I Hate Mountains

Just a quick note to tell everyone to try the Suicide Blitz campaign for Left 4 Dead 1. We don’t know the guy who made it, but kudos to him, we were asbolutely thrilled when we played it yesterday. The campaign is brilliant and beautiful, full of details and sweet lighting. Plus, the ambience is really great, the difficulty high enough for a great challenge and the optimisation is quite good too. The five maps and the overall campaign are a bit too long (took us almost 3 hours in advanced) but it’s definitely worth a try. One of the best campaigns we stumbled upon for the moment.

Aside from this, we’re still working hard on the campaign. And as you can see with the semi-chaotic release of Dead Before Dawn a few days ago, we were absolutely right when we talked about how bad Left 4 Dead 1 was supporting custom campaign. That encourage us to wait more and more, until Valve releases the patch they’re talking about for months.

On the bright side, our maps are finished. Two of them are in the optimisation process, four of them are in the final navigation meshing process, and then it should be finished for good. We won’t give any hint on a possible release date for the moment, we’re not planning anything since there’s too much unanswered questions for the moment. What’s sure is that we won’t release anything until Valve fixes Left 4 Dead 1 for good. But for the moment, they still have some time.

PS: Ok, the guy’s named R.T. Frisk, see in the comments.

It’s been a while since we last gave you some real news about the content of the campaign itself and most of you had been pretty patient until now. We never stopped working on the campaign, but we’re not working on it full-time either, so it takes some time. You already know that the first, second and third maps are finished ; it still need a few tweaks here and there, but nothing really hard to do. Lately, there was some huge progress on the fourth and fifth levels too.

For the moment Geoffroy and Marc are working hard on these fourth and fifth levels while Nicolas is waiting for them to finish in order to create the navigation meshes and link everything together. These last two maps are almost finished, we’re probably somewhere around 85 or 90% of completion. In this article, we’ll focus a bit more on the Lumberyard level, right after Underground, where survivors are back to fresh air. We could also talk about the final Lakeside level but… we kinda want to keep some mystery around this one in order to avoid spoiling too much.

As we said in previous articles, we try to care a lot about details and background while building the campaign. It gives a better credibility and allows a better immersion in the apocalyptic Left 4 Dead universe (that’s probably why it takes time to build). Until now, Lumberyard‘s pictures showed a massive exodus, a mountain road and… contaminated people finding their way through the exodus and starting a panic event. Where were these people headed ? That was the mistery. They were trying to reach a lumberyard, transformed in a heavily defended, mobile, state-of-the-art evacuation and decontamination center by the military.

When survivors finally reach the lumberyard, everyone’s already gone through the backyard’s road and all is left are the remaining people that thought they could find their salute here too… but were a bit too late. Geoffroy tried to give all these building a realistic touch, trying to build what could look like a real lumberyard. Honestly, we don’t really know how a lumberyard is supposed to work, probably like 95% of our future players, but still. We think it’s important to add some credibility.

This map is also a huge optimisation challenge, since it’s completely open and offers a lot of paths to the end. For the moment, everything’s still going fine and we can finally see the end of the tunnel. So, stay tuned for more developer stuff until the release that we hope will occur before Left 4 Dead 2. If that’s not the case, we don’t know what we’ll do and it will only depend on how much of that promised inter-operability Valve managed to built in before the launch.

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.