Thursday, October 22, 2009
Could someone fix Left 4 Dead please?
Posted by Nicolas
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As you may already know it, we're almost done with the big stuff (ie: level-design and gameplay). What's left is mostly bugfixes, sound effects and little details here and there, which will still take some time. But I'd like to point a few things I'm not really happy with recently and that most people don't understand when they contact us.
I'm not gonna make a pamphlet about Valve, but the situation around Left 4 Dead custom campaigns is seriously fucked up. Sorry for the harsh words but, it's been nearly one year since the game was released and six months since the SDK was added to the game, and still... half of the features are still bugged out or simply not supported. That's something people heavily discuss on the Left 4 Dead Mailing List, but nothing seems to move on Valve's side. What's still impossible to do, you ask?
- You can't embed custom music in your campaign VPK.
- You can't embed custom sounds in your campaign VPK at all because players would have to rebuild the whole Left 4 Dead sound cache each time they install a new campaign, and when it doesn't simply mess up everything, it takes almost 10 minutes to complete.
- Custom models are crashing the game randomly when embedded in the campaign VPK.
- You still can't embed custom particle effects, in the maps or in the VPK.
- The sound system is ruined and plays random sounds at random events, like an alarm sound when you set zombies on fire and such...
- We can't make custom game instructor messages and as we can't record survivor voices ourselves, there's mostly nothing we can to to help players understand what to do.
And believe me, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Basically, what I'm saying is that more than 11 months after the release of the game, we still can't make elaborated custom campaigns. Should we see a deliberate method of pushing players and modders to Left 4 Dead 2, I don't think so ; but there's something seriously wrong in there. So, if you're waiting for our campaign, you might as well wait for the next bugfixes. Until then, here's a few widescreen action screenshots of the first three maps!
Sorry for the quality of the darkest ones, the JPEG format doesn't like big dark areas. And by the way, what I said in this article is my own opinion, and not the team's one (even if I know they agree with my opinion) and I know there's some campaign out there that do have custom sound/music/models, but it mostly relies on hacks and exponentially increase the campaign size. And our campaign contains a hell of a lot of custom content.
Labels: difficulty, forest, manor, problem, source sdk, underground, valve
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Is anyone there ?
Posted by Nicolas
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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!
Monday, July 6, 2009
Hang on tight!
Posted by Nicolas
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We know it's been seriously quiet there since mid-may regarding new materials, but don't panic! We'll have plenty of new things to announce in the upcoming weeks. No, not a release date unfortunately, but some crusty details about the manor (exterior detailling stuff), the lumberyard (progress stuff), the lakeside (progress stuff), the forest (gameplay stuff) and the underground (ambience stuff).
And if you're patient enough, we might even release some details about the music and a super-secret-new-poster-because-the-current-is-not-cool-enough. But shhht! Nothing's really fixed for the moment. If you're really patient, we might even whine and lament on one or two things (one of them beeing Valve, of course)!
Stay tuned for more developer banter coming soon!
Edit: As you may have noticed it, there's still no news for the moment. The reason is simple, I suffered a very bad lungs accident a few weeks ago and had to be hospitalized for a while. I'm now in the process of cancelling my trip to USA next month because of the damn utterly expensive american medical system :D
I can't take the risk of beeing indebted for the rest of my life for the moment.
Labels: forest, gameplay, lakeside, lumberyard, manor, maps, underground, valve
Monday, April 6, 2009
Building an emmental (also known as a manor)
Posted by Nicolas
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During the last week, we talked about the forest level and how we managed to get around some of the limitations of the engine. This week, we'll focus a bit more on the second level, the manor. When the survivors get out of the forest, they must reach the highest point of a dusty manor and try to launch a distress call from the radio.
Since we first talked about the campaign, some people asked the following question a few times : Will you be paying homage to any movies or games? Is the manor the same as the mansion from Resident Evil? This is one of the questions David from GamesModding.com asked us a few days ago, and the answer is no, not really.
