User:The1Wolfcast
Main hobbies are source engine mapping (mainly for Garry's Mod!), remixing/arranging songs, image editing and video editing, and lastly, game development/modding.
DO NOT FORGET THESE/THIS PAGE(S): Sky List (the thing that has the light_environment keyvalues and skybox texture names)
If you want some good reads on mapping check out these pages:
How to Develop a Map That Works
Contents
Source Mapping
Ever since I got a decent pc back in 2020, one of the first steam games I got was Garry's Mod (ravenfield was the first game I ever got on steam and yes you can make maps for it which I did), probably one of the best source games to start mapping for, my first map ever made started out as a small little room with one way glass like an interrogation room, as I learned more features with the hammer editor I would try them out and put them on my map. This First map was actually so poorly made that it would crash your game when loading into it, the issue was fixed when I turned the cube skybox into a proper one.
Epic Horror Map (EHM)
Skip ahead a year and I have quite a bit of experience with the hammer editor so I decide to make a liner style map instead of the typical open sandbox maps I normally would, the map I ended up with Epic Horror Map, I played the map spooky horror map and wanted to make something similar so that explains why the map is the way it is, unfortunately while I have experience mapping, I hadn't actually published a map up to that point so I had no idea I had to pack the custom content so all of the custom textures I used showed up as missing textures. I also got really burned out while working on the map and decided to just end the map where I did and cobbled together an ending. The map contains a couple jokes like a beer bottle that plays a barney quote when you pick it up and a radio in the end room would play a really annoying song and picking it up with the gravity gun in the room would make it play a blaring alarm until you put it down. Even though a lot of the comments on the workshop page are negative, I still laugh when someone tries their hardest to hurt my feelings (especially when there are spelling mistakes XD)
OK Horror Map (OHM)
Fast forward about a week when I start development on an indirect sequel just to scratch that mapping itch I had, while thinking about it I wanted to have a lot more features mainly scripted sequences and displacements for terrain. From the very beginning I had the starting water area, the boat and the dock and I even had a rope attached to it but I never got it to work properly and just made the boat static and unmoving.
Since this was a follow up to EHM (epic horror map) I needed to have some kind of resemblance to the first one so I decided to just copy and paste the first part of the EHM but decided to make some areas seem more run down to show time passage, mainly the secret area and the floor breaking area have changes. The area after (dubbed the shotgun shack area by my friend) didn't initially contain a wall and was actually just a copy and paste of the starting area with the shotgun shack added in.
Later in development my friend gave me some pointers and originally the starting area's rock wall was made of brick and looked pretty weird, my friend said to change the texture and honestly I think it was the best change I made to the map because it looked 100x better after that. Up until the shotgun shack area I didn't want there to be any threats and wanted there to be a "big reveal", but since I didn't want the player to fight enemies without a weapon I made it the trigger for the reveal not be able to activate until the player picked up the shotgun in the basement of the shotgun shack which I added pretty early on. There is also a crowbar as a last means of defense in there and to make sure the player gets both, I make the trapdoor of the basement close and lock on the player until they pick up the crowbar. After the player picks up their weapons they'll head outside where a fast zombie will throw a Metrocop through the wall and reveal a way to the player. I will admit, I don't like this way of opening up new areas to the player because they have to be at the right place at the right time. Anyways the backyard of the shotgun shack has a headcrab canister that crashed into some barrels that leak toxic waste, the headcrab canister was actually just a static prop and not the functional thing, this works out since you can imply that this had been for a while and thus wouldn't have anymore headcrabs to release, the toxic waste wasn't necessarily a new thing for me since I knew how to use hurt triggers and use the texture tool.
The cave area was a pain to make and I even had to cut a portion of it because the displacements just wouldn't play nice. In spite of that, I will say that it turned out well and I even tried out some new concepts, remember that prop elevator I failed to make on my first map? Well I actually got one to work on there and in an earlier version of the caves, instead of it going straight down, it went at a diagonal angle like that one elevator in Half-Life 1. The cave area also introduces the player to the 357 Magnum for the first time and even has a suspense track from Half-Life 1 that plays when you see that mutilated corpse. At first there weren't any antlion workers at the top but since I had to cut a large portion of the cave section where they would have been, I decided to place 2 of them at the beginning (I even foreshadow their presence with some audio when you first get to the shotgun shack area and have a ragdoll of one in the backyard). After you figure out how to open the elevator, it takes you down to the area with what remains of the larger cave section, this is my least favorite part of the map as the little vent-like cave area is too close to the elevator you have to use the ladder in the elevator to get out and I had to place another ladder just so you could get back in (I hated this so much in fact I came back to it and changed it). The elevator shaft also gave me a lot of problems, mainly the displacements would only allow so many different light sources before it wouldn't reflect light from any new sources.
