Guard Duty (Blue Shift: Source) mod for Half-Life 2

29 comments by MR.sugar on Feb 16th, 2013

It's been a while since our last news post, so we decided to report back with something small to give you heads up what we are up to.

At first, you will be happy to hear that we are alive. Cool, isn't it? We have been progressing quite smoothly for some time already.

The name of the article says it all. The main point of this article is to get you hyped a little bit, because we have been working on some very exciting stuff lately. This year, we will focus on Greenlight matters. Valve gave us this great opportunity to take advantage of Steam and more! If we pass through the voting phase and "get greenlighted", it will provide us even more opportunities to push our skills, Source and everything to it's limits. That means that both, Operation Black Mesa and Guard Duty are doing to be even better than we expected. Well, as long as we successfuly pass through the whole process ;).

It will be very long process. Hell, we have to get two mods through this thing! And we can't do it without your support obviously!

We imagine the whole Greenlight campaign will be running throughout the year till it gets to the grand finale, so we hope you will give us the needed support during this whole process.

Hopefully, you will get the opportunity to give us a vote quite soon. We will let you know, when we put our mods on Greenlight, so stay tuned!

Black Mesa content

This news post article may be a good opportunity to make things about the Black Mesa content clear. A lot of people keep asking us to port our mods over to Black Mesa and take an advantage of the content Black Mesa may offer.
Sadly, this is not possible and there are some serious reason why. At first, when we started the projects, one of our goals were to build a portfolio. A lot of us is looking into making the way into the industry and that means the more content we create on our own, the better. We hope you will understand it.The important is also the fact that we have spent bunch of years on the content. And now, we would simply have to throw it away. Can you imagine what this could do to the motivation of our fellow team members? Don't take it that we are selfish and think about ourselves only. There are some other reasons.

  

I think it's fair to say, that porting over to BM may sound like it will put off some weight from our shoulders and make things faster and easier. This, however, is not true.Using Black Mesa could restrict us quite a lot and make implementation of some needed features harder, especialy coding wise. This apply mainly to Operation Black Mesa, but also on some planned features for Guard Duty (It will not feel like a mappack and we plan to bring something fresh there).
It's also important to mention that we have some epic plans for multiplayer, that will be worth of a stand-alone product in the end. It will offer everything you loved about the original game, but will also bring in some new features, content and game modes. Our plans couldn't be fullfiled under the Black Mesa mod. We don't want to talk about the multiplayer yet though, but you will be excited about it when we start speaking of it one day!

Being completely independed project will also bring many other exciting advantages, especially if we pass through the Greenlight process. You sure will notice it one day, what we are talking about ;).

MEDIA and Facebook

No doubts you noticed some new media was added to Moddb gallery. It's definitely nothing new and these pictures are around for a while already, but they had been Facebook exclusive until now. We decided to make them non-exclusive to FB for a simple reason. We would like to motivate you joining our Facebook page. There will be some more exclusive things in the future (and even know, you still can find some exclusive tid bits there) and we also love to be in touch with all of you through many different ways, not only the forum and Moddb!

HELP WANTED

The wall of text is coming to it's end finaly. The last thing we should point out that we are looking for some talented and great persons who would love to contribute to the projects. Both projects are fairly big and the more people help us, the faster we progress. So if you have some skills, spare time and good attitude, why not join us? I'm sure you will enjoy staying on our team, which is full of rly cool people!

We are looking for everything ranging from concept artists to someone, who is good with Source particle editor! The only positions not available at the moment are composers and voice actors... And betatesters!
How to apply? It's very easy, trust us! You send us an E-mail (at applications@tripminestudios.com) or simply visit the application section on the forum. Whatever way you choose, make sure you provide us with some info about you, your skills and some examples of your previous works!

Final words

Thanks for your support throught the whole time, it's amazing that a lot of you still support us and we honestly hope, even more people will notice us and join the community. Stay tuned for the Greenlight campaign, it's going to be something big. Along with news, media, we will also launch long-awaited website for Tripmine studios and... something more. Just wait and see!