Opposing Force 2 Developer Interview feature - Urban Chaos mod for Half-Life 2

We recently had a developer interview with Matthew “MenteR” Graef, the Project Lead behind Opposing Force 2, an impressive Half-Life 2 mod continuing the story where Gearbox left off in Half-Life Opposing Force, in which you play as H.E.C.U. soldier Adrian Shephard. Be sure to check out the official website (Opfor2.com) and on ModDB (Moddb.com) .

Source Developers Club: Why should people play your mod?

Opposing Force 2: We are introducing innovations on vehicles and weaponry, some never seen on Source, some never seen before on any sort of game. In fact the APC is one of the innovations OF2 brings. We will have an innovative kind of "changing places" inside an APC. Your normal position is to be seated, but if you want to have some action take the turret or take the mortar in real-time action, while zombies are being slaughtered outside by your turrets or take the wheels to make a faster way to your destination. Everything inside the APC, while it's moving and while everything is happening outside. This includes a very advanced character animation that depends on the logic of "Is Shephard requesting me to get off, so he can use the turret?", making the character who's currently on the turret, mortar on wheels get off and take command of another part of the vehicle. If the player refuses to do something, an AI Director spawns bigger enemies with the capabilities of putting down the APC. So the whole APC bit depends on the player AND the NPCs.

SDC: Is there any new content or gameplay?

OF2: Yes, if you're talking about innovation, there is the APC and the Barnacle. If you are talking about re-placed NPCs from the prequel, we are including pretty much a lot of monsters from Opposing Force 1, not to mention the US military weapons. We made three creatures that WILL test the player's skills. The Prowler, the Shadowrunner, and the Titanspleen, which sadly I can't talk much about. On gameplay, we have more intellectual puzzles that will take the player's logical abilities a lot farther than Half-Life 2. For action, we have the APC's scene. So yes, we're pretty much focusing a lot on new content and gameplay.

SDC: How long will the mod be? How many levels or maps are there?

OF2: It's going to have at least 6 to 10 hours of gameplay in total, 14 Chapters.

SDC: How did the mod get its start? Was there any inspiration behind it?

OF2: It started on 2007, the reason that Opposing Force never had a sequel always pissed me off. The sequels made by others were always repetitive, and those never had any new content, the others that promised to have new content always died. I was playing Zombie Master, when I decided to talk about my ideas with the people on the server, someone liked it. And decided to post a thread on the Facepunch forums. We BARELY had any media by that time. But some people decided to join, got interested. Soon we had a small group. We started working on the storyline, maps, models and textures, when suddenly, our team gets big enough for a real deal, many left, but many joined. Right now we're pretty much a successful mod as I can tell.

SDC: How large is the team?

OF2: The team right now has about 28 developers. Including programmers, modelers, gameplay planners, animators, riggers, texturers, mappers, particle editors, color correcting staff, voice actors, sound artists and beta testers.

SDC: Do you have a planned release date? Will there be a demo?

OF2: The release date's planned for July 18 2010, there will be a demo, this year, and we're planning to release it in August.

SDC: What tips can you give to other mod developers?

OF2: Don't give up from your dreams mostly. If there are any barriers on the development, they're there because you're supposed to break them. If you stop, you won't have finished what you wanted, but if you end it, you'll be known for it.