Behind The Scenes - Starview evolution (2017-2019) image - Starlight mod for Half-Life

First off, I'd like to thank all of you for voting for Starlight in this year's MOTY awards! By some ungodly miracle, I've made it into the top 100, and its all thanks to you guys! So thank you all so much, and keep voting!

For this next behind the scenes update, I'll show off the progression of one of Starlight's oldest maps, the cliffside park in the Starview Gardens chapter. This map started off fairly basic, simple cliff path leading from one end of an open area to another, mainly intended as a quick filler map to give the player another look at the capital off in the distance. As development progressed, I began to iterate upon it, and iterate more & more untill the entire original layout was gutted, and discarded. I gave the map a puzzle, several secrets, and gave it more depth than I ever originally intended. And I'm not even finished with it yet!

Filler maps have no place in the mod, I aim for every map to have a purpose in some form or another. Many have been cut, or gutted & reiterated upon heavily like this one. When a layout isn't working, it isn't working.

The only notable geometry from the original iteration that remains in it to this day would be the little perch with the computer terminal & torch lights on it, always loved that little thing. All unique geometry to this map's original iteration has been prefabbed, and saved. I'm certain I'll find a use for all of it eventually, in the vein of how Valve reuses cut content, especially those powerlines! It was honestly pretty hard to get rid of those, but I took a good long look at what the rest of the chapter was shaping up to be & decided they had to go, I know for sure I'm going to reuse them in later maps.

Next behind the scenes update? The waterfall. Its due for a revamp after all this time.

Starlight Community Discord: Discord.gg

Twitter: Twitter.com