The Stanley Parable, by Davey Wreden

I'm a bit late on the trolley here, but here's the latest postmodernist / poststructuralist artsy Source mod to hit the scene -- it's Davey Wreden's "The Stanley Parable." Relatively spoiler-free critique follows:

• Tree of life. There are lot of branching points in this game. Do they matter or not? You'll see. I will say, though, that critiquing the Branch as a ludonarrative structure is becoming increasingly misplaced these days because no one is defending it. Take the Landsmeet in Dragon Age 1, or Deirdra Kiai's "Chivalry is not Dead" -- there are so many branches and interactions, they're more "bushy" than "branchy," to the point that you can just barely distinguish between branches -- and if it's in both an AAA console action game and an indie PC-only notgame, it's safe to say that bushiness is a growing design practice.
  
• Them thematics. The level design says a lot. Some of it has been said before (and maybe with more subtlety) and some of it is novel and predicts your reactions uncannily. I hate to call it a "trick," but the level design has a lot of tricks, much like Ian Snyder's "Feign" or Alexander Bruce's "Hazard: The Journey of Life" "Antichamber" or even the stuff I do in Radiator. These devices work once and only once... Which is okay. Tricks aren't bad.
  
• Sotto voce. There's a lot of voice acting involved here, and (at least to American ears) the British tone is incredibly resonant and charming. To be fair, some of the credit should go to Wreden for writing a decent script too. It's all very well-done and probably the stand-out feature of this mod, though it's important to NEVER press "Escape" to go to the menu or it'll desync a lot of the dialogue.
  
• Theme songs. I didn't like his choice or use of music. It was a missed opportunity to do more with the sound in general. I suspect Wreden was still learning the toolset (more on that later) because this type of thing is ripe for soundscapes and fun setpieces that might've interacted with the voice acting.
  

Nostalgic for the Collective

Valve operates 2 main mod community presences: the Valve Developer wiki (with occasional transfusions from the private licensee wiki) and the Steam forums for the Source SDK; a quiet library and a McDonald's. It didn't always used to be like this.

Back in the rose-colored days of Half-Life 1 modding, among those wondrous whisper-filled parties in East Hampton manors with the incorrigible antics of Gilda Gray, Valve staffed a dedicated liaison named Chris "Autolycus" Bokitch who actively maintained the Valve Editing Resource Center. The Valve-ERC brought together a loose confederation of websites and tools across the entire modding food chain:

• The Spirit of Half-Life, a sort of open source Valve-sanctioned "skunkworks" mod intended to boost other mods, with stuff like a particle system and entity parenting.
• Map reviewers (Pixel Maps for TFC, Ten-Four for HL1)
• Small single player map contests on the main VERC site 
• Anomalous Materials, a forum for discussing experimental design projects
• Entity references and tutorials, then partly outsourced to Handy Vandal's Almanac and TFMapped
• Remote Compile System; upload your map, let some servers bake it, then get an e-mail when it's done

The last few years, it also hosted the first Source SDK reference docs and what I consider to be the crowning achievement, the "VERC Collective."

GravityGunVille

Phillip Marlowe, bless his heart, is always running these cool mapping competitions that unfortunately don't get many entries nor exposure -- but this time he's lined up some pretty cool judges, a cash prize and a pretty workable theme, so maybe we should support him with our levels, yeah? (I'm thinking I'm going to make something for it too.)

The goal of "GravityGunVille" is to make a short Half-Life 2: Episode Two single player map with heavy use of the gravity gun by 19 September 2011. There's a $100 prize, or maybe they'll split it or something.

Let's dance.

"Hide" by Andrew Shouldice

I'm posting this early because he's declared it "done" already: I think "Hide" might be the first (or at least one of the first) games completed for the Super Friendship Club's first game pageant, "Justice."

It's yet another Unity FPS, sure, but it twists the formula rather well -- the clever way he's done the sprint controls, the smart downsampling effect that makes Unity not look like Unity at all but allows him to stylize some otherwise roughly constructed props, and the really chilling sound design -- among many other things I admire. (I'm totally going to steal the sprint idea / the downsampling technique for my own games, by the way.)

... And that's all I'm going to tell you. It might've been too much already.
 
PC build is here and the Mac build is here.
Mac: http://dal-acm.ca/~dice/Hide/H...
PC: http://dal-acm.ca/~dice/Hide/H...

(PS: Mr. Andrew, optimize the file size a bit and release a web build!)

Justice, still.

Had to throw away a lot of level design because the layout was simply no-good. Going for a more methodical approach this time instead of the aimless free-form improv of before. Also shocked at how much more thought I had to put into constructing my assets and props; I've never had to build expansive interiors in Unity before. Even in this scene, I've scaled all the architecture way too big and now I have to compensate in weird ways.

It's going to be a photo finish for the end of August...

Whoopservatory

Magnar has finally released his newest Half-Life 2: Episode Two single player masterpiece, "Whoopservatory." It uses a pretty clever mechanic with an equally clever implementation, but I suggest you just go into it without knowing anything more. You'll like it but wish the end was more "meaty." (Disclosure: I beta-tested this.)

DOWNLOAD HERE.

Source Shader Editor v0.1

Whoa. If Valve had job titles, they should hire this "BiohazardPro" guy as a tools programmer or something. It also comes a little too late for the now kinda-comatose mod community, but still, Rob Briscoe could get some good use out of it, though it probably doesn't fit very neatly into the Portal 2 codebase they're using for Dear Esther.

Maybe if it dovetails with that ambiguous "we'll make the SDK free" thing, it could be just the defibrillator we need for the mod scene?

For technical details and implementation, check out the surprisingly substantial docs on the wiki.

Justice.

2 weeks left to finish a crazy overambitious collab with Eddie Cameron. Stay tuned.