Portal: Last Hope mod

It has been 7 months since the last update and now that we have gone through Summer and another school semester, here is where we're at with this.

↑ Before | After ↓

We have tweaked the lighting in the chambers, to make them more appealing. Here is a before and after comparison.

Our texture artist has finally redone the light panels as we have decided to go with a specific design in order to make PLH stand out more. Nature for F.A.L. is extremely crucial to the plot.

RedSkittleFox of Rainbow Fox Studios has rejoined the team and has been designing some new puzzles for us. Here are two of them.

Besides the overall progress on the game, we have come up with a new overall plan and wanted to address some issues.

So, basically instead of making two separate acts for PLH, we're combining the two into a single Tech Demo to showcase Absynthe and how Portals work with it. Expect the tech demo to be virtually story-less. We're also changing the team's road-map to fit in with a more realistic time-frame and to ensure we don't grow stale working on the overall game. We have gotten so many different ideas that we have been wanting to work with for some time, and PLH's development has hindered that for some time, due to the different roadblocks that we had encountered over the past several months.

When we started working on this, we were extremely naive and ambitious about it to the point that it was all we could focus on. After successfully managing to get some truly talented members of the Source Engine modding community, the overall team's experience had improved. The story had adjusted over time to create such an amazing and complex overworld. Likewise, other ideas for different development aspects had also changed over time. Designs, Models, Textures, and more had to be remade! We've gone through at least four iterations, with each new iteration being much better than the last. We did keep several existing textures and pieces of content as we converted throughout each iteration, but it was mostly the maps that we had difficulties with. Due to the fact that we had so many ideas rolling around, several team members had left due to a lack of progress and that we were constantly redoing everything. Now, more and more people are losing interest in the project, but not enough to let it shrivel up and die.

We admit that we have made many mistakes during the development process, but like any development team, we are constantly learning from them. And thanks to the new set of content and overall progress that has been made since the last update, we feel confident that no new major overhauls are necessary. Thanks to the PLH team, we're proud to announce that we finally have a possible time frame for the Tech Demo's release: early next year! After that, we'll take a long and relaxing break to regroup and come up with some new ideas/content and look at what else needs to be done when it comes to PLH. Nonetheless, we are still determined to see this game through and through, to the very end!

Until next time,

-Gamer#1 - Storywriter