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."

Confusing name much?

[martinultima]

For a second there I thought it meant "source" as in source code, until I saw the part about Half Life. Talk about confusing – who'd have thought a proprietary game would be called Source? And even the name Half Life kind of gets confusing if you try hard enough (I remember in geometry class, our teacher was showing how to work our TI-83's, and everyone was so disappointed when she explained her "HALFLIFE" program was to determine the half-life of a radioactive atom... I think I'm the only one in th

Re:Confusing name much?

[WilliamSChips]

The title also uses lambda for an A, making it Hllf-Life.

Re:Confusing name much?

[ClamIAm]

And that's not the only confusing part. I generally thought that modifications to a game were called "mods", not "MODs". The only MODs I have are some old Amiga audio files [wikipedia.org]...

Re:Confusing name much?

[TheSteve]

.NET is the worst name-taker of the bunch. Maybe I'll come up with a nice new app and call it .COM - we'll see how that one flies.

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?

[martinultima]

Already done – Microsoft's had programs named stuff like COMMAND.COM for years. And now, of course, it's come back and bit them in the ass because of those e-mail viruses that send .COM programs to trick people into thinking it's a .com Web site... got to love Microsoft, eh?

Re:Confusing name much?

[Schemat1c]

...those e-mail viruses that send .COM programs to trick people into thinking it's a .com Web site... got to love Microsoft, eh?

Not that I care for Microsoft but you can't blame them, they had the .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.

Re:Confusing name much?

[martinultima]

Shh... no correcting my intentionally misleading history, this is Slashdot and everyone's supposed to hate M$!

Talk about Unusual!

[Dr. Eggman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreedz_Climbing [wikipedia.org] Kreedz Climbing, a mod devoted to trick climbing/jumping in levels to reach odd places. Now that's unusual!

Re:Talk about Unusual!

[SirSlud]

Not unusual ... trick jumping/weapon maps have been around as long as quake 1.

Re:Talk about Unusual!

[reklusband]

Sir Slud. Your humor chip seems to have short circuited. Please report to the geekery for a replacement.

Weekday Warrior - Impressions

[popo]

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

[swtaarrs]

I agree. When I started playing, I couldn't believe that they had chosen such a frustrating movement control scheme. It also seemed to take forever to load...much longer than regular Half Life 2.

Re:Weekday Warrior - Impressions

[Neoncow]

much longer than regular Half Life 2

Mind Boggles

Re:Weekday Warrior - Impressions

[SpectreHiro]

Agreed. The combination of camera and control scheme is annoying to say the least. Add in the warmed over Office Space references (or knock offs), the lame Metal Gear parody and the painful load-times, and you've got a mod I really could've done without.

Re:Weekday Warrior - Impressions

[Das Modell]

I tried out Shantytown. It was interesting to see traditional point/click adventure game made for an FPS game, but the camera was terrible and everything was a little underwhelming compared to real adventure games. Static camera angles would have been a much better solution in every way possible.

I do like the game's world though. It's interesting.

Stuff that matters

[The MAZZTer]

I'd have to say this is the first Slashdot article in YEARS that's given me stuff that matters! These'll be fun to play. :D

Re:Stuff that matters

[gonzorob]

in YEARS? sounds like you should stop reading slashdot...

Re:Cross-platform development

[Amich]

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

It's also a damn good engine

[Nazmun]

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

Valve Career Opportunities

[trickster721]

Job Description:
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

[KDR_11k]

By the time students graduate and get a job the engine is probably obsolete already. Hell, Source was pretty much obsolete when it was first released, the Doom 3 engine was/is more future proof than Source. Unreal Engine 3 would probably make more sense since it's actually being used and it's still an upcoming technology so the dev jobs now would contrbute to games using it and it won't be obsoleted for a longer time than source. Also, judging by the comments from professional developers regarding the two e

Re:Cross-platform development

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you looked at the Source engine, and Half-Life 2's source code in particular?

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...

[The MAZZTer]

...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

[Sv-Manowar]

It's good to see people thinking outside of the box with what is available with Source, due to the market domination of CS:S and Day of Defeat it seemed as if that engine was doomed to only seeing mods based on that kind of FPS multiplay. It seems like most of the mods since those two gained popularity have been very similar except for a number which have become well recognised for their own achievements, hopefully these two can live up to the growing market in the mod community for things that are differen

our source adventure...

[bitkari]

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 [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.