FINAL POST
GOALS
I started this semester with the goal of creating a metric ton of textures for this mod. It was my intention that this mod would rely entirely on original assets.
I created... a few textures... and then realized I could be using my time much more effectively. For the second half of the semester, I shifted my focus towards level design. I still make textures, but only as needed. Now the majority of the textures I'm using are existing textures from Half-Life and ones made by other modders, used with permission.
My new goal was to take one of the levels that I had previously started, and get it finished up to a playable version. Up until this semester, this one only had some basic architecture, with the overall layout of most of the rooms figured out. But not much in the way of details, gameplay, sounds, or animated events. Now it has all of that. This involved not only level design, but modeling, rigging, animating, and music and sound design.
WHAT DID I ACHIEVE?
The level is in a very good spot right now. It's not finished by any means, but it certainly has plenty of material that I can show off on my level design portfolio. Abandoning the plan of having 100% original assets meant that I could be much more productive where it really matters.
WHAT WORKED?
I found some creative ways to make textures, and I am glad I had this experience. This being a 20-year old engine that predates normal maps, textures have some limitations. Those limitations are also an opportunity. You can get away with ANYTHING in texturing as long as the final output is a good-looking image. I abandoned Designer and returned to the caveman ways of Photoshop, and I even modeled panels and doors in Blender, and just used renders as the textures.
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| In between texture and level design work, I spent some time experimenting with ways to achieve certain effects, like caves with bioluminescent plant growths. |
I was able to design this level and do a bit of everything involved in bringing it together. The map evolved as I iterated on the design, added rooms, and stuffed it with moody details. The gameplay is a little light, but there is some basic puzzle solving in there.
WHAT DIDN'T WORK?
Trying to make all of the textures myself was a real source of creative blockage. Textures are fun, but putting the pressure on myself to make a set of textures that was diverse, unified, and appropriately detailed slowed things down a lot.
I also encountered so many weird errors just from wrestling with this old game engine. It was never designed for a high level of detail, but it is capable of it. You run into limitations, but there is usually a way around them. One aspect of designing levels for this game is that there is a gap between making a change in the level editor, and being able to see it in-game. A compiler bakes the lighting, calculates visibility, and does some other mysterious processes that take a little bit of time. It starts off taking a few seconds, but the more complex your map is, the longer that time gets.
WHAT WOULD I DO DIFFERENTLY?
The shift was a great decision, and I only wish I'd done it sooner. This project is far from over, and the work I've done during this class was only ever meant to be a slice of the work involved in the mod. Going forward, I am going to continue focusing on level design first and foremost, and then do everything involved in making that happen.
LAST PROGRESS POST: THE EEL HOUR
So here we are. Just as before, I've been spending my time detailing the map. Recently, my focus has been on adding 3d modeled details. Specifically, eels. I meant to model some more details, like coral and bioluminescent plant growths, but for now? It's just eels.
I started this model a few weeks ago, then didn't touch it for a while. It did not take very long to finish it up, texture, rig, and animate the thing. It came out kinda cute. Of course, when you see these they're dangling from meat hooks in a poorly-lit freezer. Not so cute.
It was important to me to replace the meat slabs with eels, since the meat texture was pretty recognizable from a similar and memorable location in the original Half-Life. The eels help set it apart from that, and are also really really creepy.
They're not all dead. You can also see some of them swimming around outside! You can spot a pair of them circling the map if you look out some of the windows. I'd like to think they're on a date. Probably bubble tea. When you want to add both life and death to a map, add eels.
Aside from the eels, I made a few other minor alterations. For one, I changed out the light fixtures around the freezer doors. They look so much cooler now, and you can still see the area partially lit up when they flicker off, thanks to texture lights. Also, the second room of the freezer now connects up with the kitchen.
Lastly, there's some actual "food" being served in the cafeteria. And a MysteriousMustard™ stain on the wall.
