Journal #5470

Now that Lab11: LavaLab is finished, released, done and dusted, my thoughts are turning to what I should tackle next. The rest of this month, of course, is taken up by NaNoWriMo: I'm writing a novel about how a gaming geek with no social skills handles a zombie uprising -- it's called Half Life Zero: No Life... It occurs to me that my next NaNo attempt should possibly be the story of my Lab17 complex - or rather, the story of a lowly security guard who works there... :)

My very next level, of course, will be Lab11: Erupt, the post-disaster variant of Lab11: LavaLab. My original LavaLab: Erupt basically threw away everything outside of the lab itself -- and one of the criticisms aimed at it was that much of the freedom inherent in the original level was lost in the spinoff. This time, the Erupt variant will retain much of the freedom of the original while opening up new options. I hope. Of course, this means it won't be a 10-minute conversion! There's a lot of work that will go into the make-over, so don't hold your breath...

I am also tempted to release Lab11: HeatHaze, which will be the very first level of mine to require my petesdm mod. Since I put all the effort into getting working fog, I feel like I should make use of it. In theory all it requires (apart from distributing my mod) is to add an [ent]env_fog[/ent] entity and recompile. In practice, however, what I really want to do is have the fog (sorry, "heat haze") fade in as the level floods, then fade out as the lava recedes. Which means modifying the fog code to allow timed fading rather than instant on/off...

And after that? Who knows. So much to do, so little time. I have numerous ideas to tackle. Also, I build HLDM levels for GoldSource because we cannot use Steam at work (behind way too many firewalls) so I am somewhat locked in to that engine -- but I really do want to have a play with Source too. sigh