Toadie here, giving you all a bit of an informal state-of-play update for For Hire.
Progress
Progress a bit slow at the moment, everyone's hunkering down for the end of the calendar year at work or college/uni. However, that isn't to say work has stopped, oh no.
You've probably seen some of the images in the gallery up there of the fantastic work that Saxon his guys have done on the mapping. We're up to around 8 maps at various stages of completion and over the next few months I hope to show some more of that off over the coming months.
Likewise, weapon modelling is going excellently, with the majority of the stuff planned for the first release ready to go ingame, complete with animation. Some are short textures, but eh, that'll come.
We've now got a concept artist helping turn out a few character concepts, and again over the next few months, hopefully we'll show some of that stuff too.
Coding
What we're looking for at the moment is a secondary programmer to aid Technoblue out with implementing various things over the next few months. Ideally, we're looking for someone who's had previous experience in C++ with the Source Engine (and some portfolio to back it), able to work with a team and follow guidelines, but has some creativity and wit about them. Experience designing and implementing basic frameworks to build off of is a plus, as is any experience with thin databases.
Drop either Saxon or Myself a message with a little about yourself, and any applicable samples of previous work if you're interested.
Campaign
I thought I may as well start dropping bits of info about the campaign and story behind this. As it stand's we're working on a single coherent campaign. It has a start and end, and chapter breaks (which is where releases will be split). Each chapter will not be a straight linear path though, things will be free-roaming in a vague sense.At this point in time, we're working around a core idea of using hubs/hub maps to branch out individual missions to tackle, and having hubs link chapters.
So to give you an idea, in the first chapter we're working on ,"Clock In" has two hub maps in it. The first is the intro map, and the other is the end map. The intro map contains 6 or 7 different paths branching off to missions that players can complete, each on it's own map. They complete the missions, then return to the hub. The hub maps are also linked in a similar fashion,and depending, on where the hubs are, some will allow you to travel freely between each other. Others will be dependent on whether certain criteria ( certain number of missions, money to pay a bribe, you get the idea) are met, but they will be made clear to players.
Lastly, to setting.The entire of the planned campaign will be located in one specific geographic area, within a finite time scale, and mostly set between the evening twilight and dawn, under the cover of darkness. To an exact where, when and what, I'm not going to go into just now. All I will say it's set entirely in the US (and this has been incorporated into various aspects of the mod's design), and you will be facing neither "The Reds" or Zombies.
Oh, be sure to drop through our forums, and post up any questions, suggestions and such regarding the mod.
Half-lifecreations.com
Toadie out.
