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
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Don't worry...
Posted by Nicolas
(permalink)
Don't worry, we're not posting articles anymore because we're migrating our website to Wordpress. Google is slowly giving up on the external publishing and hosting features on their Blogger platform. This is quite a sudden decision on their part, and it seems that all they want is to gain control over all the blogs they're hosting and save a few bucks.
Even if we see the advantage of letting Google take care of the server, I can see a lot more advantages in hosting it ourselves. Of course scalability is their main advantage, I can still remember this server, down on its knees when I released Portal: Prelude back in 2008, but still, this was only for a few days. The problem with this approach is that we're losing all control and giving it back to Google. It prevents us from building our site the way we want, optimizing it for our needs and adding pages as we see it.
There will be a Bonuses/extras section on the website (it's not a secret, there's a disabled link on the left), plus one or two other things when the campaign will be released. We want to be able to build little dynamic systems and stuff. Of course, migrating the website to Wordpress isn't quite a piece of cake. Sure it can import everything from Blogger but it isn't compatible with what we developed in the background and our design... soooo... it slows us down. Yeah, yet another excuse.
As for the anecdote, we've been in touch with people from Valve in the last few weeks. We told them about our problems with the game, the bugs we're facing and the issues with the VPK system. For the moment, our campaign can't be launched from a lobby, and it's apparently something they're aware of and trying to fix. Unfortunately as I said in our twitter channel, they can't help us with any of our other issues (such as the few models making the game crash). I guess they fear an overwhelming increase in people asking for help, and we can understand their choice. I hope they'll change their mind once we'll send them an early build of what we did :D (dreaming is still free).
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 23, 2009
Lies and concerns
Posted by Nicolas
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Since the release of Left 4 Dead 2 a week ago, we received a few emails asking us if it was going to have any consequences on our I Hate Mountains campaign. I thought it could be good to clear up the situation for everyone at the same time. So here's our thoughts on the current situation.
- First, there's still no SDK for Left 4 Dead 2 and something tells us that we might not see it before a long time. So we can't port our campaign to Left 4 Dead 2 if we wanted to.
- Second, even if we could, we won't be able to port our campaign to Left 4 Dead 2 because Valve lied about their so-called interoperability between Left 4 Dead 1 and 2. There is no such thing and all the content we used from the first game (textures, models, sounds, etc.) isn't available in the second for the moment.
- Left 4 Dead 1 is still crippled with bugs and it's still rather impossible to create a serious campaign using custom everything (models, particles, music, sounds, etc.) that doesn't rely on dirty and risky hacks. We might finally use these, but we'd really like to avoid it.
- Most people are starting to move on from Left 4 Dead 1 to Left 4 Dead 2 and even us are seeing Left 4 Dead 1 as a serious regression over Left 4 Dead 2. It frighten us a bit because, now that the community is splitted (thanks Valve), we don't really know were our potential players are.
Finally, I guess nothing really changed for the moment. We're still working on the campaign, but we've been quite depressed by the quality and the originality of the new Left 4 Dead 2 campaigns. It's really hard to focus on your own campaign when you perfectly know you'll never be able to reach this kind of result. But still... we're working on it.
Labels: problem, 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
Friday, October 23, 2009
Best. Trailer. Ever.
Posted by Nicolas
(permalink)
Our last news got a bit buried under this new Left 4 Dead 2 trailer, don't forget to check it out too and understand why it takes us so long to release something good.
By the way, don't expect our trailer to be this awesome...
Labels: valve
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
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Fresh news from the front
Posted by Geoffroy
(permalink)
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
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