In the cave textured vent, you will find a body of a guy who tried to get out of there using a pickaxe and had a flare as a light source, at the end of the "vent" you will have to break out but on a table near at the bottom of the elevator shaft there is a grenade if you really don't feel like breaking it piece by piece. After that atrocious area, you will end up in a train tunnel where some friendly metrocops are fighting off some antlions (and workers), this is probably my favorite place as there are a lot of outcomes you can have with the metrocops. There are differences in the dialogue depending on if you let the main cops friend live or not and there is even some dialogue if you use their healthkit, they will eventually give you pointers on where to go just in case you couldn't tell from the forcefield. After going down the tunnel for a little bit, you will hear a train coming (by hearing its loud horn) and you have a little bit to get out of its way before it hits you (yes, it can kill you!) I even have a scene where a poison zombie walks out onto the tracks and gets hit. The train eventually blows up and I figured that would be a good place to end it and then I use some point entities to fade out the level and show some text/ The level makes extensive use of game_text when picking up a weapon for the first time or when interacting with something, (with the exception of the weapon pickup text) I did this to show the player character is a person. The map also makes large use of scripted sequences especially in the train area with the metrocops. There are also some secret areas that I wont mention in case you want to find them yourself, and yes the barney beer bottle does make a return.
Highway 87
In the middle of developing OHM I got frustrated with the cave displacements not working how I wanted them to, so I decided to take a break and collaborate with my longtime friend Lightning Inferno (will be shortened to inferno for convenience from here on out) to create a map for Garry's Mod, that being highway 87, this was the first map I decided to not only collaborate with others on but to also make videos about on my YouTube channel.
You probably also noticed that there isn't a download link to the map or rather one to the steam workshop and that's because it never got finished, this map suffered from something I am sure a lot of other Garry's Mod mappers can relate to, that being feature creep/it being overly ambitious and was beyond my skill. As a result, I was never able to finish my part of the map.
The map was going to have 4 versions, a day/night version for sandbox and a day/night version for darkrp with all of the props and custom decals removed for personalization. The reason why we settled on a highway map was to ensure we could both work on it at the same time, by having the road always be the same in our version I could easily copy over Inferno's work to mine, plus it was really easy to line it all up.
Thankfully this map wasn't all a loss as I learned some new things like the point_template for getting my targets at the shotting range to respawn and I actually made great work of ai nodes on here as me and my friends like to play with Cpt. Hazama's Scp npcs that require ai nodes to work (not using them means that any scps will have to be in a short range of a player for them to follow you and will remain stationary if there isn't a player within range). I also learned how to mount other games' content to hammer like counter strike source which is something I would use when I went back to work on OHM.
Here is the download of the latest "stitched" version (both my map and inferno maps are combined also sorry for the awful naming convention)
MISC
Well that's it for all of my source maps, I have made a lot more but didn't feel like they were worth mentioning so I decided not to, most of them were for testing out stuff like level transitions or soundscapes.
I also haven't deleted any of the vmfs/bsps of any of my maps, I do this because I like to have them as reminder of both my successes and my failures (especially highway 87)
I will also say I have been working on a source sdk base 2013 mod but I wont reveal too much in case I don't finish it, but I was able to use all my mapping experience with gmod to great effect here (especially OHM). If you ever want to create a half life 2 mod, use XBLAH's Modding Tool, it will save you a lot of pain and time in the long run, it also has a version of hammer called hammer++ that is objectively superior to regular hammer in every way, I can only describe it as a mappers wet dream.
YouTube
My main YouTube channel, The1Wolfcast, is where I upload videos mainly about whatever games my pc can run and record smoothly. The videos I am proudest of are my Half-Life HD Models video, and my Counter-Strike: Condition Four video, these are the videos I have worked the hardest on and I am very happy on how they turned out, this is all I will say about my channel since I would eventually like to make a video about my history on YouTube.
Music
This is something not a lot of people know about me and this is probably the only hobby I actually took a 1 or 2 year long break from (can't remember now)
Music Maker JAM
When I was in the 4th grade I picked up an app called Music Maker JAM and messed around with it and made probably like 10 or 12 songs with it but only 4 of them I was able to recover and I made a YouTube channel dedicated to archiving those songs.
Trackers
FamiTracker
In 2018 I wanted to make music on the pc, so I did some digging and found a program called FamiTracker. I didn't use the program for long since I was a bit younger at the time and the idea of watching youtube for tutorials never even crossed my mind at least for using music software, I'm sure I watched tutorials for non important stuff but needless to say, I dropped FamiTracker pretty quickly.
