Midway Through 2022 news - Peer Review mod for Half-Life 2

What’s the dealio, peeps, sheeps, and creeps? We’ve somehow all survived yet another quarter, which means it’s time for you to hear about how great we’re doing! Ain’t life grand?

This engine is putting up a fight. It is kicking, screaming, and threatening our firstborns. This is a callout post for Source. Our rendition of Code Green in particular is really pushing this engine. Even with our clever tricks - of which we have plenty - the team knows we’re going nose-to-nose and saying “oh noes” whenever we get smacked with yet another engine error. Thankfully we know what we’re doing (believe it or not) so we’ve actually been handling it quite well. All of this is to say that Code Green is fully playable from start to end. Nose Nice! It’s really exciting and motivating to have yet another mission playable to completion. We’re getting there, guys! This little reboot is slowly coming toget-

Also in the level design department, Surface Call’s been getting a Surface Haul! Some of you may be familiar with it as the setting of our original announcement video way back at the tail end of 2017. It got the job done, the job being “Prove we can make a functioning co-op game.” But it’s been a distinct outlier in how it doesn’t stand up to our modern design ideas, procedures, art style, anything really. It kinda sucked. So it’s being reworked from the ground up. It’s been fully blocked out, and gameplay is being (re)implemented.

On the art side of things, we've been all over the place as usual. Recently we’ve been working on something to help speed up the asset-creation process as well as bring some extra cohesion to our art. Many studios these days have a robust library of physically-based materials. We've been working on our own variant of the idea: A series of base materials with a lot of customizable properties. We call them “master materials”!

We can get a lot of mileage out of a single base material, which cuts down hours of work. Instead of an artist wasting huge amounts of time creating textures from scratch, they just drag some sliders and knock it out in a few minutes. It's quick and art style-friendly without making textures too samey. A tough balance to hit, since we're a small team with a big project! While it has its limitations, it can still be very powerful, especially for its speed. Check these out, all made from the same “master” material!

Like always, while the missions are getting designed and gameplay-readied, the art team has been working on mission art studies. I’ve been trying my hand at nailing down our desert environments. That’s been going… Well, let’s not get into that catastrophe. But! Agente P has been doing solid work making art for Code Green and Intensity. Intensity in particular is a surprisingly varied mission. We’ve shown their work on a couple of areas before, so hopefully you’ve got room for more sci-fi laser room goodness.

Speaking of lasers, did you know you’re not supposed to point lasers at aircraft? Did you know that your favorite scientist duo does NOT care? In fact, that’s actually among their favorite pastimes, so fueling the habit, check out Notewell’s brand new laser pointer!

Now that we’ve tickled your eyes a bit, hows about we let those ears in on some action? If you’d like to further immerse yourself in our game, check out Peer Review Vol. 1 on Spotify! From aggressive jams to somber beats, this first compilation of music tracks from the game will give you an extra taste of our atmosphere.

That’s our update! We’re really excited about the progress we’ve been making, and hope you are as well. We like to keep in touch between these updates. For that purpose, we’ve got not only a Twitter profile, but also the obligatory community Discord server. You can chat with us, ask us questions, or just generally interact with other Peer Review and Half-Life fans. You might even catch a dev stream or two!

Before we sign off, as always, a reminder that this is a large project, and help is always welcome. We’re in pretty desperate need of 3D character artists, but we’ve got space on the team for pretty much every position, with the exception of audio/writing positions. If you’d like to help out, feel free to throw us an application!

As always, thankies for sticking with us, guys. Your support (emotional, structural, etc.) is deeply appreciated and helps us keep things moving along when things get rough. We’ll be back again before long!