I Hate Mountains

I do think it is time to give more frequent news about what’s going on and react to what people say to us via Twitter and the commentaries on the website. Here are some insights at what’s going on:

• First of all, yes the campaign is finished. We just need to sort out a bug that appears on the fourth level and then it will be fully okay. But again, this is not mandatory, we just want to avoid any potential problem in the future related to this issue, it could quickly become worse.
• Then, we’re not working on a Left 4 Dead 2 version anymore for the moment. We want to release the Left 4 Dead 1 version first, gather some feedback and then try to port it to Left 4 Dead 2 if it’s possible.
• Also, we’re building a little bonus section on the website to show you a bit of behind-the-scene materials. We really missed doing this after Portal: Prelude because we didn’t keep anything during the development. Basically, it’s a lot of screenshots of the evolution of the levels though the months, reference pictures and sounds, music drafts, graphs, statistics, studies and such. I takes some time to gather and build the pages, but so far so good, it’s almost done (it should be by Friday). We hope you’ll find the credentials to open it in the campaign (it’s not hidden very well), but our ultimate goal is not to piss people off, you will probably find the password on the Internet a few hours or days after the campaign is released.
• After the campaign is released, we’ll open a little forum on this website to allow players to talk about the campaign and report feedback to us. It’s already ready, it should be fast.
• Finally, we do have a bit more work to do on a video trailer but it’s basically finished too. It will go live at the end of the week or at the beginning of the next one. Don’t freak out though, it will be very simple and rushed, we don’t have more than a few days to waste on a trailer. When it will go live, it will necessarily mean that everything is done and that we’re ready to take one week away from the project before we release to think about things we could have missed and take a break.

Aside from this, some people don’t seem to understand that releasing something as important as I Hate Mountains is not quite a piece of cake and seems easier done than said. Believe me, this is not the way it works. We put more than one year of work into this, and it’s not the moment to rush things out. One little wrong move could led us to flood the network with a flawed version and believe me, it happened once with Portal: Prelude and this is definitely not something we want to experiment again. Files on the Internet tend to replicate themselves at an alarming rate.

More than any of you, we know it’s been a very long time this campaign is being delayed. It may piss everyone off, but at this point we really don’t want to do any mistake. Stay tuned for the video trailer and we hope you’ll talk about it around you once it’s 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.

A few months ago, I told everyone we needed to migrate our website before the end of march because Google was dropping Blogger‘s external publishing feature. Finally, they extended the date to mid-april, and then to the first of may and since procrastination is my religion, it’s been only two days I started migrating the website. So far everything seem to have gone well with the import, but if you seem to encounter something strange, please report it directly to me :
— nicolas@ihatemountains.com.

For the moment, there’s nothing more to show you unfortunately. We’re in the process of making what have been done on Left 4 Dead 1 compatible under Left 4 Dead 2 and this is not as easy as Valve said it was going to be when they released the so-called Left 4 Dead 2 Add-on Support. Basically, the thing is crippled with problems, there’s content from Left 4 Dead 1 randomly missing everywhere. Sometimes it’s a texture definition file although the texture itself is present, sometimes it’s a model that only lacks its textures, and sometimes they even replaced a perfectly valid Left 4 Dead 1 model with another model from Left 4 Dead 2 (like a mop changed into a bucket or a caboose into a wagon railing). Not to mention the content from Crash Course, which is entirely missing.

Of course, this is not helping us to make the campaign compatible. So far, we repackaged all the missing content, but there’s still a few issues to solve, like a violent crash when starting the fourth level. For a tool that was supposed to allow us to easily port our Left 4 Dead 1 campaigns to Left 4 Dead 2, I guess it totally misses the point. Anyway, that’s not much a problem anymore since we’re used to it now, it just takes longer.

By the way, stay tuned because we’ll update next week (if everything goes as planned) with the promotional screenshots we’ll send to various websites to notify them about our upcoming release.