What’s been up with The Abyss? [Outdated] news

Hello! I’m Shadow, a programmer on the team and well, we haven’t spoken in a long time, but we feel now is a good time to tell you what has been happening with us, what is going to happen to the mod and what we have done since we last updated this(which is a very, VERY long time).

So, to start off, internally we have been fluctuating on team members who have been actually working on the mod. Now, this doesn’t mean the end of TA, nor does it really mean we will slow down in progress. What this really means is that some members are drifting away, continuing this as a side project. Obviously, this isn’t the only reason why members are fluctuating, as you have probably seen a million times, some members are having family issues. Sometimes, these will last only a short amount of time while they get it sorted, however, sometimes these can cause members to never be heard from again (At least not for a long time anyway). But again we do struggle through these times and always come through them. That is not the only thing creating barriers in our team though; it also comes down to us not having enough people in specific jobs. For example, right now we have no proper modeller working on TA. As you can probably tell, this is a major problem. A little plug in here but if any of you who are reading can model organic stuff like aliens and people please hit us up. So overall, you can see how this is affecting the mod and the team members. Right now there are only three people working on the mod fully. Some members have gone of creating GMod game mode, some are working on separate projects and some are working on a new game done by some of the team working TA. Recently, we all had a discussion talking about whether we should put this project on the shelf and work on something else. This was raised because some members were either bored of working on half-life 2 beta stuff or wanted to work on something original, or some members couldn’t help out in the mod until we had got to a certain point. Now this project is currently in the think tank and is being generated as we speak, however this does not mean we are leaving TA to be abandoned.

Next up, we are very excited to announce that we will be releasing tech demo of the mod. This tech demo will include lots of different scenarios (which may or may not be in the final product) to show off what we have done and what we can do. The three major areas shown off in this tech demo will be City 17, Wasteland/Canal and Air Exchange. These areas will have some maps made to show off atmosphere, combat and other features we have included into TA. Currently, City 17 is the most complete out of the three different areas. This tech demo will hopefully come out before the start of September. However, we would like your opinion on whether you would want us to release this tech demo on time, but some features might have not been completed. Or would you rather us complete the tech demo fully and possibly miss the start of September date? It will help us deal with how much time we allocate to different parts. Not only that but once we release this tech demo we will hopefully be doing weekly/monthly updates which may include alpha parts of TA. For testing we will be looking for private play testers. As you can probably tell, we are not looking for that at the moment.

Currently, we have been working on a mixture of things, such as npcs, maps, weapons and other nice features. Out of the maps we have been working on both the normal story of TA and also the tech demo. I don’t want to say too much, not to spoil the tech demo but I will say this, we have lots of interesting things to show off and we all hope you are excited for this.

Anyway this was probably the biggest post we will ever do, so enjoy this nice block of text for now! Hopefully we will have some screenshots and videos to show off what we have done but we still need to get that all sorted out. So farewell and see you next time! o/