WEEK THIRTEEN
This week, I've mostly been focused on details. Let's start off with the big highlight:
When the player reaches this area, they finally get to "meet" the people that were talking in the cafeteria. But of course... the screams.
I really liked the suspense of waiting on a slow moving door while hearing something happening on the other side. The music here is an ominous, ambient track that I recorded with my guitar. It's a really simple one, somewhat inspired by Prey (2017).
By the way, I was able to fix those fun new errors from last week pretty quickly. It turns out I was doing something wrong and
pushing one of the engine limitations. I won't get into the technical
details of it, but suffice it to say it was a weird engine issue with a
simple fix.
LITTLE DETAILS
First up, the creature in the vent. This guy was there before, but not very obvious in the video. It's much more evident in-game than in a compressed video, but it needed more anyways. I slightly boosted the lighting and added some audio to go along with its movement. The sound effect is something I made for Zyga Hunter in CAGD 470 last semester, I figured I could recycle it here.
Next, the crawlspace around the freezer. It now has a proper end that connects up with the freezer so the player can progress. I also added some light fixtures on the walls.
Now for the pool. Aside from subtle lighting tweaks, I expanded on the puzzle and added some more details. The pool finally has a ladder, for instance. That felt important. I also gave the supply closet a proper interior and stuck a hand-written note on the wall.
The closet is involved in the puzzle, but it's not entirely set up yet. Basic idea is that someone removed the ladder on the diving board, so you need to find some pool equipment to push around and climb up.
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| The dead guy with the keycard, a staple of 90's puzzle solving |
Previously, the ceiling in this locker room was already collapsed, so the player just dropped right down onto the floor. Now the ceiling breaks as you fall through it.
Finally, bubbles! All around the map I've improved the look of the terrain outside the windows. Aside from the soft glow, there are little bubble streams scattered around.
Overall, the map is in a pretty good place right now. It's certainly much better off than what it looked like before this class. Finally it is shaping into an interesting environment, but there is still a lot of work to be done.
WEEK TWELVE: AN UNEXPECTED DISCO
So, what do I have to show this week? Well, I have some good progress to show off, and I have some fun new errors. There's a chance I might be pushing one of the limits for what this engine can handle in a single map. Most likely, I've just done something wrong and need to figure out what it was.
Okay on second thought, it's probably both.
First off, about half the walls in the swimming pool said:
"Yeah we're not gonna render anymore"
As you can see on the left, I started adding some terrain outside, and I gotta say, that part is looking pretty good! Well it was when it worked, that is. It should be working again by the next update, but for now it's a mystery. At first I thought the terrain was somehow causing the bug, but I don't see how that could be. Now I don't know what to think.
Here's another screenshot of that side of the room before the unforeseen disaster:
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| I love the look of the terrain and wall outside the window. |
I never mentioned it, but this isn't the first time this pool has given me trouble. Sometimes, the game straight up crashes to desktop with no error message when I enter the locker room. That didn't happen for a while thankfully, but it happened again recently. Guess that was foreboding of what's to come.
Next, we have the unexpected disco party in the cafeteria
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| You thought it was a monster that killed them? No, these guys just raved themselves to death. |
Imagine my surprise when I walked in here to find poka dots on the floor... then everywhere. I'm, uhhhh.... not sure what happened here. There may have been too many light sources in this room or... something. I removed some of the lights and made some other tweaks, but I'm not sure what exactly fixed it in the end. Well, I got it fixed but now the corpses disappeared. And while this mod is meant to have a mysterious vibe, that's not really what I had in mind.
I guess all I can say for sure is it was a lighting error, and it's gone now.
(correction: it came back later)
Here's the actual update I made to the area. Literally just added the terrain outside, and I turned off several more of the lights. That was more about trying to fix the lighting errors, but I kind of prefer it this way. Keep the lights where it matters.
This next one gave me quite a laugh. There's been a fan inside the air vent for a long time, but I've kept it static until now. The first time I set it up it... well it certainly rotated. I actually couldn't find the fan anywhere. Then by happenstance, I noclipped outside of the map and caught this:
Now here's the fan in it's natural habitat, rotating correctly:
So those are the errors. Now for an update on areas that are not broken (currently).
