noah witherspoon
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Garry’s Mod is a sandbox game based on the Source engine (see also: Half-Life 2, Portal, etc.) with an excellent Lua scripting interface that makes it a good platform for messing with individual game-mechanic ideas and quickly prototyping things. These are a couple of my recent projects for it, some that I’ve released and many that’re still just hanging out on my hard drive.

TRON Identity Disc

Originally a modeling project after having seen the recent TRON: Legacy movie, I decided to bring the Identity Disc into GMod with the vague intent of making a video set in Half-Life 2’s “Ravenholm” segment, replacing the game’s ubiquitous sawblades therewith. I lost interest in the project when the discs proved incredibly annoying to find and retrieve after throwing them around the place.

TRON Identity Disc at Garrysmod.org »
TRON Light Trail

Another project inspired by the recent movie—I loved the new look of the Lightcycle trails and wanted to see if I could recreate the liquid/glass-like effect myself. The result was an entity—released on Toybox, Garry’s Mod’s cloud-based script-sharing system—that could be attached to any vehicle or contraption to produce a glowing liquid trail that dissolved things that passed through it.

TRON Light Trail on Toybox »
Magic Box

Inspired by the TARDIS from Dr. Who, the Magic Box was an experiment loosely based around my old portal-gun code: essentially, a wooden crate whose interior seemed to be bigger than its exterior. I never released it, but my YouTube channel has a couple of videos of it, the latest of which you can see here.

Demon Melons

The Demon Melons were mostly a visual-effects project: I’d recently played Ubisoft’s 2008 Prince of Persia and wanted to try recreating that game’s “corruption” effect. The melons emit smoke and leave trails of black sigils on surfaces they touch; they also chase players and, when shot, split into chunks which regenerate (with an appropriately melon-flesh-y particle effect) into new, whole melons. There’s a video of them available here.

Omnivora

Omnivora was my entry in one of the first Garry’s Mod Gamemode Coding Contests. The theme was “Gardening”; Omnivora was a resource-competition-based RTS sort of game, where players cultivated their plants and competed to grow them by luring NPCs into the plants’ tentacles. There’s a video showing some of the action on my YouTube channel here.

Omnivora at Garrysmod.org »