Half-Life: Top Down is a gameplay mod for Half-Life 1 that aims to make the entire game playable as a top-down shooter. Think Hotline Miami or Enter the Gungeon, but with the levels, mechanics, and gunplay of Half-Life. The original inspiration came from the game Quarter Fraction, which I recommend you check out if you like this idea.
How does it work?
Obviously Half-Life was never designed to work well as a top-down shooter. To alleviate most of the issues, there are two main "modes" that can be changed in the advanced tab of the options menu.
One simply places the camera a fixed height above the player. This is similar to most top-down games, but it makes the void visible and the player can be hidden by a low ceiling.
The second mode tries to keep the camera in-bounds, so it never sees the void and has a clear line of sight to the player. However, it makes the camera get really close when the ceiling is low. Also, the game's more detailed ceilings can cause some annoying camera movement.
There are a few other options that are explained in the readme, and other adjustments to make the game more playable. Auto-aim has been tweaked to be more generous to account for not having vertical aiming. The angles for using objects has increased so you don't have to look directly at them.
With that said, I'm not sure yet if the entire game is playable like this. If you feel like trying, let me know if you hit a roadblock, or if you have any suggestions for how I can improve this.
And if you don't feel like downloading but are curious, here's a quick gameplay showcase:
Enjoy!
Very interesting! If only these more complex mods could work on the Dreamcast version we could make some seriously amazing homebrew! At least we got They Hunger and Paranoia so we got some classics for sure.
This is just a masterpiece. I can't believe you created the most beautiful game Half-Life Top-Down.