I made some subtle but effective improvements to the lounge area near the start of the map. Previously I made these two massive light fixture that turned out to be super ugly. So I split it up into four and gave it a more aesthetically pleasing design.
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| That is some subtle but satisfying progress |
Next up, the conference room. I decided this area would be more rewarding to explore if you could only access it some other way, so I locked the door and smashed the window. Now, it's impossible to get into this room until after the player makes their way through the pool. I added a sequence here to draw the player's attention.
Now for the freezer. I added meat noises. I loved the idea of the player slopping around the room in the dark, running into meat and I think these noises really nail that feeling.
And finally, the crawlspace. This is the area that opens up after the meat box gets knocked over. You travel through here to get to another maintenance hatch in a different part of the freezer. Or at least you will when it connects up.
WEEK ELEVEN:
This week, I made some major strides on planning the events of the level, and made some decent progress on building the level itself.
Last week's critique brought some awesome suggestions, and I absolutely took people's ideas into account when further developing the meat maze. I also decided to replace some (but not all) of the meat slabs with eels. Haven't finished making them yet, but here's a look at the model so far. I found a really good orthographic reference for this.
I will probably add eyes with actual geometry, rather than painting them on in the texture. I've got plans for these eels which I'll mention below. They're going to be animated.
Here's a top-down view of the walk-in freezer. You can see the pool of slippery blood & meat juice on the ground. You can also see a new area that wraps around the freezer. This is now part of the progression through the area. When the player gets to the boxes of meat, they see a tentacle slither into the shadows and the creature knocks over some of the crates in front of the player. A pile of eels slops onto the ground from a spilled over box. A moment later, the sound of breaking metal from the other end of the room, and the player goes back to find a crawlspace revealed.
The maintenance hatch is quite dark in the first screenshot. It's much better in-game when you're adjusted to it, but it's supposed to not be that noticeable at first.
Other points of feedback included more meat hooks, including some that are just hanging there with no meat. This made me realize that my meat hooks were upside-down, so I've corrected that. Now they're nice and dangly. Another idea was to add sheets of plastic hanging down. I liked the idea of having to navigate that through the damaged lighting, so that's been added too.
Made a new texture this week! Needed a small maintenance hatch that was bigger than an air vent, to seal off maintenance areas that need to be accessed regularly by humans. This was a pretty simple one to make, I just followed the same strategy I used for the doors in the power plant, modeling it in blender and taking a render.
Here's a brief walkthrough of the first part of the freezer section, as it is now. Note that I had to remove the cylindrical ducts from this compile of the map since they had some major geometry errors. GoldSrc, dude.
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| "Fix all errors" is my favorite button |
WEEK TEN:
Getting Atmospheric
Wow. I must have spent something like 20 hours working on this. I have... quite a lot of level progress to show. No new textures to speak of, but, I mean, that's fine. I am sure this blog post is going to miss something, since there's a lot to cover. Here's a video walkthrough of the level, complete with sound:
There are a couple of new rooms here. One of them was planned from the start, and the other was entirely new. I needed to add some more areas that serve no purpose when it comes to progression.
It turns out the secret to designing levels for this mod is to spend almost all
of my free time playing Quake, and sometimes Prey. I realized playing
Prey that I was missing some potential for exploration.
Swimming Pool
This swimming pool used to just be blocked out. I had a basic plan for the area, that you would have to make your way up to the ceiling somehow to progress. Below you can see images of the locker room and the pool itself. I thought about showing a comparison, but the area was really just empty before.
Walk-in Freezer
This map was always supposed to have a walk-in freezer, ever since it was sketched a year ago. Half-Life had one, and it's the kind of environment that lends itself to atmospheric horror. Being alone in a walk-in freezer is already scary. If you're trapped in there long enough, that could be fatal. But being trapped in a place like that when you know there are beasts around? Hooooooo-doggy.
