Dead Before Dawn - Sooner Than You Think news

Dead Before Dawn, the replica of the Crossroads Mall from the movie Dawn of the Dead (2004) is coming to Left 4 Dead. The DBD team has been working tirelessly on the campaign and has vowed not to stop until the campaign is ready for release. Previously, we stated that the estimated release date will be the 1th of July (lol). At the time of this announcement, Valve was said to release the full SDK in a week's time. That didn't happen and we were forced to postpone the release date, BUT, Valve has now confirmed that next week we will have our dirty paws on the full version of the SDK and we're ready for it. I would like to use this opportunity to give you guys a rundown of what's been happening the past few months. So let's get crackin'!

Ok as you all (should) know, the Crossroads Mall map was originally made for the Half-Life 2 Mod, No More Room in Hell. Which is back into production and for the past 8 weeks, we've had regular updates from the mod team and they are hard at work. We cover all the news from No More Room in Hell on our site as well. (Since it's Zombie related).

Myself and Darth_Brush are project lead on Dead Before Dawn (darth_brush being the godly mapper and I use my super powers in public relations and publicity to promote the campaign and various other tasks concerned to the campaign).

Since about 3 months ago, we took a leap of faith and invited certain community members to join us in creating this mod (Yes, I said it. MOD.) As it is not a FULL mod, it is a mod in the true sense of the word. Modification.

We have added to the team: a pro scripter/coder. His name is pshycokilla. He's creating all the events in the game, from triggers to the multiple crescendos and the gauntlets (Yes, we didnt call them guantlets until Valve did, but we had them in there for a while now). These triggers and other scripts in the campaign, ensure that you need to play the campaign at least 16 times before you have played every possible event in the campaign.

Then we have CosmicD, the god of Muzak who's creating custom, self-made music scenes for the campaign. One which I am very fond of is the part where the players will see the mall for the first time in "real life". This made the hairs on my neck stand on end. It was truly fantastic. Every event, crescendo and gauntlet has its own music cue/clip that will definately break away from the default music from Left 4 Dead and you guys are gonna LOVE it!

Our next talented artist is 3DSteve. 3DSteve is making more custom models and he's also working is ass off on something very special for the campaign that you guys will LOVE!!! (Think exit vehicle) 3DSteve is very talented and I wish I could show you some screenies but that would give the surprise away completely!

Miobeeno has a professional sound studio and he's a professional voice actor. He has done voice overs for many commercials and movie trialers (he sounds just like that dude from ALL the movie trailers) and he's working on the voice recording of another "player" in the campaign. This player is a big surprise to the campaign and we will not give out any more info on this matter as we feel it plays such a big role in the campaign that it would spoil a lot.

Last, but not least, is Shinobi. Shinobi is also a pro mapper and he's working on adding more scenes from the movie to the campaign. Most of you who've seen the videos we posted, will now that there is one building in particular (other than the mall of course) that is needed in this campaign. Well, we have that building now.

There you go, this is what we've been doing the last few months. Dead Before Dawn is not a dead project. It's gonna kick Valve's maps off the map and that's a promise.

When we release it, we will release it not as a final version, but as a beta of sorts. We all know that there are always so many things you might want to see changed, prefected, added etc. So that's what we'll be doing when we release it: Gather feedback from the community.

Thank you guys for your ongoing support and thank you for being patient. We are still waiting for the full SDK because the beta is just filled with errors and stuff that don't work. We will be releasing it for Left 4 Dead 1 and we might do the same for Left 4 Dead 2 depeding the outcome of Valve's decision on making it DLC or not.

Enjoy the screenshots! Click on any image to view the full size.