Decadence Mod for Half-Life 2 State of Decadence – Part one: The Capture System news

As some of you might already know, the team behind Decadence is also friends with each other in the real world, and we’re all studying game development at the University of Skövde. This allows us to involve Decadence in our university work for school credits. So now when the summer is over, the whole team has gathered once again to work full time on the mod as part of a university course.

The most important news of all, and something the team is really proud of, is that Decadence is fully working. All important features are implemented and working. Of course, there’s still some tweaking to be done and hours of testing still left, but it’s really nice to see the mod in a fully working condition. This has, however, some negative impacts on the development; a game test can easily last for three hours and everyone is enjoying the mod enough to stop working (which is one of our favorite pass times otherwise). However, there’s still programming work left to be done, so our dear programmer can’t take a break just yet! Neither can the art department, which is playing catch up to the programming at this point.

The topic of this news post will be the capture system. The capture system for Decadence is one of the key gameplay features and something we’re really happy about.

Every map in Decadence is divided into three smaller levels or arenas as we like to call them. The neutral arena is where the match starts out in, with two base arenas belonging to each of the teams. Each team fights over control of the water node in each arena of the map and when a water node has been taken over, the game moves on to the adjacent arena in favor of the winning team. The match will go back and forth like a tug-of-war until one team has captured the water node in the enemy’s base arena.

The capture system in place to make this work has been tested since day one, and we’re really happy with the system we got right now. Here’s the basic run down of how the system is in-game right how:

To capture a water node, a team member needs to be in proximity of a water node console which is located close to the actual water node. The speed of the capture will increase if you’re two players in the capture zone at the same time. The console has a screen displaying two progress bars, one bar for each team representing how close they are to capturing the water node. However, if an enemy moves into the capturing zone, the capture will stop until the enemy retreats or is killed. If you manage to get yourself killed in the middle of a capture, the amount of time you spent in the capture zone will be saved into something we call a bucket. The bucket saves 80% of the time you managed to stay in the capture zone without getting interrupted, so when your team returns to the capture zone after getting killed, you will almost start where you left off.

What’s more, there’s an additional bucket in the base arenas called a permanent bucket. As the name suggests this bucket saves 90% of the time captured into a permanent bucket, which means you could lose the arena and but when you return, there’s still something in the bucket waiting for you so you don’t have to start over from scratch.

If you manage to capture the last water node in the enemy’s base arena, you win the match!

And as an extra treat, here’s a screenshot of how it looks in-game. The dark colors represent old capture times while the light colors show you where you are right now.

For more information, visit www.decadencemod.com