Kristian Duske

Kristian Duske is an independent developer whose open-source project TrenchBroom has become the de-facto standard for authoring 3D environments in games built on id Tech and Quake-era engines. Focused exclusively on level design, the editor presents a real-time, camera-centric workflow that lets designers “fly” through a map while carving, extruding and texturing geometry as naturally as sketching in a 3D doodling program. Brush-based construction, CSG operations, UV mapping, entity placement and built-in compile pipelines are wrapped in a minimalist, cross-platform interface that runs identically on Windows, macOS and Linux, so hobbyists, professional mod teams and educational game courses can share the same project files without conversion. Typical use cases range from prototyping white-box layouts for classic first-person shooters to building fully lit, PBR-ready environments for modern indie titles that still leverage the efficient .map format. Support for Quake, Hexen II, Daikatana, Valve 220 and standard OBJ export also makes the tool useful for architectural visualisation or rapid grey-boxing in broader game-jam workflows. A plugin-friendly architecture encourages community extensions for texture wad management, scripting hooks and engine-specific compilers. Kristian Duske’s TrenchBroom is available for free on get.nero.com, where the package is pulled from the official GitHub releases via winget, always delivering the newest build and allowing users to queue it alongside other applications for unattended batch installation.