"Communication has historically been a big challenge for us," he says. I ask Engels about the challenges of working on a project like this. When you play Black Mesa it’s remarkable to think that it’s a passion project developed by, at least initially, a small team of volunteers. Crouch-jumping was cool back in 1998, but these days it feels overly complicated." "The player automatically crouches when they jump now, which makes it feel a bit more modern. "We made the player path much clearer at the expense of having it feel a lot more linear." They also updated the game’s archaic crouch-jump function. "The biggest example of what we changed was the chapter On a Rail," says Engels. And the Source engine really helped us capitalise on that in Black Mesa."īut while Black Mesa largely remains loyal to the source material in spirit, the team did change quite a few things. A simple closet or the hint of a sprawling complex through a window was enough to create that illusion. "When you made your way through Half-Life, what made it feel real was how the facility existed beyond what you could see. "We used real-world reference to get things looking as realistic as possible, then built the game on top of that," says Engels. Some areas, particularly the dam in Surface Tension, have been hugely expanded, feeling a lot more dramatic than in the original. "We wanted to modernise the game, so we had to really dive into Half-Life 2 and the episodes to look at how they were designed." The team adopted Valve’s philosophy of creating games that are "simple on the surface but complex under the hood." "I think you could argue that the main character in Half-Life is Black Mesa itself," says Engels. Our team is talented, but it’s vastly different to modernise hallways than to create an alien world completely from scratch."Īs for the Black Mesa facility itself, the team went above and beyond merely remaking the existing levels. "It’s both mechanical and organic, which is a difficult balance to strike. "Our biggest challenge was designing the Xenian technology," says Engels. "The online world can seem like it wants everyone to fail, and to have a community that wants us to succeed… well, we never take it for granted." Adam Engels, project leader Even if we built a 1:1 replica of the old levels (which we haven’t), we still have to ask ourselves: how was this supposed to look?" It’s unclear whether this weird place was supposed to be as barren as it is, or if Valve had intended it to be much more elaborate and detailed.
"With the earth-based assets, even if they were super vague due to technical limitations, we at least had an idea of how Valve wanted them to look," says Engels. When Valve created Xen, technical and time limitations had an impact on how it looked. We want the borderworld to feel like a place that exists, even if we humans don’t have the capacity to understand it." "In the end we wanted to build a world that is bizarre but contiguous. "We made the design with these in mind," says Engels. They’ve all been remade and expanded, and some sections Valve had to cut out were reintroduced. In the original game, what most refer to simply as ‘Xen’ is actually five chapters: Xen, Gonarch’s Lair, Interloper, Nihilanth and Endgame. "We didn't reinvent the game with our take on Xen, but it's much more than just get key, open door." "Valve does a wonderful job of introducing mechanics, letting you get used to it, then using that mechanic in an unexpected way," says Engels. The Black Mesa team’s main goal for Xen was adding the same level of worldbuilding seen elsewhere in Half-Life, while retaining its alien, otherworldly feel. "We can tell you from our own experience that taking your game to a new world is more challenging than it looks on paper." "We see a lot of support for the old Xen on our Steam forums." The consensus in the community, he adds, is that Valve ran out of time and wasn’t able to iterate on the alien levels like they did with the rest of the game.
"I think the dislike of those levels might have grown in our minds as time has gone on," he says. We’ve been using Google Docs recently and they’ve been a huge help."Įngels thinks history has been crueller to Xen than it deserves. "We try to schedule a few meetings or playtests where everyone can get involved. "We try and use chat to work out specific problems, then use forums to document what we talked about so we can refer to it later." Time zones are one of the biggest hurdles for such a disconnected team, and it’s basically impossible to get everyone together at once.
"We use chat programs and online forums," says Engels. The team doesn’t work in one office, which can make orchestrating such a huge project difficult.
0 kommentar(er)
