Kinsie

Id Frankfurt is exclusively engine tech, IIRC, and Id Dallas has been a two-game studio since around the Rage days.

All of the Capstone games were a perfect storm behind the scenes: Low budgets meant they couldn't hire any steady hands, meaning most of the staff were inexperienced and in many cases, straight out of school. And extremely short schedules (as in, six months or so a game) meant that there was little-to-no room for such luxuries as design documents or effective QA. Witchaven 2 was not a good time. The company was running out of money and management were making a (failed) bid to take it public, regularly bringing in prospective investors to show around and give the whole dog-and-pony show. Morale was bad, all the different factions (management, development, marketing, QA...) hated each other, and the end of the tunnel was pretty clearly in sight. That they shipped anything at all is a tiny miracle.

I mostly just remember looking at their website when it was first announced, being confused about certain things like "why is the main content CSS called shop-area" and "why do the links do weird javascript redirect things instead of just going to the proper page", doing some digging and figuring out they basically just used a $20 "eSports and Gaming NFT Template" site design with some graphics swapped out. Just a lot of very strange decisions on every level. I hope someone else can take the lessons learned from this endeavor and apply them to another awards showcase that's a bit more handcrafted with love. (I also hope more people take this as a cue to do their own write-ups of mods they like! You don't need to wait until the end of the year to sing the praises of ur fav, tell us all about it in the here and now!) I hadn't seen this one before, I don't think! "The Cacowards have been kidnapped by someone who hasn't been involved with them since 2021 and someone who hasn't been involved with them ever" is certainly a take someone could have. I would love to see more modding scenes follow the Cacowards' lead! Quake's scene in particular just constantly bats it out of the park with map jams left right and center, a frankly absurd quality ratio. Someone there needs to sing its praises to a wider world! I'd also love to see a more video-oriented take on a game modding/hobbyist gamedev celebration, but I'm also realistic about why it hasn't happened yet: Video production and live broadcast are whole different crafts from writing a weird little webazine. I don't want to speak for anyone else, but getting blindsided by some newcomer sprinting out of nowhere with an absolutely dominant showcase of the craft is one of my favorite parts of the whole endeavor. Just a road to glory, paved with pleasant surprises.

Also: GPL licensing stuff means that every GZDoom-based game on Steam has to be DRM-free by necessity, so you can just download the game and stash the folder away at your leisure. (Yes, DRM is optional on Steam, it’s just a lot of people don’t take that option for whatever reason.)

Embracer's been around for a little bit under a couple of different names, most notably as THQ Nordic. You'd think that, right?

Hyperstrange has a few games on GOG, I suspect Supplice will eventually appear there once it leaves Early Access, if GOG wants it.

I'm assuming this post is based off of being unable to find a specific project. What are you looking for?

As mentioned in the tweet in the OP, Scott Miller re-established Apogee as an indie publisher after the revived 3DR was bought by Embracer. They seem to be doing okay, as far as I can tell.

Embracer are in full slash-and-burn mode to deal with the financial mess they put themselves into with their Saudi deal getting snuffed at the 11th hour (to say nothing of increased interest rates on loans, the drop in investor interest in games and tech, and all the other larger economic reasons every large tech company is bleeding personnel right now...), so they bear a good chunk of the blame... but not all of it, for once. 3D Realms/Slipgate Ironworks/Interceptor/Whatever Other Names They're Using have spent years putting themselves into a bad situation with lord knows how many mismanaged projects running simultaneously, resulting in lots of low-quality, low-selling, development-hell-mired releases beaten out of some incredibly talented people. Embracer definitely pulled the trigger themselves, but this decision was sadly on the wall for a long time, especially after Volition bit the dust. There's already rumblings among their peers and contemporaries about things having been kinda bad there for a while, so I wouldn't be shocked if some less-than-great stories about how the place was run behind the scenes start coming out once people reach minimum-safe-distance. I expect the chairs will be stacked and the company shut down entirely after their current slate of nigh-release projects like Wrath and Graven are kicked out unbidden into a largely uncaring world by a skeleton crew on their last crumb of morale. After that, the brand will be put into a box until the next vaguely-nostalgic sucker comes along, buys it, and releases the attached bad-project-management curse upon themselves, resuming the cycle.

It is not available on any other platforms at this moment, as a quick Google would have told you. It is also not necessarily Mechadon's decision to make, on account of working with a publisher.

Did you check in the backyard?

GZDoom mods are typically pretty forwards compatible unless you're doing some astoundingly weird shit. This isn't like eDuke32 where every mod targets a specific automated nightly build.

This was an option in the original game!

Grazie. Not sure whether I'll use it for non-NES stuff since I already have other emulators (Ares/bSNES, Bizhawk/Mednafen...) that are either equal or better accuracy, but it never hurts to keep up to date.

I still need to update Mesen past the last NES-only release... Check out the SA-1 Patch. It modifies the game to use the SA-1 co-processor chip, dramatically reducing slowdown and load times.