I Hate Mountains

When we’ll release the video trailer tonight (if everything goes well) you might want to help us promote the campaign on your website, blog or forum, so we made a little press kit that contains several type of pictures.

• Logos, icons and banners for I Hate Mountains, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2
• Multiple sizes: XXL (1680px), XL (1280px), L (960px), M (640px), S (480px) and XS (200px)
• Multiple qualities: High quality (PNG), good quality (JPEG 90%) and medium quality (JPEG 75%)

There is also a large quantity of screenshots in:

• The Action screenshots gallery (1024×420 widescreen pictures). Download from here.
• The Ambient screenshots gallery (960×600 and 1680×1050 pictures). Download from here.

There’s a preview of what’s inside the press kit on the Logos and banners page. We’ll link the trailer on the front page and on this Logos and Banner page with an embedding code once it will be released.

As promised last week, here are a few of the new screenshots of the campaign we’ll be using to promote our work in the upcoming weeks. These are taken from the lastest stable build and should represent what you’ll get once you’ll finally be able to play the campaign.

Be sure that releasing something as big as I Hate Mountains sure takes some preparation, we’re in the middle of a lot of different things for the website, for the “press”, for the fans, etc. But we sure are close to it nonetheless. It’s only a matter of a few days or more, but not more than two weeks (again, speculation, but this time, it should work out).

By the way, there’s more screenshots (10 for each level) on the new “Ambient screenshots” page. Don’t hesitate to take a tour and tell us what you think about it in the comments until we finish to setup the forums.

1: Lost in the Woods

The survivors crashed their bus in an utility pole of this dark forest while fleeing. They must now find their way through the spooky North American mountains.

2: Climbing the Manor

The survivors got out of the forest and must now reach the highest point of this manor and try to launch a distress call from the radio broadcasting some tape loop.

3: The Underground Way

Escaped from the manor, the survivors are now fleeing through an old system of caves and tunnels running under the manor and through the mountains.

4: Lumberyard Evacuation

Freshly escaped from this oppressing cave system, survivors are now looking for help and rescue in the lumberyard nearby where military forces set up their outpost.

5: Lakeside Finale

Fleeing the now infected and desolated lumberyard, the survivors find themselves blocked by a lake and are eagerly waiting to be rescued by whoever could catch their signal.

Like we said on our Twitter feed a few days ago, we recently decided to restrain ourselves to a few deadlines. The work is nearly over (I know we’re always saying that), the first deadline was 4 days ago, and we only missed it by a few days. Unfortunately, we still can’t give any release date yet because we’re waiting for Valve to fix the game (else we can’t even play the campaign properly), but we’re definitely seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

What’s left to do you may ask? Well, it kinda depends on our regular playtests (we always find a few things to tweak), but I’d say there’s still the extraction vehicle to export as a Source engine model, the fourth map (Lumberyard) to polish a bit, a few tweaks to the navigation meshes, a few more particle systems, various small optimizations and then, the coop should be finished. But when I said we missed our last deadline by a few days, it wasn’t really true. Most of our tasks are linked to a particular actor of the project and for some of them, there’s no other way to proceed, it’s not like anyone else could do the job. That why while Nicolas’ still finishing the last tasks, I’ve already started to take care of the Versus side of the campaign.

You read well, we never really decided if we were going to implement a Versus mode or not (mostly because we don’t care about versus), so the question was still on hold until a few days ago. We finally decided that we had to do it for the fans, but I need to warn everyone about something: we’re definitely not going to deeply playtest versus. The campaign is playing good in coop mode, we’re just providing space and paths for the infected to roam around. Basically, every map will have some special infected that won’t play particularily well:

• Forest: Works well for Smokers and Hunters, not really for Boomers
• Manor: Works well for Smokers and Boomers, not really for Hunters
• Underground: Works well for Smokers and Boomers, not really for Hunters
• Lumberyard: Works well for Hunters and Boomers, not really for Smokers
• Lakeside: Works well for the three of them

Finally, I’ll repeat some of the things we already said recently: Why aren’t we planning an open beta? Because that’s not the way we work. Read about Agile software development and its “produce less, iterate more often” guidelines. Why is this taking so long to release? External people can’t really understand how hard it is to come up with something like what we’re doing when there’s already hundreds of campaigns out there. We’re not just building another campaign, we’re building something from the ground up with a different approach. There’s a bunch of other campaigns doing the same, and most of them are in development since shortly before I Hate Mountains. We know what we did, we know what we have to do, we know that the campaign is fully playable since months, but “playable” doesn’t mean “finished” and even less “polished” or “bug-free”.

“Stay positive guys, I have a good feeling about this!”