OK, it's 11am, I got my Earl Grey tea and some nice moody music so let's get going!
The "first encounter"
Since the beginning of the Canalyst project we kept a whole load of Canalyst builds just for the case that after the game was finished and out we would like to look at its beginnings again. I think, we now found another use for them.
The Canalyst project was started at the 18th of August 2009. A few days after the Summer vacation ended, I was at school just sitting around and thinking about how it is to make a game all by yourself. As I was learning Visual Basic 6 at school, I thought to probably make a game with it. My friends were all like "Wow, that would be super cool!" and there were a lot of ideas on names and gameplay and so on.
That day it was pretty hot outside and it was very boring to just sit around and doing nothing. I decided to choose a game from my collection to play. While searching for a nice title (was probably Grand Theft Auto 4), I noticed a bight yellow box. It was a copy of FPS Creator, the engine we are using as the base for Canalyst.
I thought why not to give it a go, installed it and played around. I installed a few patches and looked at what the engines' community became in the two years I wasn't there. Then I started to make a room just to test, if I can still design a nice looking level. Canalyst was born. In the next three days I wrote a first sketch of the story (which wasn't inspired by Metro 2033 by the way, it was purely accidental but more on that later) and worked on the level. At the 21st of August 2009 I made the first build of the level. Just a little test. For the build numbers I decided to take the system, GSC Game World used for their S.T.A.L.K.E.R. builds, so the first Canalyst build ever had the number "52". If we would make a Canalyst build today, it would have the number "902".
The first test of Canalyst level 1 in build 52 (lightmapping errors as far as you can see :P)
I didn't really want to make Canalyst a one-man-project, so I founded Sector49 Studios. First I worked completely alone, then people like Tim (Doomster), Wray (Bugsy) and Marcel (dxdragon86) saw the game, were interested in it, became insiders and then offered their work for the game and became team members. Those guys absolutely have my full respect and they really do very good work and are extremely helpful. But let's get back to level 1.
And it went on...
... by the next few rooms. A few days after build 52, I made build 61 (30th August 2009), which had a first weapon test and already introduced some kind of tutorial together with arrows guiding the player through the level. Tim became an insider and helped me with setting up the arrows. The second room later was remade a few times. In build 61 the player had to use the right mouse button to pick up the crates to build a little stair to the top of the room. Later I removed that because the physics system of FPSC wasn't really good (it still isn't very good), especially when it comes to dynamic objects colliding with the player. On the screenshot you see a shadow of a window, that I removed later. The player is in a canalization.
The second room of level 1 and the first room with tutorial elements (both from build 61)
I worked on further and in build 86 from the 24th September 2009 there were several more rooms and the first scary scene in the third room, where Tim, again, helped me with setting it up. Also there was a fourth room, but I don't want to show every little bit of the progress with pictures. :)
The nearly final version of the second room and the first shock-moment (from build 86)
I showed pretty much of the progress I made on the game in the German FPS Creator community and soon I realized that the people wanted a demo-version. A few days before the demo was released, the game captured the attention of the awesome composer Fabian from Six5Music. He asked me if I would let him make the soundtrack for the game. I accepted and only a few days later, he had a few really good tracks done. They are used in both, the old and the new demo.
At the 3rd October I had the demo pretty much done. Build 95 was only a testing build to get the last flaws out and build 96 from the 4th October 2009 was the demo-build. It had a complete tutorial and a first shooting scene, which wasn't anything special. But hey, the demo was out and the people loved it! :)
The time after the demo
After the demo-release, I wanted to draw a little bit more attention to the game. I started to work on a trailer showing off the first level. But I didn't just want to show off things, the people already saw in the demo-version. So first I worked on the level a bit more and then made the "level_01" trailer. The trailer was released at the 12th of October 2009. In this time, I made another big room, which actually showed some water, so it looked like a sewer. Build 103 from the 11th October 2009 was the build, the trailer was recorded. In build 118 from the 26th of October 2009, level 1 was done.
The sixth room in level 1 without water (from build 103)
It's been a while...
After the level was finished, I went on and made several other levels, which quality became better and better. Since I wrote the story for the first time, I and Tim had a whole lot of new ideas on how to make it better, more logical, more interesting. This two things made me remake the first level. At the end of 2010 the story was pretty much like it is now, but level 1 like it was back then didn't fit in at all. It had to be remade. So we started a new concept. The first one was pretty good and would have been really awesome, but the engine said "NO." and we had to drop it after about two months of developing it. It was a huge underground city with four "districts". One where the people with the money, or the friends lived and a little promenade at a "sewer-river" with a few shacks for "homeless people". In addition to that we planned to make a district with tiny rooms as apartments for the people without the money to have a bigger room like the one our protagonist is in and a "mechanical district", where people work and the handcar from the new Canalyst demo-version would have been at. We had the first half of the level done, then we ran into memory and optimization problems and had to cut that concept and make another one, but with a smaller level. Build 509 from the 21st of November 2010 was the last build with this version of level 1.
Level 1 in its "new" form (from build 509)
The next (and final) concept of level 1 can be seen in the current demo-version. For me it combines the two criteria of being smaller than the second concept, but actually looking like an underground place where people live, have their little shops and so on. That level is pretty neat. The levels' development was a real pain (and also extremely long - about half a year), but finally we had it completely working and it looked very good, and it had a really cool tutorial and what not. We personally are pretty satisfied with it. Build 533 from the 15th December 2010 shows our first steps in the new level 1.
Level 1 in its very early stages (from build 533)
Before I forget: At the beginning I wrote, that I wanted to write something on Canalyst's and Metro 2033's story. As stated above, it was purely accidental. I'm a huge fan of both, Metro 2033 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and know pretty much everything about the development of both games, but I forgot about Metro 2033 long before I wrote the Canalyst story, as Metro was first shown off 2006.
So yeah, I think, we are at the end of the story of Canalyst level 1. I hope, this gives both players and developers a little overview on how a level in a game is built, what problems there are sometimes when developing a game and how a game idea can start.
Greetings,
Jan Maslov (Sector49 Studios)
