About

Hellkeeper

Bonjour.

Hellkeeper is an unfortunate nickname. It evokes edgy, rebellious teenagers. But as it turns out, back in 2004, at the grand age of 14, I was (or wished to be) an edgy rebellious teenager. I soon outgrew this phase, but it was too late for the nickname: I was universally known online as Hellkeeper. So it stuck.

Most people know me for my involvement in the Unreal Tournament community. For 20 years, I have kept making maps and writing tutorials for UnrealEd, the level editor of the franchise. I was probably one of the last people to build and release a level for Unreal Tournament 2004, 18 years after the game was made available. I have released more than 20 levels for various games in the series and wrote dozens of tutorials to help newcomers understand and master UnrealEd. In the process, I developed skills I now rely on in my everyday life, met people which have been friends for decades now, had opportunities which set the path for my professional career. All because of Unreal.

It is thus surprising to consider my introduction to the franchise. I first played Unreal Tournament on a friend's PlayStation 2, then Unreal Championship on a relative's Xbox. Soon, I bought my own copy of the latest installment in the series back then: Unreal Tournament 2003. For any long-term fan, this reads like a horror story: two lesser games (which have been all but disowned by their creators) and the worst version of UT99. What matters, though, is the fact UT2003 came with UnrealEd 3.0 and started my passion for level design. Given how inscrutable UnrealEd is to the layperson, I had to teach myself how to decypher cryptic tutorials written in English, inadvertently teaching myself the whole language on the way, and soon I was writing my own documentation in French.

The Site

First created when ready-made websites were not common services yet, Hellkeeper.net was painstakingly written by hand with simple XHTML and CSS. It uses no framework, no JavaScript, no cookies, no database and can be instantly deployed wherever it gets hosted, provided any version of PHP is running. This made it extremely robust and proved unvaluable, as regular servers issues marred its existence. What's more, it kept it lightning-fast and made sure it looked the same on any browser.

Back in the mid-2000s, when personal websites were all the rage, many experienced Unreal level designers had their own place to show off their maps, tutorials and musings. Of course, I wanted mine to host my maps and offer links to all my tutorials. As years went on, Hellkeeper.net outlived all the websites I had written for I had to host all my writings here if I wanted them to survive. This turned it into a sort of memorial for my teenage years, spent documenting UnrealEd, building maps and playing Unreal.

It has now expanded to be about whatever I have an interest in.