Some info on new additions to the mod news - Abandon: The Town mod for Half-Life 2: Episode Two

So for a long time during this mod's development, one of the bigger issues I've had is with the lack of variety with standard enemies. Aside from combine soldiers and hunters, there's not a whole lot you can mix in as a regular enemy that works with them. So after avoiding programming for a long time, I finally looked into making my own enemies, and here are some of the results:

In the interest of full disclosure, all credit for the models goes to Deviant Pictures who made this dope pack of Metrpolice variants: Youtube.com

So let's get into the details. The first enemy shown is what I've simply called the "Striker", a faster version of the standard combine soldier who can make high jumps, allowing me to mix in a bit more situational variety where the player has to worry about more enemies coming from odd angles that aren't the hunter. The animations might not totally be finished, right now it's a mix of the jump from the cut combine assassin and the combine's normal landing animation. No guarantees that I can make it look better but hey at least it works.

The second enemy shown is the Engineer, a soldier who can deploy manhacks. Unlike Metrocops, he can spawn an unlimited amount of manhacks, however there is a limit of 2 that can be deployed at a time. So if he has two out, he wont make more until you kill one of the two. The manhacks have been made quite a bit faster so they should do a pretty good job of harassing players who try to camp too much.

Both these enemies are still combine soldiers at the end of the day, with the exact same ai as typical combine soldiers.

With these additions, I will be redoing the enemy spawns in the existing maps quite significantly. On top of that a new intro map and another level taking place after the current existing town map are being added to allow me to pace out the mod a bit more and play with some new ideas, so all things considered it's gonna be quite a bit more than that original demo.

There's even more stuff to show in the future, something a lot crazier than just some combine variants but that's for another update so stay tuned!