Hi, Stefan again.
This is my third attempt at writing this post. The previous ones all ended up with me rambling for hundreds of words about unrelated nonsense, so I'll try to keep it tight.
Getting all of the disappointment out of the way at the start: There won't be much new to look at. We worked on a lot of story-heavy stuff, which we don't want to show prematurely, so this blog will be split into talking about what we can and can't show. Let's start with...
The things we can't show
Making a mod is easy until it isn't. For most of this mod's development I just worked on random areas. Then around 2019 we actually properly planned out the game's structure and story. Since then, most work has gone into creating the test chambers and we left story pieces for later. Was this done because we deem these areas to be less important? No, no we were just all way too scared to work on this stuff.
Well, now that most chambers are done, we have to finally get the story moments in. Setpieces, character models, vistas, interactive stuff... it's a lot of work and since it's all very story heavy, we don't want to share any of it until the game is out.
Just know that we've been working on some of the largest pieces of content we have ever made. The maps are gigantic and the amount of map-specific custom assets exceeds any other map
What we also worked on
When we weren't working on story scenes, we've also been going through old maps to improve gameplay, visuals and sound. After we published a video showcasing a pneumatic diversity vent chamber built out of wood, we got some feedback about the map's visuals. While passable, it didn't really look as great as the others, which were much more spectacular in their presentation. Graphics aren't the only thing that matters in a mod, but we decided it was worth the effort to do another final art pass on the map.
And just for kicks here's another map. It was first created all the way back in 2018 and is one of the oldest remaining chambers in the mod. Most chambers from that era hit the cutting room floor but this one survived. We've since then upgraded the map to use cascaded shadow map lighting, added new music, improved its gameplay and visuals
2022:
2018:
Yep, that's all for today. I'm sorry we can't share much. We're working on a lot of new content we're excited to share, but that's for another time.
See you
Stefan
the 2018 screenshot still looks great even before it got the makeover, that shows how great the mapping is and it’s why this is the mod i’m looking forward to most, can’t wait to see the setpieces at release!
It can't exactly take too long to do story related content. Can it?
It takes way more time to create story scenes than the average chamber. I explained it in the post, but there are so many different disciplines that need to come together. Lines need to be written, voice must be recorded, the audio needs to be mastered and ported into source where subtitles and soundscript are created. Then you make scenes, animate characters and have to add map logic to make it all work inside the level. Getting a single line of animated dialogue into the game can take around 30 minutes depending on its length. If you extrapolate that to a game of this size, it's a major effort.
On top of that, world animation, custom models and music needs to be created. We're doing our best to make the environment feel alive and interactive. One recent endevor we took part in are world-animations like collapsing environments. It's something valve did a lot since hl2ep2 and especially Portal 2 and we're also trying to make custom cinematic physics scenes.
I never like calling maps "story maps" or "puzzle maps" since in Portal: Revolution they're more mixed up and we have a lot of puzzles to break up story-heavy maps, but still, adding those story scenes takes a lot of time and is very important to us to get right. We don't treat story as an add-on to solving puzzles. It's a major part of the mod.
Hope that explains it better than the original post.
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When will this release?
When it's done
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