The team had a chance to visit GDC this past march (we know super late news), and present C17 to valve. Outside the fact we were trembling in our jimmies with fear, we got a ton of feedback. Gautam Babbar sat down with us and played the mod and loved it. And we're not saying that to make ourselves look awesome, he really had zero negative issues with c17. Obviously 5 years in development has paid off.
During playtesting the only concern that was brought up was mostly in the area of consolidation which is an issue we had been looking at recently anyways. Specifically, in order to ship c17 we considered cutting content or simply streamlining a few areas here and there.
Unfortunately over the past year we have done just that. It hurts seeing content being tossed into the black abysmal pit that is "never to be released" but it's all obviously for the greater good.
The scale of c17 has mostly far exceeded what we originally intended, enough to the point we'd need to spend another good chunk of time to finish it all. Obviously we want to ship it and not spend an additional 4 years in dev. Due to this we'll be focusing on doing the last percentage of work, which is mostly just getting everything that's currently in there nice and tight, and of course running great since we still intend to release all of our work to the community.
We're still behind on voice acting so that's going to be one of the more major hurdles to completion. We've slowed down on c17 for a couple of reasons though, primarily because we're doing this and we're also doing some indie stuff that we can't talk about sadly (they'll kill us). As much as we like sitting down on c17 making no money, we've all gotten considerably older. Unfortunately progress on c17 is going to be snail speed for a few months while we focus on situating ourselves with steady income to stay alive.
Hey, as long as it comes out eventually, I'm just fine.
Agreed, I don't mind either.
I don't care how long it takes! Just. Do. Not. Die!
As long as it's good when its finally released.... we canplay other things till then.
Quality over Quantaty
Do not fear for lack of updates shall not rustle my jimmies
I see. You're trying to go commercial.
No. Well, not with c17 at least.
Hmm, my message looks accusatory. That's bad. I should've worded it better.
I meant to say, your efforts look too much for a mod from my perspective. This looks like a commercial game approach which is a tough road. I read Black Mesa Source developer interview on Rock Paper Shotgun and main guy there said something along the lines of "we promised too much too early for our own good."
Sounded like similar case in a way.
No worries dawg.
Don't cut too much, please :D
Don't just get rid of the cut stuff, put it up somewhere where other Source modders can use it, or save it for later, or something! Don't just throw all that hard work into the Pit of Doom!
Yeah don't worry, it'll all be there in vmf form. A lot of the content we've ended up cutting was mostly due to pacing and flow. We wanted to create a fairly long single player, but it gets harder and harder to control flow and progression that way without either rearranging gameplay in a current area, or generally adding an additional map/area to help seperate progression points.
Aka we visualize progression as points on a graph, and it should never suddenly rise and/or decline on the graph aggressively. This has led us to the content that's being cut. It was just an issue of "make more maps and spend time in dev, or just cut this one area so progression doesn't have this huge spike in difficulty/more area to fill up with interesting progression".
Ideally each area should be unique (set piece) anyways, and the player should always be able to remember what happened in each map. So we also look out in terms of making maps fill like "filler" by accident.
Good Luck !
Wait, are you or are you not porting to ASW? I'm confused.
Like, after you talked about the ASW engine, you said "Because of all of these issues we never ended up porting to ASW." Then you talked about the 2007 engine, and "so basically with source 2007, it's a waste of time."
I had a confuse
Yeah we are no longer porting to ASW. For some reason i thought we made an announcement about that a long time ago, maybe it didn't get included into an update like we planned or something...
Anyways. Right now with the deferred most of what was going to happen here in 2007 is now on asw. The downside being no hl2 content, but we have a plan about fixing that if enough people are interested. SO far we've figured out how to properly mount GCF's, so we'll start with that.