Alpha 1 Phase 1 Update news

Yo yo once again, ModDB! Staying safe and happy? Same here. Sorry to keep quiet for so long, but amidst our safeness and silence we’ve actually been making some good progress across the board! How so? Well, for starters, our team has grown by a few members since the last update. We’ve picked up some new hands here and there (most of which are still attached to their respective owners, don’t worry) and they’ve been super valuable in helping bring our game to fruition.

In addition to that, we’re also on track for our internal deadlines and are very close to hitting an internal milestone that we refer to as “Alpha 1 Phase 1”. That’s mostly just our fancy way of saying that the first batch of important features of Peer Review are close to having at least functional prototypes, and the first batch of missions have gone through a thorough planning stage and are currently in the process of being orangemapped. Alpha 1 Phase 2 will see us doing that to the other half of the planned features and missions. Here’s hoping Phase 2 stays as on track as Phase 1 did! Now, many of you opened this article and saw pretty colors amidst all this text and zoomed to those images instead of actually reading this anyway, so instead of telling you, let’s show you!

Discord & Twitter

We’re cautiously happy to launch the obligatory Official Peer Review Discord Server! God help us all! This is where you can communicate with the team and do all that other fun stuff you do in Discord servers, you know the drill.

In addition to that, we’ve gone ahead and set up a Twitter account. Follow @PSRDigital for miscellaneous tidbits and updates about our project and team members!

3D Art

Fun fact, at this point in time, most of our team’s 3D artists actually didn’t start on PSR as 3D artists, it was just a necessary skill to learn. Lots of progress they’ve made! Come to think of it, most of our team members have to work multiple departments. Anyway, team trivia aside, this has been a pretty busy department. We’ve got weapons, a character, environment art, animation, quite a bit of everything, really.

And yes, animations! Actual animations! Anyone who’s seen our announcement video knows the weapon model animations weren’t exactly... acceptable. Eh, give us a break, me and JifMOD aren’t animators but we needed something. But rejoice, Troop, Greenyred, and Luna Ryuko have been picked up as dedicated animators and man is their work nice.

Level Design

A1P1 saw us focusing on 4 missions : Hazardous Course, Surface Call, Domestic Violence and Code Green. As we mentioned before, these missions all have a healthy amount of planning behind them.

A1P1 was a bit ambitious, so we stole a couple extra hands that belong to Jimmy Lander and Agente P. Welcome to the Level Design team, guys! With a focus on planning and design, our artists haven’t quite tackled all of those missions yet, however; so, we’re gonna hold off on showing a lot of super pretty stuff there. But fear not! We haven’t been idling and still have work to show for it.

Keep in mind, this stuff is just the stuff that we’re allowed to show you right now. There’s a ton more stuff that we’ve been working on behind the scenes that isn’t quite ready for public spotlight just yet-- don’t worry, they will be revealed in due time!

Sound Design/Music

You met Jupiter last update, and since then we’ve kidnapped onboarded a couple more in the audio department. Hydral (who assisted us with a track for Black Mesa: Hazard Course) will be collabing with Jupiter on the game’s Soundtrack, and Sunglae will be picking the oft-overlooked but ever important SFX area to help give Peer Review a unique flavor all up in your ears.

Here’s another track from Jupiter that fills our beam matrices with so much color:

Recruitment

A reimagining is an ambitious undertaking, especially when you’re trying to make something like Half-Life: Decay actually good. For that we’ve got some team expansion to do! Do you have a friend or relative that would make a valuable addition to PSR? Or are you that friend or relative? Either way, if you’ve got some skills or know someone who does that you think might suit our cause, head on over to our application form or ModDB Jobs page and have a look. We’re interested in nearly every position, especially level designers and organic 3D artists. PSR is a friendly, organized team, so if that and the project sound like your thing, send in those applications!

Apply here!

That’s what we’ve got for now! It’s still quite early in development but things are coming along well and we’ll be sure to keep you guys in the know. We’re excited to show off more work later on, and hope you guys are interested and excited. We’ll try not to stay silent for so long next time. See ya!

Love,

PSR Digital <333