OpenMPT
In 2022 I played Deus Ex for the first time and I absolutely loved it, JC Denton is by far one of my favorite video game protagonists of all time and the story/gameplay blew my mind for a game made in 2000. One aspect I of the game I liked above all else was the music (favorite tracks are Training music, UNATCO Combat, NYC Conversation, All Enemy Within Tracks, Area 51 Ambient/Combat and MJ12 Combat). One thing I typically do with games that have soundtracks I like are get the source files, open them in audacity and listen to them, but with Deus Ex they are all in these weird proprietary formats and I had to fiddle around with the Import Raw Data just to get something that wasn't earrape, and when it wasn't it was just the samples use for the instruments. I did some searching and it turns out you need to open them in a tracker like OpenMPT, so I went ahead and downloaded it and listened to the entire Deus Ex ost 17 times over. I don't really use OpenMPT to make music but I have watched tutorials on how to use it just make sure I don't mess up the game files for Deus Ex so if I wanted to make some music I am sure I could cobble something together.
Linux Multi-Media Studio (LMMS)
This is pretty much where I am today with my music hobby (I started using it in 2020 but decided to actually learn it in 2021), so far I have only been remixing/arranging video game tracks to get a feel for the program and haven't composed any of my own original work, I have posted all of these songs to the same channel as well if you are interested.
Image Editing
Not really hobby but something I have gotten better at since I use GIMP (what an unfortunate name by the way lol) to make thumbnails for my videos and use it to make textures for any of my source maps.
Video Editing
This is something I have gotten exponentially better at since I started my YouTube channel.
Pre decent PC
When I didn't have a good pc and made videos on my phone I used whatever free no watermark editor I could get my hands on.
Decent PC
When I finally got my decent pc in 2020, I used Filmora 9 to edit my videos which if I am being honest, was a huge mistake. Mainly because it costs money and is really terrible. Only about a year later I found out about hitfilm express from a youtube video and switched to that. The first video I made with HitFilm was Half Life Deathmatch With BOTS I am also proud of this video but not as much as with the other two I mentioned.
Good PC
In July of 2022, I built my very first pc and I have since been using DaVinci Resolve to edit videos, the first video I made was technically a 7 Days To Die SFX video, but the first one to use any sort of "advanced" edits (chroma key mostly) was this Deus Ex meme I made to test DaVinci and see how well it ran (p.s it runs just fine) although to be fair it relied heavily on gimp and audacity for the beginning image edit and the background music respectively.
Game Development
Ending this with my oldest hobby out of all of these, game development is something I am very passionate about and pretty much no one I know, knows I used to make games, I say used to because I haven't actually made a game in awhile, or to be more specific have not finished/released any game. I have made some very simple games using .NET and Unity but they are more like tests and I don't count them.
Inspiration
So when I was a little kid, I played on the 6th generation of consoles since that's what we could reasonably afford, games that really got me inspired to start creating them were dark cloud, the sims, and some others I am probably forgetting, but the main inspiration I got was on my friends og xbox, he had far cry instincts and I spent so many hours in the map editor just creating whatever I could imagine, my favorite things to make were these long corridor like maps made from the cargo containers and it sort of felt like playing SCP: Containment Breach except with more vibrant colors and guns.
Early Days
Game Creator
Before I got my moms old windows 7 laptop in around 2016, I made games on my phone, the two programs I used were Game Creator (demo) and Sketchware. The first app I can remember is game creator, this was my first introduction to both game development and music creation. Game Creator has its own music editor built into it but it's not that amazing, some of the first games I remember making are 2d side scrolling shooters and I think I even made a mega man clone at one point.
Fun Fact!: Game Creator was made using GameMaker, I know this because fatal errors you can get in Game Creator reference some gml files and gml stands for GameMaker Language which is the programming language made for GameMaker. the more you know!
djxj
My creativity really shines here as you can tell by the title, from what I remember about this game it was just a 2d shooter with zombies and some grassy slopes but I seem to remember it so fondly for some reason. Despite this, there were some features in there that I have used in my other game creator games such as the players gun projectiles firing at such high speeds its practically a hitscan weapon as well as an 8 bit style ak-47 which I was really proud of for the longest time.
Zombie Killer
One of my best game creator games, Zombie Killer was the last game I ever made on game creator (this was made after the GameMaker 8.1 days as I returned to the app out of nostalgia) and made a 2d side scrolling shooter called Zombie Killer and you wont believe this, you shoot (and knife cause there is melee) zombies. I never did finish it though and the only proof of its existence are some playthroughs of multiple versions of the game on my friend's channel, Lightning Inferno.
