The DEMO is out!
This is the demo for Redridge. It's a little rough around the edges, but I hope you'll enjoy and bear with me.
This is the 3rd level of the game, and the first for chapter 2: "New in Town".
After being rescued from his cabin by officer Davis, the player and Davis must find their way to the radio station in the junk yard in order to use the HAM radio in an attempt to call for help. All forms of communication are down due to the supernatural interference, the roads and bridges are destroyed, and the only hope is to boost the signal of the ham radio using a relay. It's likely to be a fruitless endeavor,
but it's worth a shot!
Good luck!
-Half-Rats
Go and get it, it's right here! I mean, right up there ^.
Awesome! Downloading now! 😺
Well, it's everything I came to expect at this point, for better and for worse. The level's absolutely dripping with atmosphere, the design of monsters is great (I liked the imp replacement for vortigaunt in particular) and the general level-design is quite nice. Also, whoever voiced the Cop did a great job. Redridge is just as charming as Eminence is, so I'll wait patiently for thee release.
Now for some issues that I've stumbled upon:
1) Initially I began to play on Hard, but quickly dropped to Medium. Not only enemies are bullet sponges as per usual, but erratic movement and twitching animations make them further resistant to player's damage output. Considering additional work that was done on the enemies (the little girl teddybear is a particularly interesting addition and I'd like to see it mixed in with the other foes on the roster in some close-quarter situations), it's a shame to see them being afflicted wit the same HL bane of being too tanky on Hard.
2) It's the same problem as it was in previous titles that rears its head again: overly long pick-up noises for healing items. It gets especially bad when there are few of them bunched-up together.
3) Some enemy corpses disappear and some stay as they were. This seem to be independent of their type, so I can only assume that this inconsistency is introduced during mapping.
4) The Cop seems to behave erratically, likely due to enemies out of reach (this most noticeable during the ambush in front of multiple-storey building).
5) There are some places where you can circumvent the intended path across the chasms. Firstly, there's a grassy ledge of to the side of boarded-up house (on your right as you progress through the level) near the second chasm: you can easily jump there and from there - off to the other side. Then there are leftover bricks in the ruined building across the third chasm. Those closer to the edge will break, dropping the character to his death, but you can vault onto the higher ones from the metal sheet blocking the nearby door. The first isn't that much of a problem, considering you need to open the way for the Cop, but the second will allow to skip the second floor of the building and the arms store.
6) Doors into the Men and Women bathrooms don't make a "locked" sound. That's all.
7) Recoilless rifle in the ambush part (or whatever that thing is) is unwieldy and prone to making the player character stuck both with the barrel moving and on the legs of the gun.
8) Door in the house with the radio just slides to the side alongside with the chunk of the wall. Not sure if intended, considering it's somewhat of a secret away from intended path.
9) Redridge Chronicles while a nice way to dump exposition, interfere with stocking on ammo, are too bunched up to easily pick which one you'd like to read and are not recognisible as interactable pieces of scenery. I'd suggest plastering them on the walls, so that each piece of magazine would have its own wall. It'll simplify the process, IMO.
10) The impact sound of the wooden objects is the same as the breakable ones in the original game. Unless you have no wooden breakables in your game, I'd highly recommend changing it to something else. The metal box in the arms store is identical to the others (aside from sound) despite being breakable. While it might be part of a secret to get SMG early, the box being also moveable is a bit too much of a stretch against the gameplay language of the original game and, likely, the mod.
Devan Miller did the voice acting for Officer Davis!
Yeah, Im working on fixing those issues. Regarding the AR, thats why it was a secret. I thought no one would try to move the large ammo crates because they should have been thought to be immovable.
Also, the enemies being bullet sponges is odd, given that im using vanilla weapon code and vanilla monster code.
Works fine,this is a cool project.Kudos.
Just tested it. Nice demo, but just a few things
1. Make the blue key more noticeable. Took me a while to notice it.
2. Probably reduce the damage of the police in the building. It does very high damage.
3. I can't find any revolver or SMG
4. The part where you need to jump platforming to cross the second blood river is probably too hard for some people
There's no part where you have to jump. Your only goal is to not fall in. The only platforming is when you need to jump on the crates. Not sure why the keys are so hard for people to find, theres literally like only two possible place's it could be, and it's sitting right on the desk where a key would normally be placed...however, ill add a desk lamp or somethimg.
