Half-Life 2: "Lot"
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Lot is a single-player survival horror map for Half-Life 2. It was originally part of a horror-themed map pack called Night of the Headcrabs, but, as far as I know, that map pack never actually came together. I named it Lot because of the survival horror nature of the map, and all of the things I feel the word lot can signify: the parking lot, a vacant lot, the story Salem's Lot, the man in the Bible who escaped the destruction of a doomed city and whose wife turned into a pillar of salt because she looked at the destruction, etc.. Plus, as a friend of mine stated, this level has a lot of zombies!
I did quite a bit of entity interaction for this map. For example, the digital readout counters that appear are a composition of individual glowing sprites. I needed a way to show a countdown to give the player some indication of the progression of time. Originally, I tried to create a binary clock out of a line of glowing sprites, but this didn't work as well as I had hoped--it was too hard to tell what it was actually indicating. Then I made a line of sprites that ticked off as time counted down, but, again, no one who playtested the map could tell what this actually meant.
The only realistic solution was to use actual numbers, but I didn't have a digital readout texture that would show up in the dark. Therefore, the best solution I devised was to create three "8s" out of sprites, then set timers that would call logic_case objects and activate the correct sequences of sprites, all while a master math_counter object ticked down to symbolize the actual timer. Meanwhile, individual counters would call each other based on the timer to change the hundreds, tens and ones digits properly. In this way, the player still didn't know what the counter was counting down to (they weren't supposed to know this, anyway), but they knew that is was a countdown timer, and that it would eventually reach zero, at which point something would happen (no spoilers!).
Among other things I did to help the player was to attach both a camera and a point light to each sentry gun turret. The cameras were viewable from a monitor in the easily-accessible control room, so the player could see what the gun was facing and whether or not it had fallen over. The player can cycle between the cameras by using the control panel, and a set of sprites on a keypad on a desk tell the player what gun camera is selected. The point lights are also there to assist the player; because the level is very dark (a night setting), the gun turrets would create a flash in the distance, but the player didn't have any real indication of which direction it was facing. The point lights activate whenever the gun becomes active, and this allows the player to easily (and quickly) tell that a gun is active and which direction it is pointing. I also felt it looked REALLY COOL to see these beams shining in the darkness as gunfire sprayed around the area.
Feel free to download this level from my Downloads page and try it out. Any feedback would be appreciated!
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