what Mike is putting together with everybody's contributions, but I don't really know exactly what it is. You get to kill a bunch of demons and stuff with lots of really interesting architecture and scenery and music, so it should be really great, anyway.

So, Valve has finally released their in-game editor. And I couldn't be more thrilled.

I've always wanted to make maps since Portal came out back in 2008, but lack of personal time and the difficulty of learning Hammer, along with a lack of prefabs for some of Portal's common elements, kept me from starting. I mean, I've used WorldCraft, Hammer's predecessor, but the time and effort to relearn it wasn't something I wanted to invest. And, when it got right down to it, the time it would take to create a simple puzzle wouldn't be worth it in the end, I felt.