I Hate Mountains

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!”

Because it’s been a long time since we last provided new materials, here’s 3 brand new action screenshots taken from the Lakeside level during our last playtest. We try to keep as much mystery as possible around this one, but we’ve been busy working on weather recently and as it turned out pretty good, we wanted to share it with you. Color correction is awesome.

Also, playing with the right music is always important!

Okay, I don’t know for you and your country, but in France, we just entered Christmas Eve day. For a few days (probably more than two weeks), we’ll keep silent and take a break with family. But before we leave, we wanted to say a few last things about the campaign.

We know it’s taking a bit longer than expected to get this campaign done. In fact, this is taking way longer than expected. At first, we thought we could have a release for the end of the summer, eventually it didn’t happen. Then, we thought we could do it for November, and we worked at a fairly sustained pace to keep up, but eventually it didn’t happen either. Finally, we thought we could finally have a release for Christmas (that would have been awesome), but you guess it, it still won’t happen for a number of reasons.

There was the great debacle of the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools, that didn’t helped us as soon and as much as expected since most (if not all) of the components Valve initially promised never really showed up. But that’s OK, we didn’t really care anyway. Then, each one of us got back to work or school after summer, and as we’re all at the beginning of our professional life or at the end of our scholar life, it consumes a lot of our time. But that’s OK, we could bare with it. Finally, there was the big disappointment and excitation around the release of Left 4 Dead 2, which sucked up a lot of our time and motivation and brings us to the second point.

To be honest, at that point, we really thought it was time for us to give up. Until a week ago, as a leader I wasn’t really sure if we were still headed somewhere at all. We saw the numbers, we saw Left 4 Dead 1 leaking players faster than ever, we saw it fall behind Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, the Garry’s Mod, and even regularly Day of Defeat: Source, which hasn’t even been supported for years (July 2008). Even us weren’t playing Left 4 Dead 1 anymore, that really frightened us to hell to think that our project was already obsolete before its completion. Valve really didn’t left us enough time to build something serious.

For your information, on the official Left 4 Dead Mailing List a few beta-testers are talking about the upcoming Left 4 Dead 2 SDK. Let’s be honest, for the moment it looks particularly promising, but then again, if we really want to be honest, the SDK of the first one looked promising too and nothing happened. For a while, we considered switching to Left 4 Dead 2, finish our campaign and wait for the SDK to be released (OK damn, the SDK was released while I was writing this news, so… everything might change again, except the following statement). Don’t freak out though, because we made our decision. I Hate Mountains will be released on Left 4 Dead 1 or won’t be.

Okay, now that things are getting clearer, here’s a bit of information about our progress. Basically, it’s finished. Now, when I say “it’s finished” I mean that the whole campaign is complete and playable. That doesn’t mean the campaign is ready to be released, it means that we’re entering the polishing stage. We have this huge folder full of bugshots (screenshots of bugs) to fix, we need to tweak the navigation of bots and infected, we need to throw a few animations here and there, and more importantly, we need to test it full-scale. We know for sure that the gameplay works quite well, but it won’t hurt anyone.

Wooo, that was quite a long news. Now that you’re all bored, you may need some new materials to cheer you up. So here’s one overview and 20 new action screenshots of the last two maps, taken from of our last playtest.

I Hate Mountains Complete Campaign Overview (spoilers ahead, 875 KB). Now you can see how much work has gone into building different paths and ensure good re-playability.

20 brand new action screenshots taken from the Lumberyard and Lakeside level during our last playtest (no spoilers here, don’t worry).

Until next time, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the I Hate Mountains Team!