Unusual Source-Driven Adventure Game MODs 33
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."
Confusing name much? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Confusing name much? (Score:1)
Re:Confusing name much? (Score:1)
Re:Confusing name much? (Score:1)
It's a pain to Google for something named like that and commonly used words being used for products just makes it tougher to find information about online and gather statistics on it's usage.
Re:Confusing name much? (Score:2)
Re:Confusing name much? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that I care for Microsoft but you can't blame them, they had the
Re:Confusing name much? (Score:1)
Talk about Unusual! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Talk about Unusual! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Talk about Unusual! (Score:1)
Weekday Warrior - Impressions (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Weekday Warrior - Impressions (Score:2)
Re:Weekday Warrior - Impressions (Score:1)
Mind Boggles
Re:Weekday Warrior - Impressions (Score:1)
Re:Weekday Warrior - Impressions (Score:1)
I do like the game's world though. It's interesting.
Stuff that matters (Score:2)
Re:Stuff that matters (Score:1)
Re:Cross-platform development (Score:5, Interesting)
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
It's also a damn good engine (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been to dissapointed as of
Valve Career Opportunities (Score:1)
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.
Re:Cross-platform development (Score:1)
Re:Cross-platform development (Score:1, Insightful)
The Source engine is popular among modders for two reasons: accessibility and history. People saw the likes of CS and DOD come out from the HL1 engine, and generally assumed that the Source engine would be just as easily moddable. For the most part they are wrong.
Having seen source code for Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2K4 (though not the C++ source, the UScript source), I can say that HL2's code is 100% pure spaghetti. The desi
Try the torrents first... (Score:2)
...if they don't move fast enough for you:
http://students.guildhall.smu.edu/~weekdaywarrio r/SetupWeekdayWarrior.exe
http://students.guildhall.smu.edu/~shantytown/file s/ShantytownSetup.exe [smu.edu]
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!
Good news (Score:2)
our source adventure... (Score:4, Interesting)
We built Absence [bitkari.com] over the last few months of our degree at the University of Salford [salford.ac.uk]. 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.