L4D2 – Some Mercy

It’s been a couple days of research for the past few days, making steady progress on the mapping side whilst figuring out how the gameplay is going to work. It’s becoming quite clear that this is not going to be a regular L4D2 experience. That would be far too uninteresting for my tastes. This time I’m going for a much more open experience, which means one very big map instead of several maps linked together as you progress through them linearly. There’s no name for this project yet – but it’s going to be based around the No Mercy campaign, so expect “Mercy” in the title!

Edit: I realize this isn’t exactly descriptive of what the gameplay is going to be like, but it’s a little hard to describe at the moment: I’ll have a post on this in it’s entirety later.

So far the most difficulty is coming from dealing with hammer, and it’s lovely tendency to crash when you’re handling a lot of objects (like entire sections of maps). And don’t get me wrong, I love the Source engine’s entity system, but it’s occasionally a pain, and when it isn’t it simply takes a long time to get much accomplished. How big the final map ends up being is entirely dependant on how much hammer (and the engine itself) is able to handle. If I may make the terrible pun, Hammer is showing absolutely no mercy with that so far. Oh, that hurt…

Aside from that – Work on a storm system is also under way. Similar to Hard Rain’s storm system, it occasionally causes a gust of stormy goodness to keep the survivors under pressure. However, instead of encouraging to the survivors to rush through the linear maps (to avoid further storms), in a more open world map the storms are a real threat to the survivors, who must take advantage of their environment to survive.

The actual objectives of the map are still under development, I’ll talk more about that soon.