I Hate Mountains

Thanks!

What should we say? I guess all we have to say is thank you everyone! The I Hate Mountains release went very smoothly and so far, the feedback we received is outstanding. Like we said in a recent interview, we never released a project that got so much praise in our whole lives, that was really incredible. Thanks everyone for the feedback on the forums (be it positive or negative), thanks for the e-mails, thanks for the bug reports, thanks for the comments on various websites around the Internet, thanks for spreading the news, thanks for playing it and thanks for everything else! So far, the campaign was downloaded approximately 100,000 times during the first 10 days and since then, it has unfortunately plummeted. Hopefully it’s okay with us, because we never thought we’d be able to reach so many people given the state of the Left 4 Dead community!

Feedback & issues

We stopped to try to read everything everywhere on the Internet because, well… it was way too difficult to keep up with the amount of pages created after the release. Researching “I Hate Mountains” on Google gives us 82,000 results created during the last month, that’s just huge. So far, we didn’t make complex scientific calculations but the feedback looks 75% positive, 20% positive with a few negative criticism against lighting and multi-paths and 5% of haters. We’ve been (slowly) working on fixing issues during the last two weeks and you can follow our progress when browsing our dedicated forum and the change log. We heard the half a million reports of the sticky helicopter bug and we’re sorry about it, head over there for more informations about it.

Interviews

There’s a few things already available and more to come in the near future. First things first, for our French-speaking fans, we did an interview with the Joystick magazine. They said it should be available in the next summer issue so keep an eye for it. Then for our English-speaking fans, we’ve got interviewed by the awesome folks at Podcast 17 in issue #87. If you don’t know them yet, it’s a small devoted team talking about the Steam/Valve/Half-Life universe every week. You can listen to Nicolas trying (struggling) to speak in English from 00:56:00 to 01:28:00 (yeah, that’s 32 painful minutes). Finally, there might be something big coming on Real Talk Gaming in the next weeks because we made a very big interview with them, I’ll update this post and Twitter as soon as it’s made available.

Left 4 Dead 2 and future

For the moment, the Left 4 Dead 2 port hasn’t started yet. We’re working on fixing general issues first because as we always say, there’s no point in porting the bugs too. We’ve been fixing over 40 bugs in the last week and we’re reworking the whole lighting of several places because obviously, the dark atmosphere didn’t suit everyone. As we say on the forums, our goal isn’t to alienate the fans of this ambiance, we’re not going to make it daylight. We’re just making it slightly brighter, adding lighting clues about where to go and deleting visual clues like arrows. The first three levels are fixed, two to go during the next week. The next version will be labeled 1.2 and should be released in two weeks. The Left 4 Dead 2 version is lost in translation and we’ll see if we can work it out, it looks easier now that Valve has finally started fixing the custom campaign system (only for the second game unfortunately).

Miscellaneous

• People are looking for the hidden domo-kuns in the campaign, help them if you can!
• Arstechnica.com like us but commenters are fighting over.
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun don’t like us and commenters are quite harsh.
• Destructoid like us!
• Joystiq likes us too!
• Halflife2.net loves us!
• Half of the I Hate Mountains commentaries on websites degenerate in L4D1 vs. L4D2 or Portal: Prelude haters vs. Portal: Prelude lovers or PC vs. Xbox flamewars.

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!

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.