Mod's that never were... Created 9 years ago2015-02-03 14:00:28 UTC by monster_urby

I've started a crap ton of mods over the years, and finished none. The Core looks to be the one to change that, but I decided to think back to mods I've started and put them up here. Thought it might be interesting to see what you guys have done in the past as well.

I'm no coder, so a lot of them were simply map packs with new skins and models.

Mod: MCF
Details: This is the only one I can remember working on before I even game to TWHL. Set in a fictional city in the UK, the Morris Chemical Facility (MCF) was Gordon Freeman's next assignment by the GMan (This was long before HL2 was announced). During his first experiment with the MCF, a chemical leak was to create a series of mutant creatures which Freeman had to eradicate.
Reason for cancelling: No modelling ability, texturing with MS Paint. Then the mod Chemical Existance came out and shat all over my attempts at mapping. Just kinda gave up.

Mod: Kinetix
Details: Set in a fictional city in the UK, the Kinetix Labs were hastily established after an alien craft crash landed in a park. Under the guise of a simple plastic manufacturer, the underbelly of the complex housed the alien lifeform known as Kinetix. The player was to control an unnamed security recruit on his first day who was sensitive to the alien's telepathy. The alien would guide the player to him in an attempt to be released from his chamber. On top of this, the city was to be assaulted by a hostile alien race who were pursuing Kinetix for an unknown reason. There was even a terrible attempt at a trailer for this one. Following the release of The Core, this is probably the only past project I would consider revisiting.
Reason for cancelling: Started working on OiFH.

Mod: Half-Life: Off it's fucking head (HL:OiFH)
Details: A collaboration between myself, Tosse, Espen180 and Daubster under the label Demonic Puppy Games. This was simply a spoof mod with no real plot and ridiculous features. The very kind of mod I have come to loathe after a few years on moddb. The top 4 videos in this search for OIFH on Youtube are related
Reason for cancelling: Team kinda just fell apart after a while. Tosse and I considered starting a zombie mod in Source but this never got past the planning phase.

There are many many more but that's all I can think of at the moment...

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...

I'm afraid I've also started on projects that I never finished off. Most of those were maps tough... Almost half the disc space on my computer is unfinished .vmf files.
Anyway, some mods I started but never finished:

Mod name: Kliener Life

Details:
When I first got my hands on Half-Life: Uplink, I immediatly fell in love with this entire game series. So I decided to start my own mod, before I even bought the game! I only had the tetures, a few models, just the sound included with Uplink, and the old, crappy Uplink dlls. I didn't really plan it very far, but I think I made this the general story line:
You play as dr. Isaac Kleiner (the guy from HL2) during the Black Mesa incident. You start in some sort of room with beds in the desert, walk out of the doors and...

Reason of cancellation:
... There it stopped. I had no more ideas. So I went back to Portal 2 mapping and forgot about Half-Life for a few months.

Mod name: Concept's Choice

Details: It was basicly supposed to be a sort of my version of "The Stanley Parable".

Reason of cancellation I figured no one wanted to play a cheap rip-off of "The Stanley Parable", and I didn't have a voice actor for the narrator.

Mod name: Portal: Escape

Details: Was supposed to be just another Portal game: You solve the tests, you escape the computer.

Reason of cancellation: I got bored and leaved.

Mod name: Test subject 40291

Details: Was supposed to be the sequel of "Portal: Escape".

Reason of cancellation: There's two main reasons. 1, Portal: Escape got cancelled. 2, there's no native support for Portal 2 mods.

Mod name: Unlimited: Source

Details: Unlimited was supposed to be a sort of open-world exploration game set in the HL2 universe. You started in a cafe fighting some CP units. After that, you were to explore the world and... Simply do stuff. Whatever you did was to have consequences, like you could either be friends with the vortigaunts, or you could declare war with the rebels, or extinct the combine.

Reason of cancellation: It really only reached planning stage as back then I wasn't as good at mapping as I am now, and the planned size of the project discouraged me.

Mod name: The Delta Project

Details: It was supposed to be some sort of puzzle horror game.

Reason of cancellation: I don't really like horror games (I don't count Half-Life as a horror game) and had never played one of the theme I was looking for. I simply didn't have enough at the time, and I probably don't have now.

Mod name: Unnamed. It's "sourcemods" folder was named "game1"

Details: Some sort of TF2-art style stealth game with an intrigue story.

