Mod: USS Bravo (?)
Details: Shortly after finishing my first playthrough of USS Darkstar, I thought to myself "Wow, this is really cool, but I wish the maps were a bit less dark." With that as the only motivating factor (and planning) I started making my own version from scratch. I don't think this was actually called USS Bravo, but I can't recall what I actually called the vessel.
Reason for cancelling: A decent sized mod with no planning whatsoever, from a mapper that very nearly started mapping yesterday. It never had a chance.
Mod: 7 Hours
Details: Set during the interlude between HL1 and HL2, this mod was to star an average gamer who just so happened to be unwittingly living in the world of his favourite franchise and had just received his order of a fully-functional HEV suit replica.
Reason for cancelling: Again, there was basically zero planning involved, I just went at it. With little experience gained from USS Bravo, and no endgoal, I only got halfway through the second map before getting bored. I later deleted the mod entirely by accident, though if I recall correctly I was able to salvage half a .map for entry in castle disposed.
Mod:USS Bravo
Details: I still for some reason wanted to do this mod, so I started V2 from scratch. With a new christening for the ship and a new, still unplanned layout, I was sure this would be the one. I made a custom splash screen, took LD character models from expansion packs and other mods to bolster the ranks of the ship, and got less far than the previous attempt, but with a much more polished map (by my old standards)
Reason for cancelling: If memory serves I ran into some easy to fix error that I had no idea how to fix at the time, so I scrapped it.
Mod: Prison break
Details: I honestly remember nothing about what the supposed plot of this was, but I do recall a custom build of SoHL (1.7, I believe?) that featured some reflective surface entities, a pistol supressor, and a dual-hand viewmodel system for both having the HEV suit and not. The supressor came with the 9mmhandgun no matter what, and I didn't want the HEV viewmodel system because I wanted to use custom viewmodels eventually.
Reason for cancelling: The custom build of SoHL, which was the first build I got my hands on, didn't suit my purposes. Also lack of planning meant I only got halfway through the first map before canning it. (Starting to see a pattern here)
Mod: [Untitled Janitor Mod]
Details:Set during the Black Mesa incident, you were an average janitor in a (very small) dormitory. When you got to your nearby office and picked up your keys, the resonance cascade starts, setting off tremors in the underground complex. Escape.
Reason for cancelling: Despite having a couple of setpieces I was quite proud of at the time, the mapping was overall bland, unplanned, and I got bored. I may have also accidentally deleted it at the same time I lost the 7 hour mod. A partial source file from early development was recovered, and appears in Castle Disposed, sans custom and gearbox poster textures and a couple models I got from online.
Mod: Foothold
Details: A foreign power invades the country, and it is up to you, as a soldier/average joe to fight back, using an Op4-style arsenal of weapons and help from various people such as Dr Keller from Half-Life Decay as the warm-spirited CEO of a corporation developing power armour and/or Dr Rosenberg as a researcher at a university who needs help defending his lab while he does a research data backup to a secure offsite location. Other features would have included friendly grunts and an urban environment.
Why it was cancelled: Never got past the concept stage, though I had about 5 of them. I had planned it to be my big project after I finished the next mod on the list, but, well... That never happened. Also, half a year or so after I came up with the concept, they came out with
Homefront, which kind of stole my thunder. (as well as my idea! :furious:)
Mod: Colony 42
Details Hoo boy. This was my most ambitious project. It was also the evolution of two prior attempts. (You know this can't bode well) The space ship was turned into a space station, given an arbitrary number that I would have changed if I had ever thought of a better one, and made to run off of Spirit of Half-Life with HD models. Unlike all my previous mod attempts, I actually worked on this one for
multiple years, rather than a matter of a couple days or weeks.
Reason for cancelling: Figuring this out was actually really helpful. There was, of course, the lack of planning. I had a rough plotline and planned setpieces, but it was in constant state of flux as I modified stuff, and there wasn't really enough for an entire mod - I planned out the beginning and the end, but had nothing to put in the middle, which lead to dull, nonsensical environments with no purpose in either the universe or the gameplay. I learned a lot about level design and the goldsource engine while developing the mod, usually in large incremental bursts. This lead to newer areas looking and being constructed much better than older areas, which in turn made me want to rebuild the older areas because they were absolute crap. I realized that this would become an endless cycle, so I just kept working with the intention of redoing the beginning later, which was also a mistake, because it made the task of eventually redoing the old areas seemingly insurmountable.
But the biggest mistake I made was probably limiting myself in the setting. I had a very simplistic architecture style because of my lack of skill at the beginning, and no custom environment textures, which lead to everything looking boring and samey with few exceptions. I also had no defined size or shape for the station, which meant I couldn't often do anything interesting with outer bulkheads and portholes, and when I did, it often turned out not making spatial sense in relation to the other maps. Fighting nothing but the invading forces of vorts and the occasional grunt, with their bioweapon headcrabs in these samey environments lead to little of the enemy variety that made Half-Life great, and even my crude attempts of making an interesting story (or rather, shoehorning it in) were limited and bland. I had planned to kill off a character you meet early in the story, but I had decided to have the player spend most of the game alone, so when you met up with him and he died, there would have been little reason to care, since you had spent all of 2 minutes with him.
During the entire development of Colony 42, I craved hgrunts and concrete, because they were two things I couldn't put in the mod that I could have done really cool things with. In the end, between the amount of work I would have to do to finish the mod alone, and the limits the setting had imposed, it became painful to work on and I just lost interest. I still have a zip of the source files kicking around somewhere, and a full build on one of my computers. I'm probably never going to finish it, but the source files and all (ha) the related documents are in there too. Maybe those will eventually see the light of day...