Portal: Ratman Stories mod

A little less than a month ago, I announced that I was considering picking up this project again, and that I was going to plan out whether and what I was going to do with it. I've worked on some things in the meantime, mainly drafting out a story and trying to get Hammer working again, and this is what I've come to decide.

First of all: this mod is now officially alive again (insert Still Alive pun here). I'm not overly confident in myself when it comes to keeping projects working, but this is one of my favourite projects amongst those I started, and I'm going to avoid the mistakes I made the first time - most notably, lack of plans - this time. So this is kind of a roadmap for the next steps of development. I'm not talking about deadlines or guesses on how long this will take, because they'd be most likely pretty far off.

Right now, I'm working on finishing the story outline. It's pretty much a screenplay, if you will, and I plan on having that one done from start to finish before I start anything major with Hammer. That is, once I finished the story, I'll have written down the plot, major map elements & storyline places, divided that into chapters, and so on. At the same time, I'm doing (very lousy) sketches (I don't dare say "concept art") to visualise what I have in mind and go along with the draft.

Once I'm done with that, I'll outline the architecture of the maps and start building low-detail versions of them, taking notes along the way to write down what custom assets I'm going to need. This way, I'll have a playable low-detail prototype, at which point I can begin detailing the maps and start worrying about stuff such as custom models, textures or voice acting.

After checking my old files, I've found that there will be close to nothing I can re-use, so this is a complete reboot, so to speak. Therefore, most of the old screenshots and the likes are now outdated. I'll still leave them online, as I hate to delete old stuff, just keep in mind that they no longer represent the progress or status of the mod.

This is about as far as I have planned. For now, I'll focus on finishing the paperwork until I have something I can work with. Just know that I'm alive and kicking again. For the next time, there probably won't be many updates, since I don't want to spoiler you by talking about the storyline, but I'm now un-dead. See ya when I see ya.

Cheers,

HashtagMC