Is Foreverhood dead?

[DoomRater]

Son of a-

[Apothem]

I wonder if there are enough resources available to finish it?

[neoworm]

I wonder if there are enough resources available to finish it?

Mimicking the style shoudnt be a problem, but the game wont have the right spirit without original author. It would be better to start your own project than try to finish this one. Turning it into community project would end up even worse. Its just too artistic compared to, for example, HacX.

[Alterworldruler]

About two-three years ago i've heard from Nmn myself (he told me that he was talking with the foreverhood guy) and that skadoomer (or whatever his name was) did cancel Foreverhood but didn't want to tell that to public.

[esselfortium]

...then why did you just tell everyone?

[40oz]

THE SECRETS OUT

[skadoomer]

Hi guys.
I got this thread forwarded to me last night and decided i'd jump in here and comment on what happened to this project. As you may have guessed, it hasn't exactly been active as of late and while i haven't officially canceled it, its more or less in a frozen state until I figure out what to do with it. I see this comes as a shock to many of you who where still holding on to the last grips of having more of this universe, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for still having some form of faith that it would come out of nowhere to be amazing. That being said, I never really did share with this community what happened and why things ended up the way they did. Allow me to elaborate.

After my release of 2006, I went back to the drawing board and tried to figure out what kind of game I wanted this to be. The original demo, or beta (whatever you want to call it) was a labor of love and my first experience in building a game on my own. I had an art style I liked, a story that sort of made sense, and a great backing from you guys, the zdoom community. What I didn't have was any kind of gameplay. I had pitched this project to my professors in college as my senior thesis in design, which is why it was so art heavy. Until I began reading the responses to its release, I had given gameplay even less consideration then sound (which there was none of in the original game). I had re-purposed a bunch of hexen weapons, slapped together what I could of an conditional enemy spawning system and considered it gameplay. I knew that I could do better than that, so I downloaded all the major ACS heavy mods at the time and began teaching myself programming 101.

Beginning in 2007, I sat down and really started getting on paper what kind of game this could be. I was toying with an weapon fork tree idea, where the player would have physical weapons and magic weapons, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. I tied this into the idea of a level-up system for both the player's stats and the weapons, and didn't really get a good idea of how it all should look until Bioshock was released. All of a sudden I found a gameplay model I liked and began doing a massive scripting effort to create the conditional systems I needed to make this work. Some of you may remember this thread when I began testing some of my efforts.

Around this time I also made a very serious decision. I decided to go back to school to peruse a career in doing game art professionally. I loved the work I was doing for Foreverhood, but being over 10 years behind the modern standard of development practices put me at a real disadvantage. After weighting the pro's and cons, It made more sense to be taught then learn it on my own, as self education would have taken way longer. So in August of 2008, I began the first semester of my two year program.

Later in 2009 amidst all my school work, I finished most of the scripting. I had been doing testing with Oblige to make sure the system balanced with the doom monsters before I began crafting it to foreverhood's world. Somewhere along the lines of creating ai alliances I got stuck or hit a wall (can't remember which) with ACS where monsters would attack the player even If I told them not to. I struggled for days trying to make it work and finally broke down. I had already been driven mad from scripting a mouse driven menu that worked across all aspect resolutions, and decided to put the project down for a while. I was really exhausted of scripting, as I hadn't really done much of the art stuff as I would have liked. My scripting library now had 24 files shared among all levels, and I really saw no end in sight as I tried to squash bugs, script behavior for new monsters, edit sprites and build graphics all at the same time. My grades beaning waining as a result of this effort so it came down to school or the project. I decided to put the project down in favor of schoolwork. That was in April of 2009.

And this brings us up to our current day situation. Since that time of starting the project as a stupid idea in 2003, Its brought me to the door of the video game industry and made me believe I actually had some talent in doing this stuff for real. In searching the forums of both doomworld and zdoom, it didn't seem like the project needed a farewell, so I locked up the forums, and shut down what I could of my accounts. Its hard when your a one man project, especially when you where trying to rival quality of KDIZD to be the coder, designer, artist and debugger. Make no mistake, I really wanted help. However, this community has maybe two or three dozen top dogs with their hands in their own projects. Recrudescent has always been an issue and I wanted to be a manager of a project even less than I wanted to design sounds (which i can't overstate enough isn't my thing). To the guys who said they wanted to finish it, I have more than enough resources, sprites, maps and ACS code to make you reconsider. This project is easily 13-something gigs of stuff. I consider this project my 5 minutes of fame where I tried to create a project that wouldn't only be cool, but something that could pave the way if zdoom ever became an gpl-ed game making platform.

So in a "where is he now" moment, I wanted to plug for you guys what I have been doing. I have a new website at http://iamsparky.wordpress.com, I'm leading a pack of goofballs in the borderlands community by documenting how to create custom maps and Working on another UDK showpiece. I graduated this past fall and now that i'm finished with my internship, I'm about to move and hopefully get the first big gig.

If anyone has any questions, shoot em here, or drop me a line at an e-mail address that actually works (brianjgoodsell@gmail.com). And thanks, really, for caring about what happened to this odd little project.
-Ska

[Demolisher]

I am truly curious, if you are still planning on picking this up again, I could definitely help you in the acs and decorate/misc scripting fields. I loved foreverhood, and hell, I'd be honored to help. But even if you decide against finishing this, I still would love to see your scripts at least.

[solarsnowfall]

Damn! It sounds like I could have been a help when it mattered, but missed a connection. It even sounds like I may have found solutions for some of your problems. I was one who was really looking forward to where this was going.

[DoomRater]

Eventually there were DECORATE commands that would make things forget they had targeted something after a short while that you never spotted. As someone who kept up on new additions to ZDoom, I tried my best to keep people up to date on new methods of writing code, but ultimately even I fell behind ever since I took up Second Life. Still, I remember a few things you were having problems with and just couldn't solve... Definitely let some ACS people have a look at it.

[skadoomer]

Id like to do a script and resource release, both for those who are interested in learning from the project and for myself in case I ever decide to pick it up again. Right now there are maybe a handful of comments in 8,000 lines of script, so deciphering where to start learning the systems will be challenging. Give me a few weeks and let me see where I am after that.

[Alice Jameson]

I'd love to see the resources you have for it if you decide to release them. This was one of my favorite zdoom projects. It was inspiring for me.

[Wartorn]

I would *definitely* be interested in the content you have set out. Out of curiosity will the unfinished maps that can be seen on the project's site, in the current build category on the media section be included as well? Those would be quite interesting to see.

[skadoomer]

Sure. I have scans of my sprite sheets for many of the enemies, weapons and npc's, two levels and several map sketches never released, the entire ACS library, the design doc and testing files that i'll package in the release. A lot of the story stuff and progression of events consisted of posted notes and printer paper that where taped to my wall to keep track of everything, so i dunno what to do about that. Maybe I'm at the point where I can paraphrase the game story in two paragraphs or less.

[Apothem]

I'd love to get a peek into your libraries, however messy they may be