The reason I am writing anything at all is that the unthinkable happened. I started (and finished!) another project before finishing my current one. I was hoping this would never happen because I don't want to run the risk of leaving projects unfinished. But rest assured, I am going to complete this project.

Well what's up with the massive downtime?

Honestly I'm not 100% sure. As usual it is most likely a combination of things, that when combined lead to a total lack motivation. In this case I think the main reason is that I sort of stopped playing Left 4 Dead. I'm on a very lightweight 1.5 Mbit DSL line that is shared between 4 PCs. In those conditions there are rare occations where playing games online is a viable option. As I kind of gave up on playing the game I simultaneously lost interest in designing a level for it.

I have been doing other things however. The most obvious being the video editing work I did in the Mad Skill Motocross trailers.

As shocking as it might sound, my latest project is not for Warsow! Instead I have begun working on something that I have been longing for ever since I first heard of the game. I'm working on a Left 4 Dead level!

The Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools Beta was released not so long ago so I was finally able to start putting something together. In this case a Survival map. I know that it was technically possible to make levels for L4D before the official tools were released, but it felt unneccessary to work with some half-baked hacks when the official tools were just days away from release.

Instead I spent some extra time on conceptualizing the project:

I drew up some fancy concept art in my sketchbook and even colored it in Photoshop to get a feeling for the atmosphere. Then I did a rough layout in sketchup to get a more 3-Dimensional view on things:

As it turned out Valve was awesome enough to make an exporter plugin for Sketchup. Sadly my rough layout wasn't compatible with the way the plugin converted the file to a hammer friendly format, so I couldn't take my pre-made Sketchup model and import it directly. The plugin saved me a lot of time initially however as I was able to draw up a quick test map in sketchup to check the scale and size of everything without having to slowly get used to the Hammer editor first.

However, due to the way things need to be constructed in Sketchup in order for the plugin to work properly I will probably stick to doing most things in Hammer directly. Everything apparently has to be made out of solid (and grouped?) blocks in Sketchup so the plugin can interpret them as brushes. Sadly that is something that works against the quick'n'dirty nature of Sketchup. Also the resulting brushes weren't neatly snaped to the grid in Hammer afterwards which proved to be pretty annoying when I wanted to start tweaking things inside Hammer.

So I ended up remaking the geometry directly in hammer, using the imported Sketchup brushes as a template. But, I will likely end up doing any props and smaller detail objects I need in Sketchup, because i believe the restrictions are not as strict when it comes to exporting models as opposed to brush geometry. I might be mistaking however as I have not explored this option yet.

Right now I'm just focusing on the basic geometry, scale and layout of things. I did a quick mockup of the three houses that are going to be the main attraction of this level:

In the middle there is going to be a well (now represented by a concrete pipe model I found in the prop database), where all the weapons are going to spawn. Surrounding the well there are three houses that hopefully will represent three unique areas to bunker down in.

The Main House will have health packs and pill bottles and is supposed to be an up close & personal area with many dynamic props and tight doorways. While The Barn on the other hand provides a more open battlefield with a relatively safe elevated position where my hope is that the sniper rifle will be put to good use, along with an abundance of propane/fuel tanks for players to scatter around on the ground below. The Third Building, which I'm not sure what to call yet, will be the only building stocked with pipe bombs and molotovs. Other than that I'm not exactly sure what will make this building unique yet, but I will probably think of something.

This version is a very early Alpha version and is not really appropriate for public consumption yet. I'm uploading it here to my website simply to provide easy access for a couple of close friends to get a sneak-peak, and allow them to provide me with some initial educated input. I will prepare and upload an official first Beta version of the level at a later date.

If you stumble upon this version anyway, feel free to try it out and contact me if you have any questions or suggestions: feedback@ladelulaku.com

- Download lade-l4dsv1_alpha1.zip Alpha 1 (895 kB)