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Tempus Irae: Introduction Bungie's Marathon series was built on a 2.5-D engine much like Doom's. Unlike Doom - or Quake, or any first-person shooter until Half-Life, Marathon had a deeply involving setting and a complex storyline told through a series of computer terminals the player could read. Tempus Irae was a total conversion which continued the Marathon tradition of mixing great action with a rich story and setting. I faced two major challenges during Tempus. The first was taking the plot outline presented by the project's founder and director - basically one sentence - and turning it into a fully realized story. This involved working with the other 6 mapmakers to place the terminals and set up the action around them, as well as working with the 3 artists to create the terminal texts and artwork. The second challenge was doing things which were original and fresh in the Marathon engine - which has no scripting capabilities and only the most awkward tools for editing game resources. The biggest challenge was doing a sequence where you shut off an airlock force field and blow a pair of aliens into the vacuum of space. The sequence works on a series of switches, moving platforms, and tiny, aggressive, invisible, explosive creatures hidden inside pieces of geometry. For more information on Tempus Irae, see the website. |