While this area was planned from the start, I never built anything for it until the last two weeks. Very recently, I got the idea to double the size of the room and add... the meat maze
It's a maze... made out of meat... with a strobe light. Scary.
For reference, this is what the freezer looked like in-game until now, compared with the current version. I moved the back wall further back to make room for the meat, and set up the shelf to collapse when the player lands on it from the vent.
Exploration
I expanded this area further out to make room for more stuff. This is not part of the required progression through the level, and is purely there for exploration. I added a conference room next to the vending machine, this one with a projector.
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| Very old screenshot, but the best I could find for comparison |
It's a little bit dark, so here are some views inside the level editor. I make a point of making ceilings interesting, since that's a detail I always appreciate in level design. I plan on adding some more optional rooms to explore that you can only reach by air vent.
Cafe
Lastly, the cafe! They serve eel and fish tacos here. This area is connected to the walk-in freezer. When you get there, it's the first time you can finally access the cafeteria where the scientists are... or were.
The biggest problem I have to deal with is compile times. That's time it takes to get a map from the editor built with lighting and in-game. A couple weeks ago it took about 1 minute to compile, and now it's just over 3 and a half minutes. So that's the time it takes between making a change in the level editor, and being able to see how it works (or doesn't work) in-game. Of course, you don't do this for every little change you make, you wait until you've made significant progress before checking it out.
On the one hand, that time adds up and can slow you down in the long run. The positive side is that it encourages careful, methodical design strategy. It rewards thinking deliberately about my design choices, and over time I develop a better understanding of what things are going to look like without needing to see it.
WEEK NINE
This week, I focused pretty much entirely on level design. I continue to develop the level's mood and aesthetic, and I'm folding in pieces of environmental storytelling. I also got a start on some gameplay elements, like puzzles and platforming,
For a while, I have had this idea for a scene that takes place in this map. You can hear some survivors in the cafeteria as you traverse the map, but can never reach them until the end. For now, I repurposed existing dialogue from Half-Life's scientists to get the basic idea and mood across.
I added a couple of new rooms. The first is this storage closet, which was previously just a door with a sign. This room connects to the kitchen area through an air vent. Here you can see the first version of the room. It has the basic layout, lighting, and key objects.
The idea is you have to push the chair over to the vent, then climb around like a hamster. You know, classic gaming. I made a new chair prefab, this one with wheels instead of four legs. It looks quite comfortable, not gonna lie. Below you can see what the room looks like right now. Added several stacked chairs, and some filing cabinets to make it tight and claustrophobic.
WEEK EIGHT
Time to DESIGN
It was time for a bit of a change in my workflow. So far, I've mostly just been making textures. Way back when I started this project, I had this goal of making all of the texture assets myself, that way the line between mod and and independent game starts to blur. Now I'm realizing that while that approach is technically doable, it was crazy
These levels were nowhere near as far along as I meant them to be at this point. So I asked myself: "Girl, what are you doing?"
LEVEL DESIGN
Currently, my goal is to make a completely playable level. This is the general R&R area of the crew quarters, found in the bottom left of the overall map of the facility. I picked this level because I already had some solid ideas for it, and felt the most interest in finishing it.
The basic goal of the level is, put simply, to get through it. You just got out of the Medical area, and are making your way to the Dormitory to meet up with other survivors. This is the only path left that's not completely wrecked, but of course, you can't just breeze through it. The hallways are clogged with pieces of debris and furniture stacked as barricades.
Here are some images showing the progress I made this week (left), compared to what the map looked like before (right):
This change has proved to be the right decision. My palette was severely limited before. It was all muted tones, lots of grey. Booooooring! I do not feel so limited anymore, and the way I develop levels and create assets feels much more fluid.
This is an area that the player visits at multiple points in the story. Each time, it's in different states. It's explorable in the intro chapter, before the mysterious disaster or any of the major story events, so it needs to have a pre-disaster and post-disaster version.
