My personal library

[FrostNova]

Hi, I've played Splinter Cell trilogy last year because I joined that 52 games challenge. Furost_nova's profile | Backloggd

I made a site full of level design articles in hopes of breaking into the industry. I began with google sites, but now I've migrated to mediawiki. I still want something better than mediawiki, but for now it was the easiest solution to publish text and have more freedom to format than google sites. My plan is to work in the industry. My long term goal is to make that site a professional resource and refactor everything. But that won't come until after some years of professional experience. 

For now I've stopped adding more articles because it's a futile endeavor. The reason is pretty much this article of mine: https://www.henry-ym.org/index.php/Environment_Art_x_Level_design_x_Writing._Ego_made_me_blind

https://www.henry-ym.org

I made this: https://www.moddb.com/members/frost-nova/addons

I have made maps for Open Arena before. If you ever seen maps called Lego + something. Plus, a colorful map with too many colors at the same time, circular arena style, called RGB. I made it too. I deleted them from moddb because I was going to rename to remove the "lego" trademark, but I guess I forgot to upload them.

[datiswous]

20 hours ago, FrostNova said:

I began with google sites, but now I've migrated to mediawiki. I still want something better than mediawiki, but for now it was the easiest solution to publish text and have more freedom to format than google sites.

I think you could use a better mediawiki theme. But if it's temporary I guess it's ok. There's loads of cms's and site generators out there. Since it's mostly static you don't need something like Wordpress.

 

Btw. I see in your articles that you are critical of Prey 2006. I personally think it's an awesome game. One of the best games I ever played.  Maybe your experience is a bit personal and I think it's better to give examples of games that are actually bad.

https://www.henry-ym.org/index.php?search=prey+2006&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go

(I mostly disagree with your criticism)

Edited March 11, 2025 by datiswous

[snatcher]

Welcome @FrostNova !

Thanks for sharing your work with us. Looking forward to essays from you about The Dark Mod and the maps / missions.

[FrostNova]

I played Prey in 2021 I think. I think I was strongly biased because over time I tried to change the focus.

When I compare Prey to HL2, FEAR, Quake 2. Prey felt so out of place. But compare Prey to Unreal, Unreal 2, doom 3. The walk on walls and ceiling and the portal tech were super cool for the players at the time.

It's interesting that I loved FEAR. But when I searched the web for opinions about it I've found lots of ppl saying that FEAR was bland, crude. That Condemned was a much better game. For some reason the plot of FEAR with supernatural horror got me hooked in and made me not care much about the repetitive gameplay.

Edited March 11, 2025 by FrostNova

[datiswous]

11 hours ago, FrostNova said:

It's interesting that I loved FEAR. But when I searched the web for opinions about it I've found lots of ppl saying that FEAR was bland, crude. That Condemned was a much better game. For some reason the plot of FEAR with supernatural horror got me hooked in and made me not care much about the repetitive gameplay.

Yeah I have the same. I think the battles with the ai are so much fun and the atmosphere of the lighting and some of the scripted sequences is very nice. The levels are indeed very bland, but other aspects (i.m.o.) make up for that. Also I read Extraction Point expansion fixes some of the poor level design, but I personally don't remember the difference enough. I know Persus mandate is completelly different and should probably be ignored.

11 hours ago, FrostNova said:

When I compare Prey to HL2, FEAR, Quake 2. Prey felt so out of place. But compare Prey to Unreal, Unreal 2, doom 3. The walk on walls and ceiling and the portal tech were super cool for the players at the time.

I think it's a linair puzzle shooter. So it doesn't hold your hand at times. Which is fine to me. I think it makes sense that things are weird on an alien spaceship.

Edited March 12, 2025 by datiswous

[datiswous]

13 hours ago, snatcher said:

Looking forward to essays from you about The Dark Mod and the maps / missions.

Indeed that could be (more) interesting for the tdm comunity.

