Like any major mod project, the decision on what ideas to run with and those ideas to scrap is a tough but critical one. You always want to have rich feature content but during development it will become apparent which elements are realistic to complete and which elements are not realistic. Those that aren't realistic, either from a resource or complexity point of view, need to be excised from the mod and scrapped, or at least postponed until after you get past subsequent milestones. That was the decision I had to make this past week with Crates and Barrels.
Originally, City 17 Defender was the first game mode I worked on for this mod. As other games came into the fold, City 17 Defender clearly was the most complex and ambitious one of all. It required a lot of custom programming time in comparison to Headcrab Invaders and Pwn-the-tool, for example, so rather than get bogged down in finishing it and drastically delaying the Beta release, I decided to remove it for the time being, with the plan of incorporating it after the Beta release.
In it's stead, however, I have added two much simpler but still fun game modes. The first is the classic Breakout. As always, you control a paddle to deflect a ball into a bunch of bricks. In this case, the paddle is a barrel, the ball is a watermelon, and the bricks are crates. But to spice it up a bit, I have included several powerups which enhance the action. If you ever played the old arcade classic Arkanoid, then you will recognize many of these. The powerups are obtained by breaking item crates which periodically appear in the game arena. The powerups include longer paddle, multiple balls, enlarged balls, and my favorite - guns akimbo, which gives you dual shotguns to rapidly destroy the crates. Rollermines appear occasionally as well, and they will destroy your paddle if you happen to collide with them.
The second game is Cratetris, which is based on Tetris but uses crates (of course!) to compose the tetrads. It works just like all the other clones, but I am tinkering with a few twists that should make it more challenging.
With all of these changes, the timeframe for the Beta release is still on target for next month (i.e. March). Now that I have decided to freeze the content for these six games I can focus on the final details and debugging and get this thing out there.
You've got some really neat gamemodes right there! Keep the good work!