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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."
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 : )
There are many reasons the school keeps choosing Source for its senior projects. First, there is a history of successful projects at the school using the engine. The faculty and staff are familliar with it, they know both its strengths and its flaws, and that allows them to better guide students through a project. Second, if you look around at job postings you'll find a lot of companies want new employees to have familiarity with the Source engine, sometimes regardless of what the project would actually use. Thus, even though I personally would have preferred a more open / cross platform solution, in the end, having knowledge of Source will help me get a job, and that's ultimately why most students (including myself) came to the school. Finally, Source has a lot of tools developed by the community that save a lot of time on the projects' tight schedules.
As far as the other engines you mentioned, they have been used at the Guildhall for various other projects. Unreal Tournament 2004 has been repeatedly used for students' first 3d team game, and usually ends up being some sort of team based multiplayer game. DooM 3 and Quake 4 have been used for individual assignments given to level designers.
Ultimately however, as short as development times are in the school - these two projects above were built in 6 months while we had other individual projects running in parallel - there would not be time to test across multiple platforms anyway. Heck, it's difficult to find time to fully test the game on graphics hardware that we're not using in our development machines.
-Amich
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...
...those e-mail viruses that send .COM programs to trick people into thinking it's a .com Web site... got to love Microsoft, eh?
.com extension years before the web was a gleam in anyone's eye. You should blame the person that came up with the .com domain while knowing full well it could eventually be a problem. I guess we can be thankful a .exe domain wasn't created.
Not that I care for Microsoft but you can't blame them, they had the
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
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.