Anamorphosis mod for Alien Swarm

0 comments by vanSulli on Feb 7th, 2013

What is Anamorphosis?

This game is the spiritual successor of the now-defunct House of Kernaghan. I began anew in January as an Independent Study Project for college; the focus was on creating a prototype for dynamically-generating music. Source, unfortunately, was not the best first choice for a mod of this type. In the process of getting this far, I had to make some rather significant modifications to the base code:

• Deferred Lighting and Rendering: For this, I used Biohazard's Alien Swarm Deferred mod, so there wasn't a huge amount of coding effort on my part.

• Dynamic Music: The Source Engine has had a way to use scripts to drive dynamic music ever since Left 4 Dead. However, unless you're choreographing hordes of zombies, that music is of no use to a modder and certainly isn't very extensible for this sort of thing. Therefore, I had to write my own. To match my preferences, I made it work better in Hammer to allow better integration into the maps rather than having to use scripts that don't necessarily have anything to do with what's going on in the final level.
• Jury-Rigged Streaming Content and Level Loading: Its very difficult to immerse yourself in a game when you are interrupted periodically with a freezing of images and sound with nothing but a little 'loading' sign to placate yourself with.

I based my soundtrack off of a previous composition of mine [listen here].  Currently, the mod is well on track and the primary focus is on mapping out more of the already-planned spaces and choreographic music to follow all of the possible actions that the player might end up doing in those spaces.

I've had fun making all of the game so far; I'm excited to see what people will think once its finished and they finally play it.