To call Jack “Gauss” Monahan a mapper or a modeller would be doing him and his skillset a grave injustice. He’s an artist, a game designer, and I can only assume, a few others. He occasionally posts his thoughts on his blog, Gausswerks: Design Reboot (as well as the Gausswerks forums), and his very own Twitter. Back in 2009, he served as the level design lead for the time-travelling cult hit Darkest of Days, and at the moment he’s cranking away on Animal Memory, an indie shooter of his own design, built on the Unreal engine.
He’s also a Valve enthusiast. He once did an excellent dissection of Left 4 Dead and TF2’s character designs, and long ago he created a delightful little design reboot of Half-Life, titled: “Doctor Ivan Just Won’t Die”. But we’re going to take a look at something he once cooked up way back in 2005 – a gallery of artwork and game designs based on the Half-Life 2 universe. These constitute his early “Valve Portfolio”, which represented a section of a larger job application he sent to Valve.
As you can tell from the enticing feature image, it looks really good. Well, let’s take a closer look, shall we?