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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."
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