Sketchware
Android Fighter
There used to be this app called Sketchware, one of my fondest memories on there was creating this game called android fighter, Sketchware contained a lot of generic icons to use and one of them was the little android guy so I made a turn based fighting game that had some really innovative features like: randomized damage (this would show up as weak, normal, and critical! though the three damage types were always the same value for both you and the ai, so weak would always be 7, normal 15, etc.) and even 3 power ups, a turn skip, healthkit and a shield, and these all worked exactly how you imagine they would. Unfortunately when I got a new phone I never ported the apk over so its been lost to time. I even made a song in Music Maker JAM for it but it was lost as well. The very last version of the game allowed the android enemy to use power ups as well.
2016-2018
GameMaker 8.1
Now its 2016 and my mom gave me her windows 7 laptop (this exact model actually) and its time to get back into making games. I didn't actually immediately get to game making, as I was too busy attempting to run the free version of ravenfield on itch.io and I would always crash. When I did finally get back into game making, I discovered GameMaker 8.1 (trial version of course although it has been discontinued you can still find archived downloads of it).
Cube Land
Now this is when my game making became serious, after learning how to use the program (thanks to its tutorials) the first game I made with it was cube land, despite the name this was a top down 2d game where you played as a square and had to collect every coin in a level before you had to get to the exit and there were enemies as well, the game also had a local 2 player mode and one level even required you to use 2 players (dont worry both could be controlled on the same keyboard). There was also a pvp mode with player one being the normal square that could shoot, and player 2 that could spawn the enemies from the pve mode, this mode was awful because when I would playtest with my friend Noah he would just spam enemies and I could never win.
Cube Land: WWII
For my next game it was a World War 2 shooter, but it was in the same style as cube land and was still 2d and top down so I just slapped a subtitle on it and called it a day with the title. Gameplay consisted of killing every enemy and the enemies you killed were regular infantry soldiers and tanks that shot beefy projectiles that could 2 shot you. This game actually had shooting mechanics but you had to use the arrow keys to shoot in that direction, and yeah there was local multiplayer again but instead of using the keyboard for the second player (because player 1 used was to move and arrow keys to shoot) they had to use an xbox 360 controller, why 360? Well when I tried a ps3 controller with it the controls were all messed up (and yes at this point we went from the 6th generation to the 7th and were still 1 behind). I was going to have a deathmatch mode but I never finished it. One thing that I am proud of is the use of paths to make a tank come into the level and the players would have to time their movement to not get killed by the tank which shot slower moving 1 hit kill projectiles.
2018-2023
Unity
I was never able to master Unity like I did GameMaker or Sketchware which is very unfortunate because all the little test projects I did were actually pretty fun and I implemented cool features. One test I made was an fps where I got crouching, sprinting and jumping all implemented and even got basic shooting mechanics like, switching weapons, manual reloading. While I can't say I learned any useful game design aspects from Unity, it did get me into 3d modeling, which is something I would like to use in that source mod I mentioned if I can find a use for it.
Eventually I did stick it out and purchased a book in C# programming called "The C# Player's Guide" which eventually was able to get through my thick skull and I used Unity to make numerous game and even ended up releasing a couple too!
Delay The Inevitable
In about a span of a week I created a little arcade game where you play as a ball and try to prevent your health from dropping to zero, there are powerups that spawn about like speed or invincibility
1 Week Horror Game
2023-Now
Unreal Engine 5
Unfortunately around September of this year, Unity decided they hadn't ruined their reputation enough so they came out some pricing that was almost immediately hated. I took this as an opportunity so jump to the Unreal Engine
Modding
Modding is definitely a great first foray into game development but even while I was working on games I still modded some of the games I played either because I wanted to make them fit their themes more or make them silly experiences (usually this one lol).
SCP: Containment Breach
I love scp, it is my favorite web series to date and the only one I return to every so often, because of the nature of scp is was inevitable that someone was going to make some games based on it. The best (in my opinion) of these games is SCP: Containment Breach. What made this game especially appealing to me for modding was how easy it was to do so, the files aren't encrypted in any way or are stored as vpk files, basically what this means is as long as the file has the same name and type it will show up in game. Textures are the easiest to do since they are static images you can easily replace (or edit), audio on the other hand can be difficult depending on the files you change. There are scripted events in the game and if there is unique audio involved (like a conversation) the event or audio will be made around one another, so if the audio is longer or shorter than the event was made for, it won't flow right and you end up in situations where a guy could be talking long after the containment breach already happened.
Source Engine
I have created a few source engine mods, most of them were experiments but I have one idea so far that I actually have some work on. I won't share too much in case I don't finish it.
Ending Notes
If you got this far, thank you for reading this, I hope you learned a bit about me and what I like to do when I am not playing games (I mainly play CSGo, Arma 3, Deus Ex and GMod among other games). I will update page with anything I do or remember that is interesting, I wrote this entire thing in a couple hours so I probably left something huge out.
Here is my steam profile if you are really interested or want to see all my workshop creations: https://steamcommunity.com/id/t1wc/
