Showing posts with label half-life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label half-life. Show all posts

Sunday, August 9, 2020

new Quake map: "Smell It In The Street"

I made another Quake map! This one is called "Smell It In The Street" and it was made for the Doom Tintin map jam, a level design jam centered around using Quake mapping community member Tintin's texture pack that samples from Doom 3 textures.

Some brief level design thoughts follow:

Thursday, December 13, 2018

"Unforeseen Consequences: A Half-Life Documentary" by Danny O'Dwyer


A month ago I got to be one of the many people interviewed for Unforeseen Consequences, A Half-Life Documentary by Danny O'Dwyer (NoClip). Here are some notes, thoughts, and reactions:

I think me, Laura Michet, and the Project Borealis folks, are all there to present some continuity and young(er) blood to the story, versus the middle-aged white guys who dominate the first hour.

But it's also a very telling way to present Half-Life's legacy: the game is 20 years old, which is like a million video game years. At NYU Game Center, the vast majority of our incoming game design students have never played Half-Life because it is older than them, it is a quaint curiosity that we force them to play. It's video game broccoli.

I was fascinated by the segment where Randy Pitchford (co-founder and CEO of Gearbox Software) talks about their company's history with Valve. They basically rescued Gearbox with a speedy deal to make Half-Life Opposing Force -- but according to Pitchford, Valve was also a difficult collaborator, providing very little input on Opposing Force and sabotaging the mediocre Counter-Strike: Condition Zero by demanding an ill-advised scripted single player campaign. It's roughly in-line with the company culture that most Steam indies know: they're eager to setup a deal, but rarely remember to follow-up or maintain communication.

I was most struck by how the various AAA dudes recall witnessing Half-Life: huddled around a coworker's computer, deeply anxious about how their own product would technologically stack-up. Half-Life is defined partly by its world and narrative approach, but also by the smart ways it leveraged targeted uses of game technology. Half-Life 1 was an early pioneer in skeletal animation and AI systems; Half-Life 2 popularized physics-based gameplay and detailed facial animation; neither engine was "top of the line", but cleverly hyped and promoted the tech advances they had. In contrast, Source 2 has basically zero hype at this point, and even diehard Valve fanboy modders Project Borealis decided to use Unreal Engine 4 instead of holding out for a new engine. The game industry has fundamentally changed since 1998 or 2004.

The documentary concludes with one big argument: Half-Life 3 probably isn't coming for a variety of reasons, and we need to find comfort elsewhere. There's a lot of rumors of a Half-Life VR project, but would a story-driven single player FPS still be relevant in an age of multiplayer open-world third person games? Could any possible Half-Life 3 feel like a proper Half-Life 3?

Or instead we could look to the countless modders and designers who still fondly remember it and interpret it in the Epistle 3 jam organized by Laura Michet, or feel its deep influence on perfectly competent games like Respawn's Titanfall 2 or Campo Santo / Valve's upcoming In The Valley Of Gods.

That's ultimately the argument I made when O'Dwyer interviewed me: if you actually love the Half-Life series, you should value the time you had together, but ultimately you have to let it go. Such is life...

Sunday, April 8, 2018

American Choppers debate the arches in a sewer level from Half-Life 2

This happened last night. I'm so so sorry.

I don't have the time to actually fit this into the American Choppers meme template... but at any rate, I'm clearly Paul Sr., because I'm clearly right and I also deserve the last word!

Full tweet thread embed (what Twitter calls a "moment") is below:

Thursday, January 11, 2018

"Coast Guide" for PC Gamer UK 0310


cover of PCGUK 310
A while ago I wrote about the process of importing Half-Life 2 levels into Maya -- but I didn't divulge why I was doing that work: because PC Gamer UK commissioned a design analysis feature from me, to complement their big Half-Life 2 retrospective / Black Mesa feature for their November 2017 issue (PCGUK 0310). (Thanks to editor Phil Savage for the opportunity.)

At the top of this post, you can see the "blank" overview map of Half-Life 2's d2_coast03. That's basically what I submitted to them for publication, along with some accompanying box-out text and images for their layout artists to use. Stylistically, it's similar to what I previously did for a PC Gamer UK retrospective on Half-Life 1, when I diagrammed the Black Mesa Inbound chapter and the "shark cage" setpiece in the Apprehension chapter.

