Kept you waiting, huh? news - Half-Life 2: Inhuman mod for Half-Life 2: Episode Two

So let's address the obvious. Unfortunately, we were not able to make our release date, and I definitely should have made a post about this sooner. That being said, progress has actually remained smooth, with playtest builds making us more and more confident about the eventual end project we want to put out, so let's get into what's new.

New Additions

Soldier AI has been a focus of the project from the start, but unfortunately a lot of the work put into them remained mostly unappreciated as players still basically just saw soldiers doing the same general running and shooting animations 99% of the time. We don't have a dedicated character animator on the project, but luckily I found the answer to this problem in animations from other humanoids.

Soldiers in Inhuman now use new animations for running to cover, popping in and out of cover, and when moving from an idle pose to shooting. Each of these are animations taken from the rebels and metropolice, and are used to highlight their behavior more specifically. Players can tell if they're running to attack you or running to get behind cover based on their animation. Whether or not they'll shoot you in the face is made clear by the fact that they actually have to raise their gun up to aim at you after running or when they've first made contact. All of these changes help to telegraph their behavior and make gameplay feel more intentional.

Also got them properly cowering when they drop their grenades, which took more work than you'd probably expect.

On the subject of making player's act more intentionally, we've also changed how interacting with items in the world works:

Inhuman expects the player to look around a bit more if they want to get topped off on supplies. While we do use the same resupply system as Valve, the values on these resupplies varies depending on their placement, ensuring that players will need to do some extra searching if they're low on supplies. To lean into this feeling of scrounging around more, we've decided to implement a manual pick up system. Rather than picking up items as physics items,where they'll usually just disappear from your hands in half a second awkwardly, items you're targeting fly straight to you. Currently we're testing with this being the only way to pick items up, no more acquiring them accidentally by touching them. Don't get too worried though, to avoid this being a huge pain we've made it so items spawned from an item crate are automatically pulled towards you.

Levels also continue to get a sharp boost in quality, which is the main thing that's actually held back our release. Our actual game content at this point is more or less ready, so rest assured this project will see the light of day.

Here's a little peek at one small bit of the game:

If you wanna support my work, or if you're just really thirsty for more insights into my development process you can always follow me on Patreon:
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I'm recently trying to write a lot more and I'll definitely be posting most of that to my Patreon page. You can also catch up on my bad hot takes on twitter here: Twitter.com

Thank you for reading and for your patience on the latest delays. Look forward to more content soon.