Back in 1996, General Mills thought up a marketing idea to have a Chex-themed video game distributed on CDs in boxes of their cereal. Surprisingly, the game was actually really well done and very fun to play. It ran on the (at that time) state of the art Doom engine, and was my first introduction to first person shooter games.
Here's a screenshot from the intro and the gameplay to give you an idea:
Anyways, recently I got all nostalgic about this game and thought "how cool would it be to have this on a modern engine?" The Doom engine was cool back in the day, but now you realize that everything in that game was represented by a flat picture the size of a postage stamp.. So I started working on some simple models and code editing for Source (half-life 2 etc). With just a few rudimentary changes, it became immediately apparent that it would be possible to capture the feel of that old gameplay! I got a friend onboard who knows 3DSMax and Photoshop a lot better than me; he is making the creature models and environment textures while I am doing the code/engine junk, maps, and weapon models.
The major idea has been to create as much new content as quickly as possible, regardless of quality. Get the gameplay down, get the old weapons and enemies in there; don't worry if it looks crappy, there's always time to go back and fix it. I get the impression that a lot of mod teams go for making a smaller amount of high quality content and never really get done. So far we seem to have a good strategy, here is where we are at, about a week and a half after I first thought of the idea:
And this is at 2 weeks, with working AI, showing the self-illumination mapping:
