I made this for a map jam in early 2020, working as many hours a day as possible from announcement of the Jokejam on February 14th to an hour before the deadline on March 27th. I don't even know how many hundred hours hahaha. I decompiled the first few levels of hl2, brought them into Hammer, stripped them down to the bare brushwork, then used J.A.C.K. to convert them into a map file I could open in Trenchbroom. In there, I shrunk it down by 25% to fit quake's sizing, then tried to merge the maps together into one continuous megamap, but I wasn't able to do that for all of them due to some overlap. I can tell Valve started with them all being able to be connected, but had to change proportions for aesthetic and gameplay reasons. Oh well, that's what the loading zones are for! After all this, I got to work fixing all the brushwork, choosing textures, remaking hl2 models into brushwork, and recompiling over and over to get the lighting as close as I could. Figuring out how to get the interactive elements working was comparatively fast and easy, and a welcome distraction from the vast bulk of building, texturing, and lighting. I never got to add everything I wanted, but I'm happy with what I got done. Was it worth it? EVERY MAD PROJECT IS

Also, the main character talks because he's supposed to be Ranger from Quake accidentally transported to Half Life 2, that was the joke of the map. At some point I'd like to release this as a stand-alone map, and there won't be any unnecessary dialogue.

Get the joke(jam)! https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/jo...
(thumbnail by Slipgate Sightseer on twitter)