Mark's "Friendly Farmer Lady" Character Didn't Quite make the Cut
Afterword
Sources
Derek Greentree's ROTT FAQ was a great help in the making of this Article and about 1/5th of the material derives in some way from that.
The Official Apogee FAQ also had some good info.
The ROTT Manual was used for general information and team descriptions.
My Head, 3D Realms ROTT Webpage, Maximum-Carnage's ROTT Page, and Tom Hall's TED Documentation.
I took all the screenshots myself. Most pics and sounds are ripped from the ROTT CD goodies directory.
Thank You's
|
Mark's "Friendly Farmer Lady" Character Didn't Quite make the Cut |
Mark "Beepo" Dochtermann, for engine info and answering some of my dumb questions. Heh... I think that pic is the real reason he left Apogee :) |
| Tom Hall for tons of nifty info and corrections... and answering
my dumb questions :) And for making the damn game too! :)
That's the best pic of Tom I could find. Honest :) |
What Tom Looked like when he finished his 900th ROTT level |
|
Joe Discovers the Wonder of "Monitors" |
Joe Siegler for sending me the ROTT manual (I lost mine!), adding some weird dopefish stuff, burping, adding tons of nifty info and corrections. Contrary to what the picture might lead you to believe, Joe is a really nice, mentally stable guy and helped me out a lot. I owe him big time. I think I'll make a life size statue of Dopefish out of Spam for him or something :). He also took the "monitor" screenshot. |
Also thanks to Steve Maines for a little Darian information and Steve Quarrella for some of Oscuro's Latin.
Other
For graphics I used Fractual Design painter and Paint (I did a half-assed job on graphics, I'm afraid... sorry, didn't have too much time) and PhotoImpact for the animated gif (not bad for my first attempt, eh?). For sound mixing and editing (because the god sounds and begging sounds were three seperate ones just put together), I used CoolEdit.
I wrote this article from about 150-odd pages of source material. Word97 is not good for large document construction, IMHO. Thus, a special big stinky toes down to Word97, for making this a lot harder than it should have been. :)
Patrick "Void" Cupka and Jason "loonyboi" Bergman for giving suggestions and pointing out some grammer and spelling probs :)
Final Thoughts
I only wish I had time to do this with some of my other favorite games. This project was very time-consuming, demanding, and vast even though I had full cooperation from the developers. They all bent over backwards to try to be helpful... hell, they didn't have to even answer my mail. Not only that, but there was already a detailed FAQ on the subject as well as numerous goodies on the CD (such as pictures). Even with all that, there was still some things forgotten and missed (memories had already started to fade and people impossible to track down) but hey... what can you do?
Also, this is something you would never see in the print medium. Would a magazine dedicate this much space to a game that's four years old? Sometimes magazines do something with a classic game or games (CGW's 100 Best Games of all time was very nice, but too brief and poorly researched in places) but never, NEVER anything like this. Besides, the quality of my writing isn't even magazine quality... so it wouldn't be published anyway. I did my best though (as you always should, gosh dammit) and I think it turned out fairly well.
I might be crazy, but I'm crazy for games. I can't imagine anything else I'd want to be psychotic about.
Hope you enjoyed it! :)
