Thursday, March 4, 2010
The light at the end of the tunnel
Posted by Marc / Moroes
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Like we said on our Twitter feed a few days ago, we recently decided to restrain ourselves to a few deadlines. The work is nearly over (I know we're always saying that), the first deadline was 4 days ago, and we only missed it by a few days. Unfortunately, we still can't give any release date yet because we're waiting for Valve to fix the game (else we can't even play the campaign properly), but we're definitely seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
What's left to do you may ask? Well, it kinda depends on our regular playtests (we always find a few things to tweak), but I'd say there's still the extraction vehicle to export as a Source engine model, the fourth map (Lumberyard) to polish a bit, a few tweaks to the navigation meshes, a few more particle systems, various small optimizations and then, the coop should be finished. But when I said we missed our last deadline by a few days, it wasn't really true. Most of our tasks are linked to a particular actor of the project and for some of them, there's no other way to proceed, it's not like anyone else could do the job. That why while Nicolas' still finishing the last tasks, I've already started to take care of the Versus side of the campaign.
You read well, we never really decided if we were going to implement a Versus mode or not (mostly because we don't care about versus), so the question was still on hold until a few days ago. We finally decided that we had to do it for the fans, but I need to warn everyone about something: we're definitely not going to deeply playtest versus. The campaign is playing good in coop mode, we're just providing space and paths for the infected to roam around. Basically, every map will have some special infected that won't play particularily well:
- Forest: Works well for Smokers and Hunters, not really for Boomers
- Manor: Works well for Smokers and Boomers, not really for Hunters
- Underground: Works well for Smokers and Boomers, not really for Hunters
- Lumberyard: Works well for Hunters and Boomers, not really for Smokers
- Lakeside: Works well for the three of them
Finally, I'll repeat some of the things we already said recently: Why aren't we planning an open beta? Because that's not the way we work. Read about Agile software development and its "produce less, iterate more often" guidelines. Why is this taking so long to release? External people can't really understand how hard it is to come up with something like what we're doing when there's already hundreds of campaigns out there. We're not just building another campaign, we're building something from the ground up with a different approach. There's a bunch of other campaigns doing the same, and most of them are in development since shortly before I Hate Mountains. We know what we did, we know what we have to do, we know that the campaign is fully playable since months, but "playable" doesn't mean "finished" and even less "polished" or "bug-free".
"Stay positive guys, I have a good feeling about this!"
Labels: gameplay, lumberyard, maps, valve, versus
Friday, January 22, 2010
Thunderstorm!
Posted by Nicolas
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Because it's been a long time since we last provided new materials, here's 3 brand new action screenshots taken from the Lakeside level during our last playtest. We try to keep as much mystery as possible around this one, but we've been busy working on weather recently and as it turned out pretty good, we wanted to share it with you. Color correction is awesome.
Also, playing with the right music is always important!
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Clarification, campaign overview, screenshots and merry Christmas!
Posted by Nicolas
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Okay, I don't know for you and your country, but in France, we just entered Christmas Eve day. For a few days (probably more than two weeks), we'll keep silent and take a break with family. But before we leave, we wanted to say a few last things about the campaign.
We know it's taking a bit longer than expected to get this campaign done. In fact, this is taking way longer than expected. At first, we thought we could have a release for the end of the summer, eventually it didn't happen. Then, we thought we could do it for November, and we worked at a fairly sustained pace to keep up, but eventually it didn't happen either. Finally, we thought we could finally have a release for Christmas (that would have been awesome), but you guess it, it still won't happen for a number of reasons.
There was the great debacle of the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools, that didn't helped us as soon and as much as expected since most (if not all) of the components Valve initially promised never showed up. But that's OK, we didn't really care anyway. Then, each one of us got back to work or school after summer, and as we're all at the beginning of our professional life or at the end of our scholar life, it consumes a lot of our time. But that's OK, we could bare with it. Finally, there was the big disappointment and excitation around the release of Left 4 Dead 2, which sucked up a lot of our time and motivation and brings us to the second point.
To be honest, at that point, we really thought it was time for us to give up. Until a week ago, as a leader I wasn't really sure if we were still headed somewhere at all. We saw the numbers, we saw Left 4 Dead 1 leaking players faster than ever, we saw it fall behind Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, the Garry's Mod, and even regularly Day of Defeat: Source, which hasn't even been supported for years (July 2008). Even us weren't playing Left 4 Dead 1 anymore, that really frightened us to hell to think that our project was already obsolete before its completion. Valve really didn't left us enough time to build something serious.
For your information, on the official Left 4 Dead Mailing List a few beta-testers are talking about the upcoming Left 4 Dead 2 SDK. Let's be honest, for the moment it looks particularly promising, but then again, if we really want to be honest, the SDK of the first one looked promising too and nothing happened. For a while, we considered switching to Left 4 Dead 2, finish our campaign and wait for the SDK to be released (OK damn, the SDK was released while I was writing this news, so... everything might change again, except the following statement). Don't freak out though, because we made our decision. I Hate Mountains will be released on Left 4 Dead 1 or won't be.