After sitting on this map for a while, I finally decided to focus entirely on the post-disaster version, since that's where the real meat of the game is. I'll let things freely evolve to suit the spooky gameplay, and clean it up later for the intro.
TEXTURES
So what DID I texture this week? Signs. It's just signs. I don't feel I have to explain the purpose of signs in general, since I feel that's pretty intuitive, but these provided some much needed realistic detail. Since, you know, real facilities have signs.
Need to make some more of these with arrows.
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WEEK SEVEN
CAVES, CAVES, CAVES
This week, I spent some time putting together an in-game environment and modelling. Going forward, I'm going to start working more and more level design into my weekly progress.
I took inspiration from some images our instructor shared. These were intended as inspiration for another student's project, but they also perfectly fit some of the scenery I want for the mod.
This isn't level design per se, it's more of a style guide, an asset zoo, and a proof-of-concept for an asset creation technique wrapped in one package.
So. About the cave outside the window. This is gonna get weird. I made it using a mixture of brush geometry in the level editor and external modelling.
Then things took a turn. I exported the rocks as an OBJ, then took it into Blender. I gave it some new UVs, then set up some lighting to approximate what I have in the level. I baked those lightmaps onto four 512x512 images, one for each section of the rock.
I'm not quite sure why I did this. The plan was just to model additional pieces, like interesting rock formations, organic elements like coral, and stalks of biolumiescent fungus, and bake lighting on THOSE pieces. The OBJ exported from JACK was only meant to be a reference, not a replacement.
Oh well
I went through the process of texturing then compiling it into the engine's model format (.mdl), and brought it back into the level, deleting the existing rocks. Then I added some patches of glowing dots, suggesting some biolumiescent flora.
But I wanted more.
I removed the back wall, and hopped back into Blender to do some more modelling. I extended the cave a bit further out, and added some mist going off into the distance.
Here you can see a side view of what this looks like in Hammer. The box on the left is the bounds of the explorable level, beyond which there is nothing but void.
It's
still kind of far from where I want it, detail-wise. It's honestly not hard to iterate on this, but it is a bit slow. Taking it from image in my head to model, then to see it in-game, can be a long process. And it may require a lot of tuning to get it looking right in-game.
What can I say, GoldSrc is a weird engine.
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WEEK SIX
This week has been a little bit light for me, but I have some progress to show off. Here we have four new variants of the 256x512 wall.
Using boolean and array modifiers have been incredibly helpful, since I can easily turn certain details on or off to make different variants.
I did some small work on the level design here, trying out some positions for light fixtures. This time I have some in-game pictures of the power plant area. All the textures seen here are ones I've worked on this semester.
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WEEK FIVE
This week, I have several more textures to share. Moving away from designer was a pretty good call for a couple of reasons.
Painter & Designer are only built to understand texture sizes in powers of 2. so if you want to use nonstandard texture sizes, you have to plan them with a bit more math in mind and will have to crop. The GoldSrc engine accepts textures of all sizes, and its sometimes a good idea to use nonstandard sizes to make textures fit the level geometry.
First, we have this door. I wanted it to look heavy and damaged. Something that would seal off an area to contain a disaster.
The bulk of this was done in blender, using a matcap renderer and basic materials. I started using booleans to add details. This made a lot of sense because it means that I can easily make variations by turning certain cuts on and off, like the edge wear or the cavity around the emergency release.
I rendered out two variants at a resolution of 192x 256. One of them more generic with the unique features disabled. I painted in some more damages in Photoshop.
Next up: a wall to go with it.
On the left is what it looks like in Blender. I used booleans again, for all those horizontal lines. I'm planning on making several more variations in Blender, and I definitely need a few more completely different walls.
Lastly, we have a small piece of trim. This is mainly intended to be used in frames for sliding doors, but it can really be used for all sorts of things.
This was a pretty simple one, rendered at 128x32. Made two variants in Blender. These ones didn't get any more touch-ups in photoshop.
