Happy New Year!
These last 365 days of the year went by so fast with fun and excitement achieving our goals as a team,
We can all say it has been a wonderful year so far for our development of Operation Black Mesa and Guard Duty.
It´s time for a new year and we believe this time, we will make this coming year even better than the previous.
There are new adventures ahead, memories to create and more media releases to come.
So lets take the first steps into 2019 by.... looking back a bit :).
________
MOTY 2018
17th round of MOTY awards is over and thanks to your endless dedication, we made it. We cannot thank you enough for getting us yet another "Honorable mention" in MOTY 2018. Since we already won in the category "upcoming mods" in 2013, we can only receive this honorable mention. It is still very appreciated and you can be sure that it means a lot for us. So, thank you for that and congratilations to other competitors in MOTY 2018.
________
Dev.Blog Summary
Throughout the year, other than our normal media release, several interesting dev blogs were released. In case you missed them, here's a recap of them:
A Little party never killed nobody
If you read our previous Blog Summary, you already probably know about this never ending party with DJ "EGG". If you had left the party, maybe it´s time to come back again as there are several new posts from the past few months 
________
Level Design with professor EGG
DJ-ing is EGG´s part-time job only. And he is ready to show you how can a big party boy be a good teacher. This dev.blog will give you an insight into some aspects of level design, described shortly, coherently and accompanied by visual examples.
________
Gargantua Dev.Blog
On top of that, here we are with a new Dev.blog. This time around, we will reveal more about the
process of character re-creation. Our concept artist, Harry Willson will let you get into his head by
sharing his vision "thoughts" about Gargantua design.
________
Some extra media
And to close this very first news post of 2019, we would like to share some more work with you. Our level designers, 3D artists, animators and sound engineers would like to show you these goodies. We hope you enjoy them. Be sure you leave your comment about what you think about this, as we are always looking for feedback.
New in-game weapons presentation
We want to get weapons right. That is not an easy task and even some modern FPS games cannot get the feeling right. Everything is important, ranging from the model, animations to sounds. Everything together must make you "feel the weapon" and shooting them must bring you a hell lot of satisfaction! Here is a short video showcasing our progress in this department.
Captive Freight in-game (Guard Duty)
All this is wonderful!
Hey, team: thank you for doing HL bigger! This comunity is amazing...I love mods, ModDB, and now, I love you too, Stay strong FREEMEN
excellent
freaking beutiful
Sick!
Great looking gun models and animations, awesome work!
One point though:
The grenade and wall-mine explosions look awful, the fireball is way too large and spreads awkwardly slow, making the grenade look more like a glorified hairspray bomb.
For reference: Youtu.be
The explosion is very small, burns up instantly and therefore only visible for around one frame of the video. Shrapnel and shockwave do all the rest, kicking up dust, hitting stuff and pulling smoke trails.
Meanwhile, your explosion lasts around 3 to 4 frames, this takes away from the explosive, shocking effect. The screen shake reminds me more of an earthquake than a sharp grenade explosion.
Also not enough shrapnel hitting nearby walls and kicking up dust and pieces of the surroundings, lots of missed opportunities considering the quality of the rest of your work.
tl;dr Guns are great and impactful, grenade explosions are dull and anti-climatic. Typical video gamey fireball grenade explosion, bleh...
Your explosions look really weird,
also your rifle just sounds like a pistol.
Great work generally though :)
I am so happy that this is living up to BMS. Everything looks perfect.
Everything looks great but those weapons look ludicrous. Not only are the sounds and models perfect but those animations are to die for!
Definitely a good way to end the old year!
-Renegadist
My only criticism is to the first pistol's after shoot smoke... Way too obvious and distracting. I would tone down a lot both the thickness and the length of the wisps of smoke.
Nice.
Nice dedication for weapons. AR fire sound should be louder, right now it feels underwhelming compared to both handguns.
These gun animations and sounds are really nice