Dead of Night mod for Half-Life 2

Our Ideas

Vampires
Vampires use claws, and special abilities to eliminate slayers. Vampires can leap forward (much like long jump) to get a valuable advantage over slayers’ movement. Some being quicker than others, Vampires are able to develop their own technique of dodging until being close enough to kill a slayer. After killing a slayer Vampires can feed off their bodies to regain health. Without carefully planning their attack, vampires stand no chance going solo against slayers.

Slayers
Slayers use both long ranged and melee attacks to take down vampires. Once a vampire is taken down, the slayer must then stab it in the heart using his or her wooden stake. If the slayer is unsuccessful in stabbing the vampires heart, the vampire can get back up with a little less than half health and run away to feed on bodies or re-plan their attack. Slayers stand no chance trying to be heroic or their own one man army.

It’s key for players to use their environment to their advantage. For example, a vampire uses darkness to disguise itself from slayers, and to better plan its attack. Likewise, a slayer can turn on certain lights, break certain windows, or find ways to improve their chosen area. Using the environment leaves it up to the player to decide how their fight will happen, and brings a sense of dynamics to the game play.

We'd like to take advantage of the new OrangeBox engine's lighting. Things like motionblur and dynamic lighting will only improve the scary atmosphere and realistic gameplay we originally had planned for the mod. We beleive that with it's new lighting, it will allow vampires to have the choice of either playing a fast-leaping style of gameplay, or a sneaky and silent style.

The teams will be class based. Each having [x] amount of classes, will leave it up to the player to fight with their own chosen weapons. Each slayer class will have character, and weapons to go with that character. Similarly, vampires will have individual classes… but special abilities setting them apart.

TimeFrame
Modern, but an assortment of weapons. We're not looking at laser-beams or lightsabers, but things from automatics to single shot rifles. Depending on the style of the character, the weapons are to follow.

Weapons of choice:
Going with a traditional weapon list, we planned to have older weapons such as magnums, other pistols, old-style shotguns and crossbows. Like mentioned above, weapons will not be all old, as we'd like things to be varied across the mod

Feeding:
We’re a little unsure about how we’re going to do the feeding system. Seeing as the Source engine positions ragdolls client side, it would look a bit awkward to see one player feeding off mid-air, while they themselves see a body. This leaves us unsure about how we want to pursue the feeding system. We’ve discussed making the rag dolls server-side so everybody sees them in the same place, but we’re afraid the server would end up lagging itself to pieces. We also discussed removing ragdolls and doing death animations, instead, but that might take away from the Source feel and also take away some of the fun of killing.

Pistol & Flashlight
A pistol and flashlight combo will be the only way to search for vampires in the dark. Rifles, shotguns, or other weapons will not have flashlights enabled. This adds to the creepiness of the mod.

Our Team

Katasdf (Project Leader, Mapper, Web and Graphic Development)
Cyper (Skinner, Mapper)
MbChrono (Programmer)
Rottenbeard (Sound artist, Animator)
Soccerdude (Programmer)
Leon (Concept Artist, Mapper, Organic Skinner)
Redka (Weapon Modeler)
Skalpa (Animator)
Dax (Character Modeler)

What We Need

1. Coders

Join Us

Looking to join the team? Send in an application at our: Forums

What we have done:

Coding:

1. Most guns have been implemented (without proper models).
2. Team play is done, along with GUIs for choosing teams and classes.
3. Iron Sights
4. Interface changes: Heartbeating health —gets quicker as your health gets lower.

Mapping:

1. don_school (about 45%)
2. don_asylum (about 60%)

Modeling:

1. Colt 1911
2. Stake and Cross
3. Stake
4. Shotgun
5. Crossbow

On a final note, hopefully with the help of the community, we can create a mod that could considered an instant classic (alike it's predecessor), and be played for quite a while to come.

- Dead of Night team.