I Hate Mountains

Here we are, last playtest gone perfectly well, last problems approximately solved (there’s still a few things but we can’t fix them), we think it’s time to get serious. As we promised in the May 18 news, we’re now releasing our video trailer. That gives us a last week to finalize everything and organize the release. We’ll hope you’ll enjoy it!

Be sure to watch it on Vimeo to get the HD quality!

If you prefer Youtube, there’s also a Youtube version. thanks to doktor10

Will the campaign be released for Left 4 Dead 2?

The campaign will initially be released for Left 4 Dead 1 and a Left 4 Dead 2 port should follow a few weeks later. We can’t guarantee the Left 4 Dead 2 port yet, because it’s not as easy as some people think is it to port a complex campaign like I Hate Mountains from Left 4 Dead 1 to Left 4 Dead 2. There’s missing models, and there’s missing Left 4 Dead 1 survivors (obviously), which means there’s also missing voices, and missing textures, and missing sounds, and missing entities (from the Crash Course update), and missing particle systems and missing infected populations, etc. We don’t really see how easy it is as soon as you start using most of the features the game offers.

When we’ll release the video trailer tonight (if everything goes well) you might want to help us promote the campaign on your website, blog or forum, so we made a little press kit that contains several type of pictures.

• Logos, icons and banners for I Hate Mountains, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2
• Multiple sizes: XXL (1680px), XL (1280px), L (960px), M (640px), S (480px) and XS (200px)
• Multiple qualities: High quality (PNG), good quality (JPEG 90%) and medium quality (JPEG 75%)

There is also a large quantity of screenshots in:

• The Action screenshots gallery (1024×420 widescreen pictures). Download from here.
• The Ambient screenshots gallery (960×600 and 1680×1050 pictures). Download from here.

There’s a preview of what’s inside the press kit on the Logos and banners page. We’ll link the trailer on the front page and on this Logos and Banner page with an embedding code once it will be released.

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!