[revelator]

taste in playstyle is different these days, maybe because so many of the current games come from the console world but who knows. 

personally i love fear, fear 2 is also ok but fear 3 i kinda loathe it became to mainstream and was not even close to the atmosphere of the former two.

not to say all console game ports have been bad, i absolutely love the horizon series despite it starting its life on playstation. the old and sadly very buggy call of cthulhu dark corners of the earth was also a console port from xbox and it was a lot of fun when it worked.

sadly the studios trying to fit square blocks in round holes to make porting games easier has been rather rocky and playstyles as a consequence have suffered. like not being able to jump or invisible walls keeping you from exploring. most times due to the maps kinda ending shortly after said wall and causing some rather funny deaths because whoops you fell through the map at times they forget a wall and either you get stuck on invisible geometry or fall through the map. also some games with truely attrocious keymappings. older games from before console gaming got serious also used tricks to keep users from exploring to far but it was much better integrated with the games so did not fell as forced.

[FrostNova]

https://www.henry-ym.org/index.php/Realistic_vs._Fantasy#Jed_Knight_2%3A_Jedi_Outcast I fixed some typos and expanded it.

https://www.henry-ym.org/index.php/When_details_conflict_with_the_gameplay Malevolence wasn't really part of my portfolio. I deleted that blockout and created another page to discuss the important part of my exercise with malevolence. For a stealth game, what I said abou the water would surely be a huge difference in level design for stealth games.

Edited April 1, 2025 by FrostNova

[FrostNova]

New section dedicated to game reviews. I published so many in backlog sites that after I reached 100 I decided to copy in my own site.

It may appear strange, but I have nothing about multiplayer. 

Edited October 18, 2025 by FrostNova

[Zerush]

11 hours ago, FrostNova said:

New section dedicated to game reviews. I published so many in backlog sites that after I reached 100 I decided to copy in my own site.

It may appear strange, but I have nothing about multiplayer. 

I don't like multiplayer games, I'm old and i like to desconnect sometimes with a good game, playing in own conditions and rythm, but nowadays good singleplayer games, like TDM, are turning in rare gems.

In the past I loved MDK, naturally Doom, Prey also was nice, Dark Messiah, great Portal, from guys contracted by Valve, because of an by these created Student game, Narbacular Drop from the Digipen Academy, which was the game idea on which was based Portal.

DigiPen apart offers tons of all kind of student games of any genre for free, a lot of these are also on Steam also for free.

Edited October 18, 2025 by Zerush

[FrostNova]

I was partially wrong, I did cover multiplayer in one article. The most recent article I think, is one I called "too many routes". I was looking at the maps I made for UT and suddenly realized something. Many things that I read cover focus, force of will, willingness to surpass your own limits, success, suffering, pain, etc. Somehow I looked at my own created levels and it just dawned on me. There! I see it! Why do many many multiplayer maps are bad? It's about not having a clear goal or focus and attempting to do too much at once. Or attempting to cater for too many styles or embrace too many strategies at the same time. I think that articles from Mark Rosewater also played some part in my realization. When you try to make a map that attempts to be too many things at once it ends up being none.

[FrostNova]

After publishing 100 game reviews adsense accepted my site. I tried many times since January and was rejected in every attempt. Now they accepted it.
With Gemini I generated a php code to get the ads to show. 

Edited October 22, 2025 by FrostNova

[FrostNova]

https://www.henry-ym.org/index.php/How_to_suspect_charlatans,_scammers_and_criminals%3F
https://www.henry-ym.org/index.php/What_to_not_say_to_a_person_with_depression
They are not related to gamedev or gamedesign, but how often do we see people falling into depression? How easy is it for a person to fall in depression after being scammed for ex? Not uncommon among gamedev or gamedesign communities

[FrostNova]

https://i.postimg.cc/q4Gh4RVG/cloudflare.png
I registered a free cloudflare account. For some reason Amazon bot is generating a lot of traffic in my site.