So after nearly a year following my previous mods death, I decided to use the skill I gained from that en-devour to tackle something a bit smaller. Going down from a mod of about 8 hours with lots of coding, down to a chapter where it's all basically laid out for me is definitely proving to be easier on the headaches.
Office Complex is going to simply be a recreation of one of my favorite chapter of Half-Life. The very one the mod gets it's name from. Much like pretty much everyone who bought it, I was pretty disappointed in Valve for simply porting Half-Life to the Source engine, doing practically nothing more to improve it. Low res textures, low poly models, very small maps, that kind of stuff. Me, having lots of free time and at least mediocre skill in hammer and texture creation, I one day decided I'd go ahead and remake some parts of it. The main lobby, the dam area, and the beginning of Apprehension were some of the parts I started with, but I never got around to finishing them, deleting them as I lost free time.
Now that I've so much more free time now, I figured, "Hey, I like mapping, I'm all out of feasible story ideas, and Black Mesa just looks so cool, but dammit, who knows when I'll be playing it!" So much like a daring child who's just seen Jackass for the first time, I set out to try it myself.
First and foremost, I wish to establish that I do not feel like I can live up to Black Mesa's standards. I just can't do it. I've 3 years experience, they've probably almost a decade. My goal is simply to create... a demo of sorts, showing the new life that can be breathed into Half-Life even through an amateur's skill. I don't want to attempt to compete with Black Mesa, or anything dumb like that; I just want to have a project of my own, that I can do, and people will enjoy, along with making Half-Life look pretty again.
Words of wisdom.