Okay, now that things are getting clearer, here's a bit of information about our progress. Basically, it's finished. Now, when I say "it's finished" I mean that the whole campaign is complete and playable. That doesn't mean the campaign is ready to be released, it means that we're entering the polishing stage. We have this huge folder full of bugshots (screenshots of bugs) to fix, we need to tweak the navigation of bots and infected, we need to throw a few animations here and there, and more importantly, we need to test it full-scale. We know for sure that the gameplay works quite well, but it won't hurt anyone.
Wooo, that was quite a long news. Now that you're all bored, you may need some new materials to cheer you up. So here's one overview and 20 new action screenshots of the last two maps, taken from of our last playtest.
I Hate Mountains Complete Campaign Overview (spoilers ahead, 875 KB). Now you can see how much work has gone into building different paths and ensure good re-playability.
20 brand new action screenshots taken from the Lumberyard and Lakeside level during our last playtest (no spoilers here, don't worry).
Until next time, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the I Hate Mountains Team!
Labels: gameplay, lakeside, lumberyard, maps, source sdk, valve
Monday, November 2, 2009
Advertising and notifying
Posted by Nicolas
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Just a quick note to tell everyone to try the Suicide Blitz campaign for Left 4 Dead 1. We don't know the guy who made it, but kudos to him, we were asbolutely thrilled when we played it yesterday. The campaign is brilliant and beautiful, full of details and sweet lighting. Plus, the ambience is really great, the difficulty high enough for a great challenge and the optimisation is quite good too. The five maps and the overall campaign are a bit too long (took us almost 3 hours in advanced) but it's definitely worth a try. One of the best campaigns we stumbled upon for the moment.
Aside from this, we're still working hard on the campaign. And as you can see with the semi-chaotic release of Dead Before Dawn a few days ago, we were absolutely right when we talked about how bad Left 4 Dead 1 was supporting custom campaign. That encourage us to wait more and more, until Valve releases the patch they're talking about for months.
On the bright side, our maps are finished. Two of them are in the optimisation process, four of them are in the final navigation meshing process, and then it should be finished for good. We won't give any hint on a possible release date for the moment, we're not planning anything since there's too much unanswered questions for the moment. What's sure is that we won't release anything until Valve fixes Left 4 Dead 1 for good. But for the moment, they still have some time.
PS: Ok, the guy's named R.T. Frisk, see in the comments.
Labels: difficulty, maps, problem, valve
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Fresh news from the front
Posted by Geoffroy
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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.
Labels: lakeside, lumberyard, maps, 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
(permalink)
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
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Back on the rails
Posted by Marc / Moroes
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It's been a while since we last updated this blog with real content about the campaign and not just some random banter. It's been a while but that's it, the campaign is back on the rails. Geoffroy and Nicolas just finished their school year and I'm back from a little mapping rest. We're getting back to work, even if Valve seems to hate us, poor Left 4 Dead mappers, since they broke the SDK (again) and left the model browser lying in pieces since the last update (using the regular SDK).
During the last week, each one of us worked hard. The forest (first map) is finished, the manor (second map) is nearly finished, we're currently editing its navigation mesh. The third map is finished, the fourth is progressing quickly and the fifth too.
That's all for the moment. And if you think this news is a bit poor, head over to the Bioh4zard 2 website. These folks are building a promising campaign around the Resident Evil universe and they seem to know what they're doing. Check out their trailer.
EDIT 8:30pm
We found a fix for the model browser bug, see the comments if you want to know what to do, since ydna summed it up for us.
Labels: maps, problem, source sdk, valve
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Flat period...
Posted by Nicolas
(permalink)
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.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Finally, a poster and a lumberyard
Posted by Marc / Moroes
(permalink)
When we began to think about a campaign title and a slogan, we naturally tried to highlight our montainous environment with a catchy title, just like every official campaign. Once the title and slogan found, the second step was the creation of a movie poster, an essential step for every Left 4 Dead campaign, because this will probably be the first thing people will see before downloading it. With his artwork/photoshop/drawing skills, Geoffroy decided to work alone on this task using the photoshop poster template built by Adam "Supernorn" Riches. Once the global layout fixed, we all had a meeting to discuss every little detail of the poster and compare a good dozen of different versions.
This poster wasn't unveiled until then simply because the website design already uses it to some extent. It allowed us to start releasing material without repeating the same error than most custom campaigns seems to do. Which means, find an idea, make a kickass poster, don't show anything more for two months and reward people with a few crappy screenshots that don't even match the campaign poster. Now that everybody seems to know what we're doing, it's time to unveil our poster:
But unveiling the poster is also and above all an opportunity to talk a bit more about the campaign, and especially the fourth map which ressemble the poster the most. Lumberyard begins when underground ends (what a surprise), after travelling through a long underground tunnel system, the survivors finally reach fresh air again using the railway passing through the mountain. While walking in this fourth map, you'll realize very quickly where you are (vertically talking) and this is also where the mountainous background at the origin of the title of the campaign will make its greatest appearance.
