Valve's Source Engine Mod
With HL2 mods being the craze in early 2010s, this was my brick to add to the modding scene when I had all the time back in high school and at uni
Background
My first major C++ project that started back in 2008 while I was still in high school. It continued (with pauses) until 2012, when development effectively stopped until I cleaned it up before releasing as a perpetual alpha in 2015 on ModDB. It was born out of two different experiences:
First was Zombie Master , one of the first HL2 mods. It featured a 1 vs many PvP mode where one player would direct a horde of zombies, RTS-style, against all other players.
Simultaneously, Synergy came out, and one of the maps available for it were Trials - a level consisting of a set of extremely difficult puzzles to solve in cooperative mode. Those included jumping puzzles, high speed train chases, and mazes. Sadly, the map had little replay value.
Thus my mod idea was meant to be simple - the players were tasked with solving puzzles, while one other player was supposed to randomise them by changing the puzzles on the fly. As development went on it turned into a full-blown Player vs Player modification pitting one team against a single player whose goal is to use traps & environmental hazards to stop anyone from finishing the level, similar to the original Zombie Master concept. The traps included suicidal, mechanical pigeons, exploding, flying orbs voiced by a friend of mine and giant, human-eating blenders.
The name of the mod was initially meant to be Overlordess, the titular character being the trap-setting player. The name did not roll off the tongue very nicely at all, and within the team got shortened to Ov in the end.
Gameplay
One player assumes the role of the Ov, and is given a set of traps. Those include:
- Lasers
- Static flame throwers
- Syringes that inject you with hallucinogens
- Sticky bombs
- Bombs that clone the nearest physical prop, explode on touch
- Mechanical pigeons that hone in on a player in sight and throw themselves into a suicidal rush
- Paralysers that help keep people in place while they slowly get killed off
- Fans to push them off of high cliffs
- A blender with a hook that pulls people in to blend them into pieces
And a few more. On top of that, each trap had the chance of leaving behind a “trap defense” when destroyed - grenades, gas, a vortex that pulls/pushes players out. This gave a sufficient amount of randomness to make the game surprising, unpredictable and highly replayable.
The rebel side, which was the rest of the players, was a bit more underdeveloped in the final release and mostly featured different weapons per each class, and a few tools that help eg. disable traps.
We also did not have a model for a medpack to heal other people with and thus we reuesed the grenade model. Healing was now done by bashing friendlies with a grenade.
Development
While working on the mod I acted as a lead for a small team of 3D and 2D artists, while my responsibilities included all of the game design, level design, level creation and gameplay programming. I worked on it on-and-off over the course of 3 years, with a final push in 2015 to get it to some form of a final state gameplay wise.
The entire source is written in C++, and was pretty much my training ground for working in a proper codebase. Which is why it consists of things like a 10k line file that contains code for all of the various traps .
Map design was done on the fly as development progressed, and was all done in Hammer editor. Since I had little to no custom models I had to use geometry blocks to add variety to maps, as well as attempt to fit in existing HL2 decals & models into the mod’s maps.
Media
The video below shows the latest state of the mod (~2015), however it is recorded from a Source demo file and lacks user inputs/menus, hence all trap placements and such just happen without any UI explanation.