Next week: Some more textures and some in-game shots!
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WEEK FOUR
Putting the "Art" in texture art
This week, I'm happy to say I can show off some new textures in-game!
I tried getting back into designer, I really did. But it wasn't working out so well for what I needed. Oh sure, some things are better made in designer, but I was struggling to find the free-flowing creativity that I'm used to. Designer is great for when you know what material you want to make. With my level of experience in it, it's not always ideal for just... creating. And I swear it's just slower than I remember it. Hmmm, maybe I should finally download that update.
So, like everything in my life these days, I made my way back to Blender.
I found a weird and different method for making textures! Well, it's not that weird but it certainly ain't modern. Instead of building things using nodes, I'm just physically building them in blender and taking a render. This was inspired by Gunman Chronicles, another game on the GoldSrc engine. They made some of their textures out of clay sculptures that they photographed! I'm doing the same basic thing, just in an entirely digital space.
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| Textures by Dale Broadbent. Source: valvearchive.com |
For the low-res, simple textures I need, this gave me all I needed. No reason to make full PBR textures and render them down. The texture just needs to look good as a single image, so however I produce that image doesn't really matter.
As you can see, it doesn't really matter what the geo is actually doing, as long as the render looks how I want it through a front-facing orthographic camera. So what is meant to be water leaking onto the metal is actually just a cavity sculpted into a plane, drowned in ambient occlusion.
To celebrate these new textures, I built a small, dimly lit hallway scene. Complete with flickering red lights and some sounds to give it that post-disaster ambiance.
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WEEK THREE
Last time, I said I would show off textures. And, well, I have textures! A few, at least.
After a shaky start, I got into a good rhythm before too long. I boucned back and forth between Designer and Hammer (the level editor), working bit by bit until things started to materialize. I picked a specific reference photo for inspiration and got a small asset list going.
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| Blue is used to denote anything that will require a specialized texture. Anything gray or white is going to be more generic. |
It's been... a little while since I booted up Substance Designer. It requires a different mindset from the Blender & Painter workflow I'm so used to, so it takes some adjusting to get back in the flow. But I'm getting there!
Slowly, I'm remembering how I used to make textures for the mod. Designer is totally
built for PBR texturing, but I find it can also be a very powerful
tool for when all you want is basic color textures. It lets you churn
out a ton of variations on a texture and fairly quickly. And when you
don't have to produce normal, roughness, and metallic maps, it's kind of liberating.
My basic workflow goes something like this:
1. I start by creating the base of the texture. Like a generic concrete or metal surface, something with the dents and cracks that I want all of the variants to have.
2. Then I figure out the patterns and shapes. I use tile generators, shape nodes, transformations etc. to block in the arrangement of bolts, panels, or grates. Maybe I put some color variation in here.
3. Add some highlights, shadows, and damages. I plug that mask into a curvature node to get some highlights for the edges and shadows for the cavities. I make extensive use of AO, gradient maps, levels, & blend nodes here.
Basically I just go wild with nodes. The graph below shows three outputs for separate concrete textures, found all the way on the right. In the lower left, I experimented with adding puddles to the ground, but didn't quite get it right yet.
I mentioned before that I would make some of my textures as PBR materials, then convert them for the GoldSrc engine. Turns out, that method does not always feel so good.
After all, the end goal is only a good-looking color texture, saved as an indexed bitmap. Anything else is purely extra. Once I reminded myself of that fact, things started going better.
Sometimes it's best to just abandon PBR and return to monke.
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WEEK TWO
Hi again! Just to recap, for some time now I have been working on a Half-Life 1 mod as a side project. Usually when classes are going on, the mod gets pushed to backburner, but it is in desperate need of some assets before the level design can get much further. So, I decided to use this class as motivation to build up the asset library and experiment with concepts for the mod.
Here's a little bit about the setting. It takes place at a deep sea research facility, probably in the near-ish future. No such underwater facilities quite on this scale exist today. But let's assume that one does. So the vibe is sci-fi, but not too sci-fi. Basically, it's an atmospheric horror deal, featuring panicked scientists and all manner of mutated squid-like beasts.