Yeah that would help. Since it's very dark there.
Remember, you DO have a flashlight. You can use it by pressing "F". If you see a dark area, you can use your flashlight to illuminate it. Additionally, you can use your mouse to look around the room to find things of interest.
Thank you sir!
It was a nice demo. There are a few problems with it though, some of them quite annoying. They’re very much alike what made me dislike Parasomnia, so I’m surprised to still find them here. Regardless of that, here is what I was able to find:
Problems (ordered by severity):
1) I also started in hard, but the animations are so twitchy / stuttering / jerky (not sure what the correct word is) and it’s almost impossible to aim correctly. I quickly reverted back to medium. I don’t recall having this problem in HL, so it sounds like it’s something introduced by the mod’s code or models.
2) Please, stop making readable material forcefully and unexpectedly appear on the player’s screen. The player should press the Use key for that. They should also be able to recognise readable material from either a specific model, or a sprite on top of a sheet of paper. It would also be best, but less important, to allow the player to stop reading when they want to, instead of having to wait for the time limit to be over. This might need custom code.
3) Still do not enjoy the "munching" sound. It is passable by itself, but when it plays several times in a row it is not enjoyable, and this happened a few times throughout the short demo. As mentioned elsewhere, I suggest making the sound shorter, and maybe more abstract.
4) Keys should use custom models. They’re hard to find as they are, and by making them brushes their design tells the player they’re just part of the setting, much like brush bottles are.
5) When a wood panel is used to lock a door, it should either break or not be wood. The players must get what they expect in that regard.
6) "Trees" look horrible. I know this is Goldsource, and I found the demo’s overall mapping looked great and did well at creating an atmosphere, but something can be done about those trees. You could maybe put them on a slope to make them further away, and add several layers of "solid" transparent textures of trees.
7) It seemed like the cop’s dialog was unskippable at the very beginning. Might have been a bug that wasn’t the mod’s fault though. But if it wasn’t a bug, I’d strongly advocate against such practices. There is a variety of good reasons for that, the main one being replayability.
8) At the very beginning, I think there is an autosave on the small "bridge" or near it, which tends to save the game in the middle of a fight, which is a bad thing.
9) Might not be permanent, but I think the monster sounds taken from HL are too recognisable.
10) Locked doors should open by pressing the "Use" key on the lock too!
11) Somewhere near the car station, the cop will enter a cycle where he repeatedly attempts to run and then stops, without leaving his spot. When I enter the "Shell" building and kill the zombie inside, he stops. After that, he refused to move anywhere, so I had to leave without him. He finally came back to me, which I think was when I encountered another enemy. Worth noting that the first part of this problem also happened with the small "wild boar", or whatever it is, in the demo. Can send you a screenshot if needed.
12) I sometimes hear exhaling sounds. I don’t know why he does that, and what it means.
13) Cars bleed.
14) I think the gunshot sounds are new. They’re really nice, but too loud.
15) The electrified bridge looks like it’s made of wood. It shouldn’t.
16) It’s possible to jump over a fence using the broken sandbags, which traps the player inside.
17) Already mentioned, but there is a door that opens sideways with a part of the wall.
18) The vent duct that breaks should maybe be opaque, as it lets light through which allows the player to predict it will break.
19) Make extinguishers breakable?
20) Corpses inside the room with the breaking vent duct can prevent moving the boxes.
20) I think there is no point and that it isn’t fun to make that long thin piece of wood that breaks under the player’s feet. Realistic physics is not what you usually expect from a Goldsource game where you’re used to run on one-unit thick walls.
21) Why do I need the cop to open the gate?
22) One of the white car models is passable.
Good things:
1) Most models look very nice, except for the female body who just looks okay.
2) I really like open combats in the city.
3) The city looks really nice, apart from the trees.
4) It’s nice to have the ability to restore power. Although I think the cop should be clever enough to avoid taking it when the power is on.
Question: Is there a key binding to use a health kit? At some point I was getting the "munching" sound several times in a row, and it seemed like it was caused by me pressing "R". However, I didn’t see any such binding in the settings.
No keybinding. Thebsounds just stack. Shepard has fixed this since it being reported.