Reason of cancellation: I was developing this with some guy, but we wanted different things, and eventually we both lost interest in the mod.

That's all for this time. I'll make sure to post here everytime I decide to cancel a mod.
I might take up development of any of this mods at any time.

Urby, MCF makes more sense than Half-Life 2. You should totally do it.

I too am guilty of this. Just one, though.

Mod: (unnamed)
Details: Set in Black Mesa, Gordon Freeman was to dig up an old, decomissioned lab dedicated to time travel, then travel back in time to fix the time machine, to be able to travel back in time to fix the time machine. A joint project with Tetsuo. I don't remember the details but that's about it. More of a map pack than a mod, no custom content was planned.
Reason for cancelling: We were too busy at the time and it kind of died out. We had the story but didn't really have a solid plan, and we hadn't done more than a map each or so. I think one of us lost the files in a hard drive crash or something and that gave it the final blow. In retrospect, maybe I'd revive it sometime, if Tetsuo shares the feeling. pokes Tetsuo

We're not so different from the mainstream. There must be literally hundreds of games that never see the light of day. I remember Colony 42 Jeff. It was actually one of the mods I was looking forward to.

Great, now I feel terrible.
I can guarantee that you wouldn't have liked it as much as you think you would have. The Core it's not.
I'm trying to think of any solidified mod ideas for source that I had, but I'm coming up blank. I know I had stuff, but I can't recall any of the actual concepts.

I was working on 2 mods. A puzzle one and a horror one. But since my workstation has been uhm... "compromised", I can't go ahead.
So, as soon as I'll have a new pc, both of them will be finished if I find/can create the needed resources.

You will hear me again! Muahahahahaha!

MOD (unnamed)
This is the one i was working on with Stu.
We had the basic storyline but never fleshed out any of the levels on paper before designing them. I got caught up in the details too early on and then got pulled away by outside forces (life). Just never picked it back up.

I did find the first level .rmf. But we'd essentially need to start from scratch.

I remember the set plot points, and it was always meant to be an easily completable 3-4 map pack. It was never completed.

MOD - DART FIGHT
Details: Team and Class-Based, Multiplayer 'deathmatch' style game featuring close-quarter maps of houses, office complexes, and backyards. Nerf-style projectile weapons were to be the main draw to the game. Experience was to be awarded for kills and completing objectives. Used to upgrade bullet velocity, clip size, reload speed etc.
Experience starts at zero for each match.

Why it Failed
I think some of you remember my thread in the Maps and Mods section last August. I wanted to make a nerf-gun mod for Source. Source coding is very difficult and frankly, I gave up. I managed to make a custom weapon that shot .50 cal rounds with the crowbar view model. But making a projectile weapon proved to be near impossible. Every tutorial I followed didn't work, and everything I tried to do myself wound up in dead-ends. Coding for source is counter-intuitive to the C++ Novice and I couldn't wrap my head around the macros or header links that Valve used. The documentation was sparse at best.

I then tried Unreal 4... and had it working in an evening with their visual-style 'blueprint' coding. I was so amazed by this that my desire for Source development fell off a cliff.

Mod
No-Mod

Details
Now I feel really bad I'm one of the few members here who haven't been part of a mod... sads..

Why It Failed
Because not exist ='(

The next time I Join Mod I will...
Maybe start a TWHL mod after the GB contest? I call dibs on

• The great Hall of Dicks
• Whorish Alleyway
• Penguinboy's Lightning bolts
• func_vehicle: MASSIVE Truck of FAIL

Mod: Furtiveness
Details: My attempt at a super-anti-hero story. A pharmaceuticals lab owned by a corportation which leads or controls basically everything (think Google, but for your electricity, tech research, resource mines, etc.) conducts experimenting and testing for all sorts of drugs. Not intentionally evil testing, though that branch was operated by some serious idiots, meaning methods were usually ill-founded, results not always pretty or successful.
The player character would be a subject of various pills which were supposed to enhance the user's alertness, reflexes, and agility, sort of like a super energy drink. Instead they did all of that to an extreme, and enhanced his senses to the point where he could (to name a few) see gases, feel and anticipate movements (of living things, winds, etc.) and their causes, hear electrical currents moving, it mostly drove him crazy. Realzing this, he'd assume all of the experimentation at the lab was similar, and begin to sneak around the facility, crawing in suspended ceilings, evading security, and start dispatching of various researchers, destroying research, servers, and just generally trying to screw over that branch of the company in an attempt to keep them from continuing their work.
Reason for Canceling: That's about as far as planning got before I dove right into making maps. Way too ambitious, especially for my skillset at the time, which was limited to incredibly basic mapping. I also never had the story fleshed out enough to really pursue it, nor pitch the idea. I've probably got a few documents and VMFs locked away in old account or HDD somewhere. I'd honestly give this one another shot if I could figure the rest out.

