erysdren's WWW site

hi everyone (and the girl reading this). for the last three weeks me and my partner evie have been hard at work on a huge content update for our award winning game BITCH HELL, which we originally released on October 31, 2024. this update will include a new

yeah yeah yeah i know i haven't posted in a while. whatever. look at what i've been working on this month!!!

well. i've been doing some heavy research into Half-Life 2's choreography system and all of the related subsystems - facial animation, lipsync, and general scene management. here's my current working theory (in the broad sense) of how the choreography sys…

previous devlogs: 2025-09-03 - DOSember game jam devlog #1 2025-10-13 - DOSember game jam devlog #2 well as per usual with my attempts at participating in game jams, i did not "finish" anything substantial during the time of the jam. however, i did decide…

EDIT: Please see the end of this post for some corrections!

well, it's been over a month since my first DOSember game jam devlog, what have i done so far?...

In VGA Text Mode, the font bitmap can be updated by the currently running program using Int 10h.

i've seen some confusion lately about the intended viewing aspect ratio of Quake and its art assets. i was confused myself, so i decided to dig in a bit. while Quake was indeed intended to run in the low-resolution VGA and VESA modes like 320x200, which w…

polyrobo.mdl rendered in the Plush software renderer see the end of this post for an explanation of the full set of tech used here!

Source: The University of Utah The Utah Teapot is a very famous early 3D model created in 1975 by Martin Newell at the University of Utah.

The VUE file format is a very old text script format for defining simple animations and the rendering of models.

back in early august i decided to revisit the Plush software renderer again and give it some more touch ups, as well as some new features i was thinking about. i seperated the concept of "Objects" (essentially actors in a scene) from "Models" which just c…

a new MS-DOS game jam has appeared!

this post started out as a rant about the current state of media preservation on the modern internet... but ranting and complaining rarely helps anything. so instead, i have written a few short guides and notes about ways you can help contribute to media…

Note: All integer values in these descriptions are in Little Endian format, and all strings are ASCII encoded.

i forgot to make an announcement when i deployed it, but you may have noticed that my website looks hella different, again!

sorry for the lack of updates... for the last month or so i've been head-down working on implementing Jolt Physics into the FTEQW engine. i've kinda been keeping quiet about it because i wanted to "drop it" all at once when i had a playable demo ready for…

In FTEQW, you can use CSQC to give you more control over weapon viewmodels.

on friday me and my wife evie attended the inaugural Nebraska Indie Games Expo, hosted by the University of Nebraska Omaha. i submitted our game BITCH HELL to this expo back in early April and was honestly surprised to see us accepted, especially with our…

for the past few days i've been going all in on writing plugins for the FTEQW engine, and i've been making good progress so far!

i want to show you some cool art from the late 90s and early 00s. this art was only ever intended to be seen by the developers at a select few games companies, and thus may contain obscure in-jokes and references that nobody outside of the company is like…

The FTEQW engine offers many improvements in changelevel functionality over the original Quake engine from 1996.

me and my wife's queer FPS game BITCH HELL is 50% off for the next 16 hours!!!

File Header Version 1 Games using VPP Version 1 Version 2 Games using VPP Version 2 Version 3 Version 3 file compression Games using VPP Version 3 Version 4 Version 5 Version 6 The VPP file format stores uncompressed files in a table.

i updated this here webbed site with a new page called playlist!

after a lot of blood and sweat and tears, i finally got TrenchBroom running on Haiku!

hi everyone!

honestly, i've been killing a lot of free time lately by working on random tools and non-game projects. i feel kinda guilty for this, because i should be working on my big game projects (like IRIDIUM VERTIGO) but i just haven't had the motivation for it.…

Please note that I will NOT provide any support for this.

me and my wife's queer FPS game BITCH HELL has been featured in Indiepocalypse issue #60!

From May 2020 to April 2021, me and designer Kim Riswick created a massive sandbox level in the Source Engine on commission from Radio TV Solutions, a popular Twitch streaming group.

as of today, Rise of the Triad is 30 years old!

hi everyone!!!

In March 2020 I collaborated with level designer Kim Riswick on a Half-Life 2 level for the Map Labs #8: Companion Piece 2 mapping competition.

as promised in my last .plan update, i'd like to talk a little bit about what my "next project" is!

WARNING: this post contains me being overly sad and makes passing reference to self-destructive habits & behaviours. i'm a fairly emotional person nowadays. getting on HRT in 2019 and then getting older has led me to this interesting place where almost an…

I personally had some trouble getting the Half-Life 2 Leak (as well as patched versions like LeakNet) running on my Arch Linux desktop.

today we are in celebrations!

with BITCH HELL's launch being pretty much a success, i've been trying to figure out what game project i'm gonna tackle next. i've written a bunch of notes, pros and cons on the projects sitting on my backburner to try and help me pick one. no luck so far,

BITCH HELL has been me and evie's on-again-off-again pet project since it was first conceived in March and April 2022. i always loved evie's way of describing our development process: "created during chaos". we originally made the game for the TRANS FUCKI…

i love being trans. i love taking control of this body and living the way we want. there is nothing more we want in life than for others to feel the same, trans or not. i want everyone to feel this control in their destiny. for us before transitioning it…

BITCH HELL v1.0 is out now on itch.io!!!

this week has had my energy focused almost entirely on getting BITCH HELL ready for v1.0 release on the 31st. i'm so excited for ya'll to play it!

i set up a Forgejo instance on my domain!

for the last 6 years, i have been trying to crack open some files. in early 2018 i was given a bunch of video files with the .AVS file extension, from a cancelled FMV game from the early 90s named Duelin' Firemen. at this time, i was deep in a project to…

here's some stuff i've been up to this week, and some todo items: removed the random form feed characters found in the TEDHELP.EXE section of my last post. in light of SDL3 becoming ABI/API stable, i've updated Yamagi Quake II to support it in the sdl3-cu…

id Software's Tile EDitor v5.0 (TED5) was originally created in 1990 by John Romero while working at Softdisk.

i fuckin love software rendering. the act of creating a fully realized 3D scene entirely in your own program, without the aid of OpenGL or DirectX or any GPU whatsoever. something about that is so charming to me. it leads to so many interesting technical…

As I detailed in my other post, the Finger protocol is extremely simple and easy to implement.

i'm really gonna miss that goddamn website. i hate feeling so melancholy over something as simple as a website shutting down, but i met so many cool people there and made great friendships, i can't help but feel sad. i don't have much to say beyond that. i