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Unusual Source-Driven Adventure Game MODs
bengal0 writes "Two new HL2 mods created in six months by graduating students at the
Guildhall at SMU are available for download.
Both games are single player adventure games, with mouse-driven interfaces focusing on exploration and puzzle solving. Weekday Warrior is a comical game set in an office environment, in which a bored office worker daydreams to escape his normal life. In Shantytown, a girl and her robot companion explore a towering, futuristic city in search of a way to stop the trash that is falling on her house. BitTorrent links: Weekday Warrior, Shantytown."
For a second there I thought it meant "source" as in source code, until I saw the part about Half Life. Talk about confusing – who'd have thought a proprietary game would be called Source? And even the name Half Life kind of gets confusing if you try hard enough (I remember in geometry class, our teacher was showing how to work our TI-83's, and everyone was so disappointed when she explained her "HALFLIFE" program was to determine the half-life of a radioactive atom... I think I'm the only one in the class who even knew what she was talking about). Who knows, maybe it's just me...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreedz_Climbing Kreedz Climbing, a mod devoted to trick climbing/jumping in levels to reach odd places. Now that's unusual!
Demented But Determined.
The office modeling, texturing and character scripting is nice, and the voice acting is well recorded and surprisingly well done. Unfortunately the camera angles are so god-awful that the game is rendered nearly unplayable. I spent most of my first 15 minutes just wandering around blind corners and bumping into things. Its a shame that that a project which clearly has a lot of polish on it, is so hamstrung by such a poor technical solution. Instead of the game being challenging it ends up just being frustrating.
Too bad. Its clear that many other members of the dev team did an excellent job.
Looking forward to 2.0
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I'd have to say this is the first Slashdot article in YEARS that's given me stuff that matters! These'll be fun to play. :D
"I'd have to say this is the first Slashdot article in YEARS that's given me stuff that matters! These'll be fun to play. :D"
So now you're good for another seven years?
Terrific. You've got newer hardware than people had avaiable when the game released. Also note that the game actually runs decently (60fps with AA/AF/theworks on my 9800 Pro), unlike, say, DOOM 3 or F.E.A.R.
Why are they using the Source Engine to develop games when there are more portable engines like Doom3/Quake4 or the Unreal Engine? ... pity.
They're starting to learn how to make games and are already putting themselves into a proprietary corner
...if they don't move fast enough for you:
http://students.guildhall.smu.edu/~weekdaywarrio r/SetupWeekdayWarrior.exee s/ShantytownSetup.exe
http://students.guildhall.smu.edu/~shantytown/fil
But before you slashdot their servers, please, think of the poor college students trying to pay off college loans. Don't make them break into their savings for bandwidth!
I just recently started playing half-life two and it's freaken amazing. The gameplay possibilities with that engine is pretty awesome. The water hazard among other portions of the game were simply amazing. It was refreshing to play such an immersive, realistic, and fun game. Then came ravenholme which was almost like survival horror games and gameplay was improved through the use of the gravity gun. Nothing like smashing zombies by picking up ordinary stuff on the ground.
I've been to dissapointed as of late with numerous highly rated titles (God of war for the ps2, that game is freaken awful, nice graphics but it gets old watching your avatar take 2-3 seconds on the same cool move 200 times a level).
Hmmm... Pie...
Job Description:
Innovative, independant new generation of game creators to revitalize a stagnated and over-marketed medium.
Necessary Qualifications:
Must know how to make promotional content for FPS genre kings. Must be willing to work at home, and for free.
It's good to see people thinking outside of the box with what is available with Source, due to the market domination of CS:S and Day of Defeat it seemed as if that engine was doomed to only seeing mods based on that kind of FPS multiplay. It seems like most of the mods since those two gained popularity have been very similar except for a number which have become well recognised for their own achievements, hopefully these two can live up to the growing market in the mod community for things that are different (shown in the popularity of Sven Co-Op, Science and Industry and Garry's Mod) and become successful. I, for one, will give them a try with an open mind.
Business Voyeur
I've also been working on a third-person-perspective adventure game mod for the Source engine as part of my studies.
We built Absence over the last few months of our degree at the University of Salford. There were 7 of us who worked on it, and like the folk at Guildhall, we found the source engine to be very flexible to work with - hammer in particular is a wonderful tool.
There were a few problems, however. As we were left up to our own devices, we had to rely solely on the modding community for support. This was good in that there are a number of friendly and helpful modders about who are willing to give advice - but there are rather massive gaps in knowledge with the source engine - particularly the coding side of things. When you've only got a short amount of time to come up with something the tech can quickly become a significant barrier.
Also, getting the game out to people that don't have the game is a pain. Yes, I know this is a totally obvious thing to say, but when you're trying to get an *adventure* game out, using a *shooter* engine means that your immediate audience is expecting something with guns/cars/boobs/etc, and you tend to not get much of a sympathetic ear when discussing your game.
That aside, tho, source is great fun - and for the purposes of our school project, it did the job admirably.