How to make a messup mod for Half-Life tutorial

How to make a messup mod for Half-Life
by usbpetrock

After playing all the funniest messup mods like Junk-Life and SSH Mod Messup, you're probably dying to know how to create one of your very own. Well, this guide is for you! Sit down and read on to find out the secret recipe for a great messup mod.

In-jokes
The most important part of a messup mod is the in-jokes. These are the bizarre memories and slips of tongue that you constantly repeat when your friends are around. It is important to put these in your mod so that a lot of the humour will be incomprehensible to the average player, as random = funny. If you don't have any in-jokes, or just don't have any friends, then feel free to search the internet for some fresh memes like 360 No-Scope, Get Rekt, MLG Pro Montage Parodies, and other memes that have not been done to death already, as these will provide all the high-quality content you need without you having to lift a finger. Everyone knows that formulaic comedy is the best kind of comedy.

Profanity
The next most important element of your mod is your swear words. Everyone knows that swearing is funny because you are not supposed to do it, capturing the essence of Shock Humour, a relatively fresh technique that should provide some great originality for your mod. For bonus points, combine swear words to create super swears, achieving double or even triple the laughs in one word. Making a sentence entirely out of swear words is another great way to ramp up the giggles - don't worry about making it grammatically correct!

Pop-culture references
Next, you should find a bunch of songs and sound clips that are viral on the internet, and download them and use a free piece of software to cut them to a suitable length and convert them to wav and mp3 files. Remember that Half-Life uses 8000khz mono sound files for everything including CD music and any attempt to increase this sound quality will result in your sound not playing so don't even try. When selecting your songs you should pick ones that all the cool kids are singing nowadays such as Baby by Justin Bieber and Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley.

Randomosity
This excellent non-word has never been used before so if you capture its meaning in your mod, then you will be one step ahead of the crowd. Remember that true randomness means repeating the names of foodstuffs as if they are the funniest things that you have ever heard. Everyone knows that all good comedians are extremely self-satisfied and laugh at their own jokes - if you can't even laugh at it, who else will?

Making your mod
Now that you have collected your content, it is time to put it all together into a mod! Copy and paste the entire "valve" folder (don't worry about redundant files, no-one actually owns the original game apart from you) and rename it to whatever you want to call your mod - a good tip is to take either "Half" or "Life" out of the name of the game, then replace it with something inherently funny like "Crazy" or "Spleen". Now, enter your new folder and open liblist.gam with a good text editor such as Microsoft Word. You will need to adjust the "game" line; don't worry about "gamedll", who cares if your mod is unplayable on other versions of the game or does not run on a certain platform? Now that you have a mod, it is time to start adding your content. Take all of your sound bites and copy them over most of the game's sound files. It doesn't matter if you have significantly less content than would be required to replace everything, as repetition is good, just look what it did for HeadOn. Once you have replaced all this, decompile all of the weapon viewmodels using HLMV, then edit their textures with a good image editing program such as Microsoft Paint. Once people see that their shotgun has a smiley face on it they will immediately drop to the ground and start ROFLing. You may also wish to enter the gfx folder and edit the title screen. A picture of poop over Gordon's head could be a great place to start, and finish. That should be enough for your mod.

Releasing your mod

You have a mod now which is great, so don't bother testing it. Your players will find a way to get it to run by themselves. Write a readme file that explains (preferably with the witty profanity you created earlier) how to install your mod. Do not bother testing this either, in fact it is better if it is incorrect. All you need to do now is find a high quality archiving program such as WinZIP and add the mod folder to an archive. Upload the result to ModDB, complete with search page and header images that completely ignore all guidelines given on the mod upload page, such as the rule about no text on the header image. When creating your description, you should use some of the comedy techniques mentioned earlier such as in-jokes. One great and unique idea is to create a long list of nonsensical qualifications that theoretically describe people who would like your mod. Hit Save and once your mod is approved, the 11/10 IGN reviews will start rolling in!

Congratulations on completing the difficult but worthwhile path of creating your own messup mod. I hope you have learnt something and will go on to create the most hilarious messup mod of all time. Thank you for reading.