I Hate Mountains

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!

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.

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.