I Hate Mountains

It’s been a while since we last gave you some real news about the content of the campaign itself and most of you had been pretty patient until now. We never stopped working on the campaign, but we’re not working on it full-time either, so it takes some time. You already know that the first, second and third maps are finished ; it still need a few tweaks here and there, but nothing really hard to do. Lately, there was some huge progress on the fourth and fifth levels too.

For the moment Geoffroy and Marc are working hard on these fourth and fifth levels while Nicolas is waiting for them to finish in order to create the navigation meshes and link everything together. These last two maps are almost finished, we’re probably somewhere around 85 or 90% of completion. In this article, we’ll focus a bit more on the Lumberyard level, right after Underground, where survivors are back to fresh air. We could also talk about the final Lakeside level but… we kinda want to keep some mystery around this one in order to avoid spoiling too much.

As we said in previous articles, we try to care a lot about details and background while building the campaign. It gives a better credibility and allows a better immersion in the apocalyptic Left 4 Dead universe (that’s probably why it takes time to build). Until now, Lumberyard‘s pictures showed a massive exodus, a mountain road and… contaminated people finding their way through the exodus and starting a panic event. Where were these people headed ? That was the mistery. They were trying to reach a lumberyard, transformed in a heavily defended, mobile, state-of-the-art evacuation and decontamination center by the military.

When survivors finally reach the lumberyard, everyone’s already gone through the backyard’s road and all is left are the remaining people that thought they could find their salute here too… but were a bit too late. Geoffroy tried to give all these building a realistic touch, trying to build what could look like a real lumberyard. Honestly, we don’t really know how a lumberyard is supposed to work, probably like 95% of our future players, but still. We think it’s important to add some credibility.

This map is also a huge optimisation challenge, since it’s completely open and offers a lot of paths to the end. For the moment, everything’s still going fine and we can finally see the end of the tunnel. So, stay tuned for more developer stuff until the release that we hope will occur before Left 4 Dead 2. If that’s not the case, we don’t know what we’ll do and it will only depend on how much of that promised inter-operability Valve managed to built in before the launch.

Hi back, I’m writing this from home, where I’m constrained since a few weeks… It’s been a terrible mess recently and we kind of lost our goal with this campaign. As I’m writing, I don’t really know where my team mates are and I don’t really know if they’re still working on their part of the campaign since I didn’t had any news for a few weeks. I became sort of Internet-anonymous in the past few weeks and didn’t bother much about anything else than my health.

Anyway, we’re not out of business. I was already done working on my maps when the accident happened, so I wasn’t even delayed. Last time I talked to Geoffroy, he was still working on his map and I don’t really know what Marc is doing for the moment. The point is that we’re really close to completion, it must be something like 85 or 90%, but we definitely need to refocus and clean the mess to restart the motivation machine.

With Left 4 Dead 2 coming along gently and some really creative campaigns starting to pop up from everywhere, we perfectly know we’re a bit endangered right now. We’ll talk about this a bit later and report here once done. In the mean time, if you know about some very good Left 4 Dead campaigns, feel free to post some links in the comments, I was out of business for a few weeks and probably missed some good things.

I know this article doesn’t sound really good at first, but that’s the way it is. And for the moment, we never even though about canceling everything (Ok, maybe once or twice in a desperate moment). We know it’s been more than two months, and boy… that was some terrible two months. But stay tuned, or just grab the RSS feed to avoid missing something. We’re not giving up yet!

A quick message to tell you that we’re not dead yet. It’s just a flat period… I am working for my master of engineering final exams, Geoffroy is working for his end of the year exams, and Marc is still working hard at Ubisoft while doing his best to focus on the campaign each evening.

We don’t have any release date for the moment, we’d like to focus a bit more on levels and finish this up before we can think of an approximative date. But this will definitely be somewhere this summer (most likely july). Here is an approximative completion percentage for each level of the campaign.

• Forest: 95%
• Manor: 85%
• Underground: 99%
• Lumberyard: 65%
• Lakeside: 30%

Stay tuned for more developer banter until the release.