Corwin Brence Portfolio

Drawings and digital paintings

Assorted sketches and paintings. Some on real paper with pencil or ballpoint pens, some painted digitally in ArtRage Studio, some two-color pixel drawings made in FullPaint for black-and-white Macintosh.

Pencil and charcoal study of Emil Jannings in *The Last Command (1928)*

Marker study of *A Night in Casablanca (1946)*

2-color study of scene from *Myst (1993)*

Game design

Between 2001 and 2019, I produced a lot of gameplay and partial-conversion mods for id Software's Doom 2: Hell on Earth (1994), using a wide variety of features of enhanced Doom engine ports. Below is a list of the mods with a brief description of what they contain.

Larger Doom mods

Cola 3: The Soda of Style (2019) - An advanced, high-concept gameplay conversion building on the design ideas from my previous mods; weapons gain experience from collecting "cola bubbles" from defeated enemies, from which they can become more powerful, but can also spend this experience on powerful special attacks, and enter a superpowered state from power-up items.

Weasel Presents: Terrorists! (2013) - Using a set of existing assets from William Shatner's TekWar (Capstone, 1996), I challenged myself to assemble a polished gameplay conversion as a loving tribute to the digitized police-themed rail shooters of yesteryear. Contains a set of semi-realistic weapons that, over time, evolve into very unrealistic versions, as well as a new system where the player must rescue "hostages" that replace Doom's normal power-up items.

Style Mod (2010) - Designed to fit into a mere 9 kilobytes, Style Mod makes heavy use of ZDoom's text-based texture-composition language to refit existing Doom graphics into entirely new formations. Weapons have unlimited ammo, and enhanced firing modes that cost "Style Points" gathered from defeated enemies. More detailed retrospective article was written here.
Style Mod for Heretic (2011) - Following the same design concept as Style Mod for Doom, this mod instead targets Raven Software's Doom-engine game, Heretic (1994). The arsenal is quite a lot wilder, with such magical artifacts as the Chainwand, the Orbit-Ball Thing, and a staff that fires homing chickens.
Diaz: The Last Hours of Purity - Github repo of 2015 "v3" build, 2008 "hits collection" update, Original 2006 build. A mod designed to a high degree of polish, centering around a solidly defined player character created by fellow Doom mod author, Cardboard Marty of Blue Vertigo Productions. More detailed retrospective article was written here.

"Mixed Tape" mods:

Volume 3 (2016)
Volume 2 (2006)
Volume 1 (2005)

A series of mash-up collections of weapons from other mods of mine. The ZDoom engine is quite modular this way, making compiling these a lot less difficult than expected.

Accessories to Murder (ww-doomnukem) - (2016-2022) - An artist going by the moniker of "Doom Nukem" designed a lot of extremely high quality graphical assets intended to be loaded over somebody else's mod. With blessing from said artist, I decided they needed to have a mod to themselves. What resulted is one of my most polished gameplay conversions; outwardly, not changing a lot about Doom's arsenal (outside of adding reloads), but focusing more towards a sci-fi-horror aesthetic.
Cold Hard Cash (2005) - This mod was something of a gameplay experiment using the EDGE engine. In it, I removed every weapon pick-up in Doom, replacing them all with vending machines from which the player can buy a wide selection of weapons, using money taken from defeated enemies.
Cold Hard Cash 2 (2019) - I attempted to revisit the concept of Cold Hard Cash a long time later, using the more advanced scripting facilities of GZDoom to provide users with a more sophisticated shopping interface. One of the vending machines even makes an attempt to explain why demons from Hell are carrying around pocket change - money is the root of all evil, after all. I had plans to implement weapon degradation and an ability to sell weapons back to the vending machines, but these were never added to the mod. It remains unfinished; I'd gotten in over my head with the scripting needed for the shop UI.

Weasel Presents: NAZIS!

"V2" build (2021)
original build (2011)

As a great fan of the Wolfenstein series of computer games, and of shooter games set in World War 2's European theater, my design brief for this mod was simple: a mod about shooting Nazis. Gameplay-wise, this mod aims for arcade conventions of fast, snappy reloads that do not interrupt the action, and seeks to make enemy bullets fast but avoidable by a fast-moving player character.

