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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.