Voice Actors Streams and Alien Posters news - From Earth mod for Half-Life 2

I have been a bit quiet recently, though I have been posting a bit more on our Twitter page.

Still, things have been progressing nicely since we got accepted to Steam Greenlight.

Voice Acting is done

With the last of the dialogue recorded and lipsynced I can now let a out a deep sigh of relief and relax a bit. There might still be some changes as we playtest the game, but we will always have something to fall back on now. Big thanks to all the voice actors, especially for going through the process of learning how to pronounce the alien language!

• Ashley Mangusing as alien Queen
• Avia Alyx as Anthony Yaremov
• Dianna Conley as Kra 32nd / female alien
• Jesse Lowther as alien Commander
• Joseph P. Bracken as male alien
• Phanie Nixon as Zenaida Liu
• Tuomas Kuusniemi as alien advertiser

With that done, I can finish up all the story sections. A lot of the scenes are already in-game, but I was waiting to get all the dialogue finished before completing them. Working on the choreographed scenes is one of the most enjoyable aspects of development. This time I was even able to get the phoneme extractor to work properly thanks to some community made tutorials. It doesn't work 100% of the time - and Faceposer crashes - but I even got it working for some of the alien dialogue.

Alien posters

We are looking for artists interested in doing small contributions for us. Mostly we need to populate the alien world with stuff like posters and logos, something we have had a shortage of in the past. We might need some for the sequences that take place in Earth as well, but we will do this later. If you are interested, check out this link for more information. The link might contains some information that you might consider to be "spoilers".

Level Design Streaming

I did a bit of level design streaming, and I am planning to do a bit more at Twitch.tv. I will probably stream mostly on weekends, with the times being closer to the morning on the American continent.

Hopefully next time I'll be better at articulating my ideas and I won't talk about small holes in brushes for thirty minutes.

What's next?

Making a proper story trailer is something I have been planning to do for a while now, but that has been difficult since most of the levels are still not textured. Some of the final areas are still not in map form either, though most of their gameplay is already planned out. Right now the plan is to finish all that, and then start working on a story trailer - hopefully that will help us get more people interested in our work.

Meanwhile, I have been improving the combat a lot, as well as adding some new elements to the alien language system, making it easier for players to understand. I probably wont be so active writing news post in the coming months, but I am trying to start a habit of being a lot more active on our Twitter page.

On the subject of going indie

Even with the announcement of Source 2, From Earth will probably stay a free game, available for all on Steam. However, if you are interested in hiring me, feel free to contact me. You can see my portfolio here.

Looking for help

If you are interested in applying, you can send me a message on Moddb, Twitter, Facebook, or e-mail me at au-heppa@hlssmod.net.

Sound Designer
We are looking for a talented sound designer to create custom sounds for all the alien and human technology.

Other
We are interested in getting any help we can get, especially world texture creators and prop modelers. We are particularly in need of world texture creators, including creating HDR skybox creatures for the Source Engine. If you are not interested in joining the team for a longer time you can also do smaller, one time contributions.