Half-Life: Enriched - Gonarch's Lair news

Sire, the people demand download links! And they shall receive them.

Today will be all about Gonarch's Lair but before we dive in: there are only a few more days left in the MODDB MOD of the Year 2022 competition. If you appreciate my work, consider voting for Half-Life: Enriched! Many thanks!

With that out of the way, let's talk about the sack on spider legs: Gonarch, also known as the Big Momma. An interesting choice when it comes to creature design. The brilliant book "Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar" goes into some of the story behind the more obscure designs in Half-Life. Valve tasked a young artist with the designs of the Xenian creatures and he came up with some 'interesting' designs that were rather sexual in nature. He did not shy away from the fleshy and phallic. This raised a few eyebrows at first but on the other hand, maybe these designs could freak out pubescent boys (the average gamer audience at the time) more than any regular zombie could. That's why some of designs actually made it into production, including Mr. Friendly, who didn't make the final cut.

Gonarch Lair is quite a short chapter but originally consists of three seperate maps. As I've shown in my previous article, I've sown all parts back together into one map. This took quite a lot of work, as I've completely redone all geometry and details. The triangle terrain make the structures look more natural and organic than before.

Valve had to rush the developement of Half-Life in the final stages to get the game out in time. Gonarch Lair is a good example of this, as the pathing of the boss monster is quite hacky in places. There were finished animations for the Gonarch jumping off the ledges but they were never used because the pathing the monster uses doesn't like to mix well with scripted sequences. Instead, the monster is pushed and pulled along by external forces. It seems Valve ran out of time to fix the code for proper implementation.

This is also the reason why the Gonarch explodes at the end of the battle. The death animation at the end will not actually kill it and the monster will respawn or just lie there and still produce pain noises when being damaged. In the explosion the Gonarch entity is completely removed from the game and replaced by individual gibs. I've always found the explosion a very strange ending and therefore came up with my own replacement for it! Let me know what you think!

I've made some changes to the way the fight works but it will still require some more testing and tweaking to get the balance right. I'm already working on setting up a Gitlab page and Discord channel for a dedicated beta test team to help me with such matters. I'll be getting back on that soon, so if you're interested in helping out then keep an eye on this page!

If you haven't checked it out already; this new build also features an updated version of 'On A Rail' with many tweaks, fixes and full support for detail textures.

Thanks for reading and happy holidays!