Agent Hernandez: Dawn of Tomorrow (2009) - The unfinished "sequel" to Diaz: The Last Hours of Purity, starring agent Diaz's "backup." The intent with this mod was more than to simply refine on the weapons and mechanics of Diaz. I intended to illustrate the advancement of time, with the invasion having worsened since the previous mod, with some enemies having new, mutated forms.
The Adventures of Mister Cola (2006) - An otherwise ordinary new set of replacement weapons for Doom, with the added gimmick of them becoming super-powered if the player locates a "Super Six-Pack" (replacing Doom's "Berzerk" power-up).
The Stranger (2006) - This gameplay conversion came with a written backstory, and a selection of weapons that, at the time, I'd declared were inspired by guns featured in Japanese anime and manga series like Trigun and Ghost in the Shell. In reality, these weapons don't exactly mesh together well, and some of them have fairly poor-quality assets, on top of the anime connection being tenuous at best. The backstory is a concept I'd like to revisit some day.
Batteries Not Included series - Batteries Not Included, Batteries Still Not Included (2005) - My first sets of Doom weapons centering around a theme: weapons running on battery power.
Doom Illustrated: Original EDGE version, Later ZDoom edition (2005) - A selection of what I was calling "comic-book-style" weapons. Originally I had designed large comic-style onomatopoeia graphics for the guns, explosions, and other effects, but problems with their functionality resulted in my removing them and never trying again.
Operation Silver Hammer (2004) and Operation Mjolnir (2005) - A set of weapons using graphics of realistic military weaponry primarily lifted from the GT Interactive game, NAM (1997). Roughly when I'd learned how to use EDGE's DDF language to make weapons reload after a defined number of shots. Basic functionality for a shooting game, but an important learning process for me.

Smaller mods

The Batman effect (2020) - Noodling around with GZDoom's new-at-the-time features for sprite rotation, I made this tiny mod that replaces Doom's teleport effect with a screen transition inspired by the 1966 Batman TV series.

WW-DRLA Sounds (maintained until 2023) - A sound effects patch for Yholl's Doom Roguelike Arsenal that coincidentally also works with handfuls of other mods. The sounds come from a lot of different sources; I lay no claim to creating the sounds myself, but if anything serves as a demonstration of my ability to manage, edit, and remix audio assets for a computer game, this is it.
Independence Doom (2003) - Doom modding was much less user-friendly before 2004; with this mod, I used a very old system called DeHackEd to create an EXE patch to be applied to an original Doom 2 game. This patch replaces many, many in-game entities with rocket explosions, which will cause absurd chain-reactions that will, more often than not, kill either the player or everything else in the room.
ww-buttonmash (2012) - Jokingly dubbed "Carpal Tunnel: The Game," this mod removes all weapon pickups from the game, and gives you a single weapon that becomes more powerful the faster you mash the Fire buttons. This mod is liable to cause you physical injury.
No Shotguns For You! (2017) - A frequent sticking point with Doom is that the shotguns are heavily over-emphasized in most map designs, leaving rapid-fire weapons without much ammo for players who prefer to use them, so with these mods, I tinkered with this by removing them from the game. The original mod simply replaced shotguns with chainguns, and super shotguns with rocket launchers; "No Shotguns For You! 2" replaces them with entirely new bullet weapons, including a medium-speed battle rifle and an ultra-fast rotary cannon. On the opposite end, "Yes Shotguns For You!" leaves the shotguns alone, and replaces the default pistol and chaingun with more shotguns.
Mini-Mods Collection (2006) - Designed for the Doom engine port, EDGE, and its unique "DDF" definition language, these mini-mods consisted of single weapons that players were expected to mix and match when starting the game, to create their own arsenal.
Build Your Skill (2014) - An experiment in which your character really, really sucks at being an action hero, but slowly gets better at it. Wasn't quite finished. Could probably use a rewrite.
Strife Needs A God Damn Mod (2010) - A mod for Rogue Entertainment's Doom-engine game, Strife: Quest for the Sigil (1996). I never quite finished this one, but did manage to introduce new weapons such as a shotgun into Strife's vexing and maze-like dialogue system, a feat that most ZDoom modders were less than fond of undertaking.

Level design

No Rockets For You (2009) - The only Doom level I've ever finished and released, replacing MAP01 of Doom 2 and requiring a Boom-compatible engine. I put it here not to demonstrate that I'm particularly good at map design (I'm really not), but that I have familiarity with how Doom Builder works.

Writing, fiction and non-fiction (and web design)

Turn of a Friendly Card (2017) - A blog I wrote throughout 2017 (and a few further articles later on), covering reviews of computer solitaire games and interesting decks of playing cards. In 2024, I evacuated it from Wordpress and hand-converted every single post into custom, hand-written HTML, to have greater control over its presentation.

Weasel's Writing - A website where I've positioned most of my written original fiction. My fiction style entails writing short-form vignettes, short scenes that hint at larger settings or stories. Many of these were originally written to community prompts on Cohost, but with Cohost's closure in 2024, I adapted every one of them to HTML+CSS, with a unique style-sheet for each major setting/series.

Video game articles for Hardcore Gaming 101:

Again
Aero Fighters / Sonic Wings series
Special feature: A Dollar Menu History of Cooking Games
Psychonauts
21st Century Entertainment pinball games series (Pinball Dreams et al)
Red Zone
Sub-Terrania
Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring

Contacting me

Hiring managers, please contact me at corwin.brence@gmail.com for business.