It's that time of year again. Child's Play is back. I was surprised to see two Nebraska institutions on the list of involved hospitals this year - I've spent a lot of time in the Omaha Children's Hospital from some of my early surgeries, and while I was certainly never in anywhere near as serious shape as those children the charity centers upon, it adds a much more personal note for me than in years past.

Starting to see some decent looking released and in-progress Quake 4 maps from the community. Looking forward to what the players will be making - I was always really impressed with the Quake 3 level design community (despite not being involved in it) and it sounds like quite a few of those guys are giving our game a shot. Who knows, maybe I'll even have something of my own to contribute... That is, if I can find some of this 'time' that people speak of.

The Quake 4 SDK is now available for download. Go give it a shot, and enjoy the handy dandy documentation and example files.

I got the all-clear for posting some samples of the work I did on Quake 4, a few small tidbits of which you can see on the right. I spent just under a year and a half on Quake from my first day at Raven until it shipped. Had the opportunity to work with a great team, and even the stuff shown here is in almost all cases a team effort - I came in late, so I hopped all over the place, doing a bit here, a bit there... it's great when people say they like or didn't like stuff, because you can pick how much you did! :) Seriously, though there's a fantastic bunch of designers here, really cool to be among them. I think it's safe to say that there's plenty of things any one of us would do differently (as I'm sure there is on any title) given a second chance, but all in all I'm still proud to have worked on it. And I just noticed I screwed up on one of the images, but I'm at work so I can't fix it. Boo. I'll fix it when I get home, I promise! I've been busy with a few lingering Quake bits at work in helping with the SDK and the documentation Wiki (http://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/). We just added a new contact link, so if you have any questions about content or mod creation for Q4, you can toss it directly to us and we'll find the right person to answer it.