The facility is built next to a dormant underwater volcano, at the base of the mountain. They conduct research on geology and biology, but the base is hiding secrets in the high security areas. That part of the base extends inside of a cave system. For reference, here's an overall map of the facility as it is currently planned.
The entire left half of the map is the main section of the base. As far as the player character knows, that's the extent of the facility. But there is a top secret wing of the base, hidden away in the caves. The two wings are connected through the cave system, which requires a high security clearance to access. A geothermal power plant sits in the middle of it.
About 1/3 of this map, all of it in the main section, has already been built in some form so far. A lot of that is simply blocked out for now, and some of it is in the process of getting detailed with textures & lighting. One of the areas that hasn't been touched at all yet is the geothermal power plant. I've had a fuzzy image of it in my head for a while, partly inspired by things I've seen in Arkane's Prey, and I hope to get that vision out in a clear way.
Today, I got a start on blocking out that area. I intend to work on its design while putting together an industrial texture library. When you finally visit this area in game, it's going to be horribly infested by alien contaminants. My approach here is to build it first, figure out a semi-realistic design for the environment, then wreck it and introduce gameplay.
Mainly I'm going to be using Substance Designer. I will probably mix in some rendered 3d stuff, basically modeling complex pieces and taking a render of it to use as a texture.
Here are some samples of textures I've made in the past on this project, all made in Designer:
But those are for other areas, like labs, dormitories, and common public areas. They're all clean textures that are seen in the first areas of the game, before the disaster hits. Not really suitable for the industrial sections. I've been gathering some reference for the geothermal power plant. There's not a lot out there that matches my vision specifically, but definitely some stuff with elements I can use. Arkane's Prey is an excellent point of reference, since it has a similar variety of environments, despite being in space instead of underwater.
For next week: I hope to show off some new textures, maybe with in-game previews. And possibly some concept art (if I feel like it)!
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WEEK ONE
Half-Life Mod Asset Creation
SOME CONTEXT
Just under two years ago, a gang of CAGD students and I decided to make a full-conversion mod on the Half-Life engine. That essentially means creating a first person game of our own using another game as a base. So it's a new story, made with our own assets and level designs, while the bulk of the groundwork (game systems, movement, AI) is already covered. Any textures, sounds, models, and sprites already in Half-Life are fair game, but its a personal goal of mine to rely heavily on new assets.
We
had a good amount of steam for a while and would meet regularly in
person to hash out designs, but it's been very slow-going since the
pandemic started. I've been slowly chipping away at the level design. Very slowly.
The setting is an underwater research facility, which is ravaged by some unknown horror.
My goal here is to use this class as a chance to develop our mod's atmosphere and create a ton of texture sets and models to use as a level designer. The engine is from 1998, and it prefers low resolution textures and low poly counts. That actually gives me some flexibility, since I can still focus on the details and atmosphere without having to worry too much about realism.
THE PLAN
1. Draw concept art for an area. Pick an environment from the design documents we already have, and flesh it out.
2. Recreate that area in 3D, create an asset list for textures needed
3. Create any additional props in blender
4. Create modern PBR textures using Substance Painter & Substance Designer
5. Use designer's PBR render node to bake the textures down to a single image
6. Show off those assets in-game in a moody scene that shows off atmosphere and lighting
7. (Optional) Show off the high-res assets separately
Just to be clear, I'm not planning on designing playable levels as part of this class, my work here is just about defining an aesthetic for those levels and creating assets. I expect to end up with some more time on my hands when I am satisfied with the assets for an area. At that point, I will move on to drawing up more concept art for other areas with different assets, possibly including creature or character designs.
You can see some of the work I've already done on the mod on my artstation, here:
TIMELINE
This week: Concept art, put together asset lists, get started on 3d work and textures
Each week: Continue modeling and texturing, continue producing concept art
