I Hate Mountains

Don’t worry, we’re not posting articles anymore because we’re migrating our website to WordPress. Google is slowly giving up on the external publishing and hosting features on their Blogger platform. This is quite a sudden decision on their part, and it seems that all they want is to gain control over all the blogs they’re hosting and save a few bucks.

Even if we see the advantage of letting Google take care of the server, I can see a lot more advantages in hosting it ourselves. Of course scalability is their main advantage, I can still remember this server, down on its knees when I released Portal: Prelude back in 2008, but still, this was only for a few days. The problem with this approach is that we’re losing all control and giving it back to Google. It prevents us from building our site the way we want, optimizing it for our needs and adding pages as we see it.

There will be a Bonuses/extras section on the website (it’s not a secret, there’s a disabled link on the left), plus one or two other things when the campaign will be released. We want to be able to build little dynamic systems and stuff. Of course, migrating the website to WordPress isn’t quite a piece of cake. Sure it can import everything from Blogger but it isn’t compatible with what we developed in the background and our design… soooo… it slows us down. Yeah, yet another excuse.

As for the anecdote, we’ve been in touch with people from Valve in the last few weeks. We told them about our problems with the game, the bugs we’re facing and the issues with the VPK system. For the moment, our campaign can’t be launched from a lobby, and it’s apparently something they’re aware of and trying to fix. Unfortunately as I said in our twitter channel, they can’t help us with any of our other issues (such as the few models making the game crash). I guess they fear an overwhelming increase in people asking for help, and we can understand their choice. I hope they’ll change their mind once we’ll send them an early build of what we did :D (dreaming is still free).

Okay, I don’t know for you and your country, but in France, we just entered Christmas Eve day. For a few days (probably more than two weeks), we’ll keep silent and take a break with family. But before we leave, we wanted to say a few last things about the campaign.

We know it’s taking a bit longer than expected to get this campaign done. In fact, this is taking way longer than expected. At first, we thought we could have a release for the end of the summer, eventually it didn’t happen. Then, we thought we could do it for November, and we worked at a fairly sustained pace to keep up, but eventually it didn’t happen either. Finally, we thought we could finally have a release for Christmas (that would have been awesome), but you guess it, it still won’t happen for a number of reasons.

There was the great debacle of the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools, that didn’t helped us as soon and as much as expected since most (if not all) of the components Valve initially promised never really showed up. But that’s OK, we didn’t really care anyway. Then, each one of us got back to work or school after summer, and as we’re all at the beginning of our professional life or at the end of our scholar life, it consumes a lot of our time. But that’s OK, we could bare with it. Finally, there was the big disappointment and excitation around the release of Left 4 Dead 2, which sucked up a lot of our time and motivation and brings us to the second point.

To be honest, at that point, we really thought it was time for us to give up. Until a week ago, as a leader I wasn’t really sure if we were still headed somewhere at all. We saw the numbers, we saw Left 4 Dead 1 leaking players faster than ever, we saw it fall behind Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, the Garry’s Mod, and even regularly Day of Defeat: Source, which hasn’t even been supported for years (July 2008). Even us weren’t playing Left 4 Dead 1 anymore, that really frightened us to hell to think that our project was already obsolete before its completion. Valve really didn’t left us enough time to build something serious.

For your information, on the official Left 4 Dead Mailing List a few beta-testers are talking about the upcoming Left 4 Dead 2 SDK. Let’s be honest, for the moment it looks particularly promising, but then again, if we really want to be honest, the SDK of the first one looked promising too and nothing happened. For a while, we considered switching to Left 4 Dead 2, finish our campaign and wait for the SDK to be released (OK damn, the SDK was released while I was writing this news, so… everything might change again, except the following statement). Don’t freak out though, because we made our decision. I Hate Mountains will be released on Left 4 Dead 1 or won’t be.

Okay, now that things are getting clearer, here’s a bit of information about our progress. Basically, it’s finished. Now, when I say “it’s finished” I mean that the whole campaign is complete and playable. That doesn’t mean the campaign is ready to be released, it means that we’re entering the polishing stage. We have this huge folder full of bugshots (screenshots of bugs) to fix, we need to tweak the navigation of bots and infected, we need to throw a few animations here and there, and more importantly, we need to test it full-scale. We know for sure that the gameplay works quite well, but it won’t hurt anyone.

Wooo, that was quite a long news. Now that you’re all bored, you may need some new materials to cheer you up. So here’s one overview and 20 new action screenshots of the last two maps, taken from of our last playtest.

I Hate Mountains Complete Campaign Overview (spoilers ahead, 875 KB). Now you can see how much work has gone into building different paths and ensure good re-playability.

20 brand new action screenshots taken from the Lumberyard and Lakeside level during our last playtest (no spoilers here, don’t worry).

Until next time, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the I Hate Mountains Team!

Since the release of Left 4 Dead 2 a week ago, we received a few emails asking us if it was going to have any consequences on our I Hate Mountains campaign. I thought it could be good to clear up the situation for everyone at the same time. So here’s our thoughts on the current situation.

• First, there’s still no SDK for Left 4 Dead 2 and something tells us that we might not see it before a long time. So we can’t port our campaign to Left 4 Dead 2 if we wanted to.
• Second, even if we could, we won’t be able to port our campaign to Left 4 Dead 2 because Valve kind of changed their mind about their so-called interoperability between Left 4 Dead 1 and 2. There is no such thing and all the content we used from the first game (textures, models, sounds, etc.) isn’t available in the second for the moment. Let’s hope they’ll remedy this situation later.
• Left 4 Dead 1 is still crippled with bugs and it’s still rather impossible to create a serious campaign using custom everything (models, particles, music, sounds, etc.) that doesn’t rely on dirty and risky hacks. We might finally use these, but we’d really like to avoid it.
• Most people are starting to move on from Left 4 Dead 1 to Left 4 Dead 2 and even us are seeing Left 4 Dead 1 as a serious regression over Left 4 Dead 2. It frighten us a bit because, now that the community is splitted, we don’t really know were our potential players are.

Finally, I guess nothing really changed for the moment. We’re still working on the campaign, but we’ve been quite depressed by the quality and the originality of the new Left 4 Dead 2 campaigns. It’s really hard to focus on your own campaign when you perfectly know you’ll never be able to reach this kind of result, damn you Valve<:em> and your clever ideas! But still… we’re working on it.