Mod: GG-3883
Details: You're in Black Mesa during the incident. You have to get out. End. This was a bag of ambitiousness mixed with incompetence that I like to pretend never existed.
Reason for Canceling: I constantly encountered issues due to my experimenting with stuff I'd never done before, and it drove me to quit. I'm not a programmer, never have been, likely never will, yet I was constantly trying to mess with source code, and asking around for help with it. I ended up breaking stuff. The mod was also a mix-and-match of assets I'd created, downloaded, etc. Oh, and the mod was inspired when I heard an instrumental demo, and decided I needed a project so I could use it as a theme. This was doomed to fail from the start, and I'm glad.

It's only after reading this thread that I realise pretty much none of my maps have actually been attempts at mods, or even attempts at proper maps. A lot of them have just been me coming up with an idea and figuring out how to achieve it with the entities available to me.
Here's a recent example of one.

The only mod I ever really attempted was a remake of "sabotage" by ministeve.

Details
I had never really finished a map before, so after playing that map I decided to attempt to remake it on the basis that the short length, and having a concrete direction would help me complete it.

Why It Failed
Unfortunately late 2010 to mid 2011 wasn't a good time in my life and I was absent from TWHL and mapping for nearly a year iirc. The map just ended up being pretty much forgotten about due to this.

I went back through the WIP thread and found the images I had posted of it.
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]

God I really don't want to try to name all the bullshit mods I worked on when I was in middle school.

TJB those maps show promise

Those multi-part doors are amazings TJB

[quote]Maybe start a TWHL mod after the GB contest? I call dibs on

• The great Hall of Dicks
• Whorish Alleyway
• Penguinboy's Lightning bolts
• func_vehicle: MASSIVE Truck of FAIL[/quote]I want to see plot summaries, but I'm not sure I want to play them.

I only ever "attempted" one.
Mod: [I don't recall what it was called. I believe I had a working title of "Mach Mod", for reasons too non-existent to elaborate on.]
Details: Going from memory (which, if you know me, you know isn't a good thing)... I think it was sort of based around the idea that at the start of the mod, you'd pick a portal like a character select (I guess like the difficulty selection at the start of Quake), and the story would branch off from there as either... I think Gordon, a barney, a hgrunt or a vortigaunt? I can't remember whether there was ever any plot to speak of, but I do know I wanted the stories to converge at some point.
Reason for cancelling: Besides pure laziness and my usual aversion to productive things during school, it really quite needed stuff like "modelling" and "coding" which I had no experience with. Oh, and I was shit at mapping.

I... really don't want to go find the thread I made. God knows what horrors lie that far in the past.

Can't stop thinking about alternate ways I could have done Colony 42 if I had known then what I know now. (and possibly had access to a newer engine than Goldsource)

I've already started from scratch and failed at this concept 3 times. I don't want to do it again, damnit!
Eh, I'll just get a design doc going, maybe someday it'll be refined and planned enough...

I blame Urby.

That blame shall sit firmly on my shoulders.

I swear to god, if I EVER make a mod or game based off of Colony 42, and it gets released, you're going in the god-damn credits.

I began a mod called The Travelus a few years back. I was going to link a 10x10 grid of open maps and let the player choose how to complete necessary tasks in a mostly open alien world.

I wrote a theme song and modeled a cool arm-cannon and gave up after 6 hours.

Surprised 6-D has not yet been mentioned Rim.

Wanted to mention one you didn't really know about.

Mod: The Manor

Details: I'm a big fan of horror and I would of loved to have tried and finished it; in fact a snippet of the level design can be found in my caves tutorial. I worked on it for about 4 years, completed about 7 maps for it and I did a little spin-off map for my uni coursework. It was just fun to create.

Reason for cancelling: Rubbish, went through about 3 versions of the Source Engine and it was killed every time. Well...and Source is horribly out-of-date.