Arma / Garry's Mod Server Promotional Material

Lately, I've been going through my old content to see where my earliest steps into games actually come from, and funnily enough, I came across my old screenshots from Garry's Mod and Arma.

Back in the day, I used to spend so much of my time creating scenes to promote the servers I ran on Arma and Garry's Mod. I'd try to build world lore, tell stories, and show off some dramatic, cinematic versions of what people could expect when they jumped in. Looking back, a lot of it was survival and horror; gas-masked survivors, things crawling out of the dark, abandoned stations, and the odd heavily-armoured bus tearing down a wasteland road. I was basically making little trailers before I even knew that's what I was doing.

Sometimes it's good to go back and revisit these times. I can still remember spending hours manually posing every figure, lining up the lighting just right, then taking it all into Photoshop to add effects, layer in extra elements, and colour correct until it had the mood I was chasing. None of it was quick, but that was half the fun.

What strikes me now is how much of it carried over. The framing, the storytelling, the obsession with atmosphere; that's the same instinct that pushes me toward making games today. These scenes were the first time I realised I didn't just want to play in these worlds, I wanted to build them.

It was so cool 🥲