I Hate Mountains

Hey people, it’s not because we’re not posting any news that we’re not working. I bet a lot of people don’t understand how hard it is to come up with a campaign like this one, when you’re not paid for it nor supposed to work on it everyday for 7+ hours. Let me explain…

One regular single map can take up to one year of work to be fully finished and polished to the max (I even saw more). Imagine the work involved in building five of these at the same time. We may be three, but three is still not a huge team. On the other hand, don’t misunderstand us, we don’t want to be more. The wider the team, the poorer the management.

Also, because there’s already a certain quantity of campaigns released since the launch of Left 4 Dead and its SDK, many believe we’re just lazy. But excuse me, we played these campaigns together, and I’m not going to comment out on their quality. When you’re forced to play in god mode to finish a campaign and it still takes you more than two hours and a half to finish it… I’m not calling it fun.

Anyway, on a more positive note, here’s the progress of the campaign. The first 3 maps are finished… we played them a lot and it seems pretty solid (until the beta tests I guess). The fourth and fifth maps are in progress, approximately at 75% each. We perfectly know that Left 4 Dead 2 is coming, Marc even played it yesterday in Paris. I won’t spoil you by saying he wasn’t really impressed by the game… but let’s give them a little more time to polish it up.

Well… that’s it for the moment. There’s a lot of campaigns still under development. Just be patient, it’s not really a piece of cake to work on something like this. And if Left 4 Dead 2 comes before our campaign and people move on, well… we’ll just move on too.

Hi back, I’m writing this from home, where I’m constrained since a few weeks… It’s been a terrible mess recently and we kind of lost our goal with this campaign. As I’m writing, I don’t really know where my team mates are and I don’t really know if they’re still working on their part of the campaign since I didn’t had any news for a few weeks. I became sort of Internet-anonymous in the past few weeks and didn’t bother much about anything else than my health.

Anyway, we’re not out of business. I was already done working on my maps when the accident happened, so I wasn’t even delayed. Last time I talked to Geoffroy, he was still working on his map and I don’t really know what Marc is doing for the moment. The point is that we’re really close to completion, it must be something like 85 or 90%, but we definitely need to refocus and clean the mess to restart the motivation machine.

With Left 4 Dead 2 coming along gently and some really creative campaigns starting to pop up from everywhere, we perfectly know we’re a bit endangered right now. We’ll talk about this a bit later and report here once done. In the mean time, if you know about some very good Left 4 Dead campaigns, feel free to post some links in the comments, I was out of business for a few weeks and probably missed some good things.

I know this article doesn’t sound really good at first, but that’s the way it is. And for the moment, we never even though about canceling everything (Ok, maybe once or twice in a desperate moment). We know it’s been more than two months, and boy… that was some terrible two months. But stay tuned, or just grab the RSS feed to avoid missing something. We’re not giving up yet!

We know it’s been seriously quiet there since mid-may regarding new materials, but don’t panic! We’ll have plenty of new things to announce in the upcoming weeks. No, not a release date unfortunately, but some crusty details about the manor (exterior detailling stuff), the lumberyard (progress stuff), the lakeside (progress stuff), the forest (gameplay stuff) and the underground (ambience stuff).

And if you’re patient enough, we might even release some details about the music and a super-secret-new-poster-because-the-current-is-not-cool-enough. But shhht! Nothing’s really fixed for the moment. If you’re really patient, we might even whine and lament on one or two things (one of them beeing Valve, of course)!

Stay tuned for more developer banter coming soon!

Edit: As you may have noticed it, there’s still no news for the moment. The reason is simple, I suffered a very bad lungs accident a few weeks ago and had to be hospitalized for a while. I’m now in the process of cancelling my trip to USA next month because of the damn utterly expensive american medical system :D
I can’t take the risk of beeing indebted for the rest of my life for the moment.