Checkerboarded Hopes History feature

Introduction

I'm sure all of you know by now (or you've at least figured out) that Checkerboarded Hopes 2 is a satirical modification, but you're not that sure on the history on Checkerboarded Hopes series. That's why I've decided to write up a feature on ModDB accounting for the entire history of my baby, Checkerboarded Hopes. This article will be pretty big, so if you don't like reading big blocks of text, then fuck off.

The Beginning

The Checkerboarded Hopes series started in the year 2008. After a couple months of making fun of terrible leak fix-up mods on the Team GabeN IRC channel I decided to make my own, just I instead decided to make it as awful as I could.

The name "Checkerboarded Hopes" is a spoof on how every leak fix-up mod has to have some sort of "dark name" like Lost Concepts, Dark Atmosphere, or Missing Information. I don't remember how I exactly came up with the name, but I pretty much put Lost Concepts and Missing Information into a metaphorical blender and somehow Checkerboarded Hopes came out.

I made Checkerboarded Hopes 1 in around 5 minutes. It only had one map, titled "Hydra" which was a huge brick box with a poorly constructed Hydra on the far right wall. The map was me making fun of this project called "Hydra VS" where 3 guys tried to recreate the Hydra NPC using only Garry's Mod 9 Lua, calling Hydra VS a pipe dream could be considered the biggest understatement of the century. After making Checkerboarded Hopes I posted it on Facepunch for all to enjoy.

A Sequel?

Development on CBH2 started around 8 months after the original CBH was released. ScarT^ from Team GabeN had informed me of a new leak fix-up mod called "Old Times" created by this guy named Hogsy, he was saying that the mod looked a lot like mine since it had a lot of missing textures and other crap that were the building blocks of CBH. That's when I said "Okay, that's it, it's sequel time" and development on Checkerboarded Hopes 2 started.

The Death and Revival of CBH2

Checkerboarded Hopes 2 had two development cycles, the first one was World of Purple and the second is the one I actually released, below is information about both of them:

Death

CBH2 originally had its own subtitle, called 'World of Purple' which was a reference to the game 'Mercenaries 2: World in Flames.' But this subtitle was dropped simply because I didn't remember it.

The original CBH2 had a couple of maps that I'm glad weren't included in the final product, simply because they were really dumb, even dumber than what you would expect from a mod like Checkerboarded Hopes.

World of Purple was actually leaked by my modeller Lamp when I told him to leak it on a forum called ApertureGaming. But the funny thing is that he actually told people on the forum that the CBH2 alpha contained code from Team GabeN's project, something that was completely false since I just copied the 'server' and 'client' DLLs from my HL2: EP2 folder.

A guy named 'DigitalSane' actually thought something as ridiculous as this was true and posted it on a site called 'BetaArchive.co.uk', I found it while ego-searching Checkerboarded Hopes. I took the time to reply to the thread saying this:

I didn't know that Checkerboarded Hopes 2 contained leaked Team GabeN code. Thanks for letting me know.

Pretty much after CBH2 intentionally being leaked I stopped working on it and I ended up deleting it from my hard drive, until I decided to revive it.

Revival

I don't know what exactly motivated me to restart work on Checkerboarded Hopes 2. But I completely blame Hogsy for it. I'm pretty sure his shenanigans made me so raged that I just decided to actually work on it and finish it.

I worked on CBH2 for about 3 weeks, watching as essentially everybody posted stupid comments on its ModDB profile.

The Future of Checkerboarded Hopes?

The release of Checkerboarded Hopes 2 was kind of a mixed feeling. I was really excited that I had actually released something for a game that I really liked, even if it was something like Checkerboarded Hopes. But I also felt like the release was rather rushed.

Because I believe that the release was rather rushed I've decided to work on a smaller project that will function as DLC for Checkerboarded Hopes 2. It'll add a feature that I'm sure most of you wanted to see in the final version of CBH2, but unfortunately it was never added in. More information will be released later on next month, so keep your eyes pried open. It's not over, at least not yet.