BLACKSECTOR mod for Half-Life 2

I know, it's been a long time without any updates or information on the project's progress or status. Way too long. BLACKSECTOR was born as an original First Person-Shooter on the Source Engine, a truly Total Conversion Modification featuring a fast paced Multiplayer mode. But when things got serious, the project became bigger and bigger, i was not able to manage all the things that have to get managed from a Lead Designer's point of view. And i am very sad to announce, that BLACKSECTOR is officially "put on hold". So this is a truly Post Mortem for the BLACKSECTOR i had originally in mind.

We had a very talented team with guys who really wanted to make some progress and show what mods are made for. We had some stunning visuals and some pretty nice ideas underway. But we didn't have was the time and the organisation to complete our milestones and bring everything together to fit into the whole project. So after one year without any news, the website is offline, the forum is closed down and BLACKSECTOR seems to be history. I am still dreaming of completing BLACKSECTOR one another time and i hope i will find some cool and talented designers, model and concept artists with the same dedication for modding once again. But not for now. I have rarely sparetime and there is no way for me to get back on track with this project. It's simply too big for one person to lead.

But i also know it is my own fault, because i missed to write a clear design document. I missed giving the team the advices they needed to create an ambitious project like that. By the way i wanted to say THANK YOU to all of our followers on ModDB, Twitter and our official website.

What remains is the feeling, that i learned a lot about game developing and game design. You cannot build a game without any precise idea of what exactly you want to create and how to create it. And now i know, it is really dangerous to implement more and more stuff into your game. Stick with the basics and show of just a few features, but nice features. Less is more in this case. I remember to add more and more ideas into BLACKSECTOR without even having the basic gameframe built. We were talking about sneaking creepy creatures with thermalvision and the ability to climb up the walls, but we had no programmer, who could ever realize these visions for us. We had some awesome concept art but no idea of bringing all these cool stuff into life. I tried to hire more designers and artists but the bigger our dev team became, the more work i had to put into organisation and communication. And all that without any previous experience about game developing. The project was doomed to fail. The definite ending of BLACKSECTOR was with the crash of my hard drive. I lost all the files and documents this project was about. I had no backup and no time to rewrite and restore everything once again. But this was just a result of a few weeks with no progress and no communication between the developers - which was because of my bad organisation.

So let us leave BLACKSECTOR here on ModDB as it is and i am definitly looking forward to finish this project someday. It is still my dream and i won't give it up. I just wanted to make this up pretty clear, because it is still haunting me. Hope you understand that.

But after all, i am now working on an unannounced mod project with two other guys. This project is much smaller and much more possible to finish. I hope you guys will check back for the announcement soon, here on ModDB. I have taken over a few ideas for the new game but i will keep it still very simple and not too much for three developers. The project will be a Total Conversion Mod and it will feature the latest Source Engine again, because we all have worked with this engine a long time now and it is still a really nice looking technology. Expect more to come.

Hope to see you on the other side.
Cheers,

Unreal1ty