I Hate Mountains

Over the last weeks, we watched a lot of people playing the campaign and we learn from their mistakes by fixing things here and there in the campaign. Now these guys I’m gonna link you right after are just the kings of awesomeland. We watched their videos together and we were literally laughing our asses off in front of our computers. Seriously, if you had to watch one walkthrough of the I Hate Mountains campaign, be it this one! Thanks to them for sharing a good moment, this is what all I Hate Mountains co-op plays should be.

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.

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!”