Walking through the fourth map, you'll have to travel along a lakeside road, inspired by Canadian landscapes. This road is larger than most roads you'll have already faced during the campaign, these are not forest trails anymore, and this one is scattered with corpses and multiple car crashes. It seems to have been used for a mass exodus who went terribly wrong. Then, what happened? In the distance, along the lake, some buildings stand out from the horizon: the sawmill. Why do they all seemed to head for this installation? This is what you'll have to discover when the campaign will be ready to play.
From the developer viewpoint, Geoffroy, who is in charge of the level, always tries to keep a significant coherence. This credibility problem is reflected through the architecture of the level and the placement of the various buildings and props. Thus, the sawmill was entirely built for the sake of realism even before it had a gameplay layout. It may seem like a controversial way of building a map, but lumberyard was entirely imagined this way, the gameplay often adapts to the environment and not the opposite. Each 3D prop, each car on the road, each bush and tree was scattered in a realistic way, which is kind of our main goal with this campaign after all. We're trying to put a bit more design work than what Valve did with the poorly designed survival maps released with the recent update (who said smoky rocks, invisible walls and uncrossable 2 foot height fences?). Just kidding, we love you Valve <3
Stay tuned for more developer banter until the release.
Labels: lumberyard, maps, valve
Monday, April 27, 2009
Balancing the difficulty
Posted by Geoffroy
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Two weeks ago, we talked about the manor level and why we decided to do things the way they are right now. This week, the focus continues on the third level, the underground and on the overall campaign difficulty.
When Nicolas wrote the game design document about the campaign, one of the key elements was to build a rather long campaign with changing environments and gameplay. The goal was to provide players with a non-monotonous campaign that would work perfectly well as a whole, but also when playing each level independently. The global path had to be logical, but the gameplay type (open space/close combat) and the environment (exterior/interior) had to change beetween each map, following this approximative pattern :
As you can see, when you combine the different elements that make a Left 4 Dead level more or less difficult, we get the overall difficulty of each level. In game, this is pretty much correct for the moment, when testing we feel that each map is as difficult as it should be, and the third map is really difficult. Much like every official campaigns, we tried to balance the difficulty around the third map. The campaign starts slowly, progressively reach a crescendo at the third map (No Mercy's sewers, Death Toll's church, Dead Air's construction site, Blood Harvest's bridge) and slows down until the final arrives. But our third map is really hard.
At start, the underground level was supposed to be a catacomb-ish level, with crypts, coffins and all the extra cliché things you can think about. But when the prototyping time came, it was clear that it would never work the intended way. No one would ever want to walk in an endless network of catacombs and crypts during half an hour, plus that didn't seem very realistic from the start. That's why we decided to mix several underground environments in the same level. This choice was not really popular among the team until we all actually saw the result when the level reached a decently polished state. The different environments blended together perfectly well and if you didn't pay attention to it, you didn't even notice the changes until the end. For the moment, the level is composed of four different underground environments and architectures.
Iterative screenshots of a part of the underground level
The underground level was entirely made in a really short time, I'd say three weeks. Prototyping, gameplay tests, architecture and prop flooding were all completed in a matter of weeks. The only problem with this level is its length. For the moment, this is the longest level I ever played on Left 4 Dead. Taking the shortest path, it takes 3 minutes to run from the beginning to the end, while it only takes 2:25 on the longest Left 4 Dead level (No Mercy's sewers, which is already a quite difficult level). For the moment, we believe the map is good as it is, because we're able to finish it using the expert difficulty, but we are not against the idea of cutting a whole part if it's really too long and difficult.
One of the key elements of making a level more or less difficult without interfering too much on its length and geometry is to tweak the item/weapon spawning. Unlike Left 4 Dead official campaigns, we decided to give more than 4 first aid kits in this level. Because the crescendo event is located in the middle of the level, you often reach it in an already bad shape... thus, you leave it in a terrible shape (if not dead), and there's a whole half of the level left to do. That's why we decided to give more than 4 first aid kits, because we know every player isn't the best player in the world. The trap here is that we're not really giving 4 extra first aid kits just before the crescendo event, so there won't be enough for everyone... We believe it will force players to play efficiently and work as a team (or they will just insult each others and keep their first aid kits for themselves).
That's all for the underground level, we are against spoiling everything before the release, so you probably won't get more details before the release. On a side note, a few people asked us if we could give an approximative completion percentage for each level, so here it is:
- Forest: 90%
What's left: soundscapes, items/weapons tweaking, nav tweaking - Manor: 60%
What's left: exterior, sounds, event, items/weapons, nav - Underground: 95%
What's left: soundscapes - Lumberyard: 50%
What's left: detailling, event, sounds, items/weapons, nav - Lakeside: 15%
What's left: everything except prototyping and ambient
Stay tuned for more developer banter until the release.
Labels: difficulty, gameplay, maps, underground
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