We're paying homage to multiple things and we're borrowing from multiple sources for inspiration, but we're not trying to reproduce anything existing. [...] I personally think it's uninteresting, people should try to innovate and create something new and fresh instead of always copying and reproducing everything from game to game. The original work/game will always be the best. Our primary sources of inspiration are the Canadian mountains and a bit of Dawn of the Dead for some details. [...]
When we first imagined the manor, the campaign wasn't even born. It was still an early prototype of what could become a single player horror adventure. We had a lot of troubles to find how we should handle this manor, how many rooms it should have and what should be it's global age and state. At first, we decided to go for an exact copy of the Disneyland Resort Paris Haunted Manor, it was so cliché that we couldn't miss the point. But eventually, we never found how to develop this idea. Wooden manor were usually not large enough to contain all the space we needed. Which means a lot more than what you can found in the last level's mansion of Blood Harvest.
We browsed hundreds of plans from dozens of real estate websites until we found something that could suit our needs perfectly. The manor is called Fontainebleau, just like the French castle, but it has nothing else in common. We studied the plans, built a prototype in Hammer and spent many hours trying to figure out a path between the numerous rooms. I (Nicolas) built the prototype, expanded it and moved away from the original plan until the gameplay path got pretty solid. Then, Marc took over the prototype and decorated the whole manor with the help of the team (it's not so easy to find a unique idea for more than fifty rooms). The process mostly destroyed the original manor and transformed it into a dusty emmental.
The final ambience progressively moved from "haunted manor" to "recently abandonned manor" and the main idea behind it became "provide the players with an extremely closed environment", just like the hospital or the apartments in No Mercy, but without any defined path and with a darker setting (watch out for your teammates). It's up to the players to make their way to the highest room of the manor and there's a lot of solutions to reach it. Let's just hope the final Left 4 Dead SDK will provide an easy way to compute multi-paths between indoor and outdoor environments.
Stay tuned for more developer banter until the release.
... and be sure to read the little interview on GamesModding.com.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
What the hell is this all about ? (bis)
Posted by Nicolas
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Here we are. Almost half a year passed since we began communicating on our previous project Portal: Prelude, and we believe it's time to unveil our next plans. Welcome to IHateMountains.com!
Beware, the following is a shameless copy of the about page.
What? You hate mountains?
No, it's not a joke, and no, we don't really hate mountains (only Francis does).
"I Hate Mountains" is the name of a brand new Left 4 Dead campaign made by three french friends. This campaign is built the Valve way, we are not trying to revolutionize anything, we just want to provide more content to this awesome game.
Read ahead to learn more about it.
Why are we doing it?
Because we friggin' love this game.
We are playing Left 4 Dead together since the early days, during the Festival du Jeu-Vidéo in Paris, in 2008 (before the release). We played this game so much and always on the same campaigns that we believe it needs fresh new content, quickly.
More details on the campaign
The I Hate Mountains campaign is divided into 5 different maps, just like Valve did with their own campaigns.
 | Forest Our survivors crashed their bus in an utility pole of this dark mountain forest while fleeing. They must now find their way through the trees. |
 | Manor Now that the survivors managed to get out of the forest, they must reach the highest point of this manor and try to launch a distress call from the radio. |
 | Underground Escaped from the manor, the survivors are now fleeing though an old system of caves and tunnels running through the mountain. |
 | Lumberyard Freshly escaped of this oppressing cave system, our survivors are now looking for help and rescue in the lumberyard nearby. |
 | Lakeside Fleeing the now infected and deserted lumberyard, the survivors are now stuck and eagerly waiting to be rescued by whoever could see their signal. |
Who are we?
Mostly people from the Portal: Prelude team.
We are three friends with a professional, a student and an amateur background of the videogame industry. Check out the Meet the team page for more details.
Labels: forest, lakeside, lumberyard, manor, maps, underground
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