But for this new illustration, I wanted to be more accurate and import the actual level geometry as a base. It ended up being rather time consuming to do all the test renders in Maya and iterate to that finished state, especially since I'm not used to working in a pre-rendered mode. I also didn't really know what kind of look I wanted? I knew I was partial to a sort of digital papercraft look, but I also struggled with keeping everything readable.

In print, the whole thing looked a little bit like this:

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Road trip sketches; notes on extracting and visualizing Half-Life 2 levels in Maya


So I'm working on (another) article about level design in Half-Life 2. I chose the d2_coast03 map of the Highway 17 chapter, which is the first real "coastline" road trip section of the game, and is probably the most successful. Look at how big and open it is. Would you believe this is a map in a game celebrated as a meticulous roller-coaster? In my mind, it's contemporary with a lot of vehicle-based first-person open world game design trends that started around the same time in 2004, and they even pulled it off in an engine architecture that's still kinda based on Quake 1.

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Cleaning out some old Black Mesa archives for PC Gamer


Here are two old level design illustrations I did for a PC Gamer feature on level design in Half-Life 1, quite a few years ago. In the overview map, I focused on the construction of the Black Mesa Inbound chapter as a whole; and in the more focused cross-section, I concentrated my analysis on a single setpiece, the "shark cage" sequence in the Apprehension chapter.

(In the PC Gamer print version, the diagrams are annotated and labelled, but the image files I submitted were blank like these. I forget which issue it appears in. If you're interested in this topic, you can watch my Practice 2013 talk on this stuff to get roughly the same material.)

Anyway, here's a bit about my process and intent with these illustrations:

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

"Consider the Chair" in Heterotopias 002


For the new issue #002 of the video game architecture zine Heterotopias, I've contributed a piece on chairs in video games (though I focus on Half-Life 2) and about how these games' chairs function -- from the paradox that we are rarely allowed to sit in these chairs, to the "environmental storytelling" of the chairs' placement and arrangement, to the chairs' materials and history as a designed object. At the end, I posit a speculative political future for chairs in video games.

If you're into level design, you'll basically love Heterotopias. I've been a fan since issue 001, where they have a great interview with a Kane and Lynch dev about trying to evoke the alleys of Shanghai. I urge you to support this fine publication, and consider buying an issue to support independent games criticism. I'm also honored to appear next to all these other great writers, and Gareth / Chris were phenomenal editors. 10/10 would write again.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Someplace Else source files (for Black Mesa Source) + "Majestical" env texture set


A year and a half ago, I was working on a Source re-mastering of Adam Foster's classic "Someplace Else" to plug into Black Mesa Source. The appeal of modding a mod to remake a mod was intoxicating. Unfortunately I haven't really touched Hammer since then though, so I think I'm now forced to admit that I probably won't get around to finishing it.

I am open-sourcing the map file and textures I made for it in hopes that maybe someone more motivated can pick it up. If you're interested in finishing what I started, here are some design notes:

Thursday, January 9, 2014

"Black Mesa Source: Makeover Xtreme" at Indiecade East 2014

Indiecade East in New York City is happening in... about a month... and I'm giving a talk there. (A talk that I should start writing. Shit.) I should also note that the entire speaker lineup is very exciting and diverse and Indiecade is a lovely games event with a very good signal-to-noise ratio.

My talk continues the "technical politics" theme of my other talks these past few months:

"Makeovers are serious business. That's why dozens of modders volunteered to makeover Half-Life 1 (one of the most influential games ever made) in a new game engine with new graphics, architecture, animations, voice acting, choreography, sound effects, etc. So much work goes into the video games we play, but what exactly does that work involve? Get ready for excruciating detail about the blood and sweat that goes into just one room of one level of one game -- and why us modders w-w-work it for years to give it away for free. See? Makeovers are serious business."

My relationship with Black Mesa Source is strange -- I did a lot of work for them for a few years, then left because I couldn't commit time to it anymore -- so I recognize a lot of the content, but at the same time it feels somewhat alien to me because someone else finished it.

There's something interesting to dissect about the identity of work, here, especially given the intangible status of mods.

Are mods "games"? In terms of distribution / ownership / sales, no. In terms of artistry / concept / craft, yes. Is this Black Mesa Source level mine? Yes and no. When you get a makeover, are you still you, or someone else? What are the politics of makeovers? etc.