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.

As you may already know it, we’re almost done with the big stuff (ie: level-design and gameplay). What’s left is mostly bugfixes, sound effects and little details here and there, which will still take some time. But I’d like to point a few things I’m not really happy with recently and that most people don’t understand when they contact us.

I’m not gonna make a pamphlet about Valve, but the situation around Left 4 Dead custom campaigns is seriously fucked up. Sorry for the harsh words but, it’s been nearly one year since the game was released and six months since the SDK was added to the game, and still… half of the features are still bugged out or simply not supported. That’s something people heavily discuss on the Left 4 Dead Mailing List, but nothing seems to move on Valve’s side. What’s still impossible to do, you ask?

• You can’t embed custom music in your campaign VPK.
• You can’t embed custom sounds in your campaign VPK at all because players would have to rebuild the whole Left 4 Dead sound cache each time they install a new campaign, and when it doesn’t simply mess up everything, it takes almost 10 minutes to complete.
• Custom models are crashing the game randomly when embedded in the campaign VPK.
• You still can’t embed custom particle effects, in the maps or in the VPK.
• The sound system is ruined and plays random sounds at random events, like an alarm sound when you set zombies on fire and such…
• We can’t make custom game instructor messages and as we can’t record survivor voices ourselves, there’s mostly nothing we can to to help players understand what to do.

And believe me, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Basically, what I’m saying is that more than 11 months after the release of the game, we still can’t make elaborated custom campaigns. Should we see a deliberate method of pushing players and modders to Left 4 Dead 2, I don’t think so ; but there’s something seriously wrong in there. So, if you’re waiting for our campaign, you might as well wait for the next bugfixes. Until then, here’s a few widescreen action screenshots of the first three maps!

Sorry for the quality of the darkest ones, the JPEG format doesn’t like big dark areas. And by the way, what I said in this article is my own opinion, and not the team’s one (even if I know they agree with my opinion) and I know there’s some campaign out there that do have custom sound/music/models, but it mostly relies on hacks and exponentially increase the campaign size. And our campaign contains a hell of a lot of custom content.

Hi back, I’m writing this from home, where I’m constrained since a few weeks… It’s been a terrible mess recently and we kind of lost our goal with this campaign. As I’m writing, I don’t really know where my team mates are and I don’t really know if they’re still working on their part of the campaign since I didn’t had any news for a few weeks. I became sort of Internet-anonymous in the past few weeks and didn’t bother much about anything else than my health.

Anyway, we’re not out of business. I was already done working on my maps when the accident happened, so I wasn’t even delayed. Last time I talked to Geoffroy, he was still working on his map and I don’t really know what Marc is doing for the moment. The point is that we’re really close to completion, it must be something like 85 or 90%, but we definitely need to refocus and clean the mess to restart the motivation machine.

With Left 4 Dead 2 coming along gently and some really creative campaigns starting to pop up from everywhere, we perfectly know we’re a bit endangered right now. We’ll talk about this a bit later and report here once done. In the mean time, if you know about some very good Left 4 Dead campaigns, feel free to post some links in the comments, I was out of business for a few weeks and probably missed some good things.

I know this article doesn’t sound really good at first, but that’s the way it is. And for the moment, we never even though about canceling everything (Ok, maybe once or twice in a desperate moment). We know it’s been more than two months, and boy… that was some terrible two months. But stay tuned, or just grab the RSS feed to avoid missing something. We’re not giving up yet!