The snowglobe tumbles from my hand and with my last breath I whisper. Several decades from now, when I'm found dead, the old photo clutched in my hand won't be of a lost teenage love, it'll be a printout of C3A1_W5D. I spent many years as a teenager tinkering in the level editor Worldcraft and became intimately familiar with Half-Life's texture WADs as a result. I admit that my love of its textures runs deeper, though. Half-Life's sound effects have become at least as iconic as its textures, and many have survived unchanged into sequels and other Source engine games. All of the sounds and music were created alone by Kelly Bailey, who also worked on level design. The textures aren't the only part of Half-Life created by a single person. That's how you get from Half-Life's singleplayer levels to early Counter-Strike maps like Assault, Siege, and Prodigy, all of which relied on Half-Life's textures. Half-Life's real world textures were malleable enough that you could apply them a little differently, maybe add just a few of your own, and suddenly have a setting entirely separate from Black Mesa. Using the textures for Quake or its sequel, all you could ever really create was more Quake. I also think the textures deserve a lot of credit for the mapping and modding scene that grew around Half-Life in the years after its release. What can I get good pictures of that is vaguely industrial and interesting to look at and then how can we use this?" So I was all over Seattle - Harbor Island, Gasworks park - getting rusty metal things. "The photo references are much much better. "Originally I was hand-painting all of the textures, and you can really see a shift in some of them where they go from hand-painted to photo reference," says Laur. The geometry of the underlying architecture mostly consisted of low-poly boxes by technological necessity, but textures made each area seem entirely distinct. When I first played Half-Life as a 14-year-old, the Black Mesa Research Facility felt like a real place to me in a way that other games with realistic settings from the era, such as Sin and Kingpin: Life Of Crime, never did. Part of my assumption that the textures were created by a group was driven by how varied Half-Life's textures are, and how essential. "It's just an overwhelming amount of work", says Marc Laidlaw, Half-Life's writer, of Laur's solo efforts. So I started making these linoleum tiles, the drop ceiling, the concrete block wall, the black and white tile floor." "I grew up just out D.C., and so there's all these big, really banal office buildings, and that's kind of the direction I went," says Laur. I was trying to enforce some visual cohesion, and that really ended up working." "Somebody making another level would start using them and I was like no, this is chaos, we need to restrict this, so I started naming the texture sets by the level that they were made for. "First of all I had a bunch of textures, and then everytime I made new ones, whoever was working on the new levels would be like, 'Oh fresh textures, I'm gonna use those!'," says Laur. As a result, Laur as texture artist had a lot of influence over what Black Mesa became. Different people on the team initially worked independently, and later started-over to try to turn it into something cohesive. One thing the documentary makes clear is that Valve didn't have a cohesive plan for what Half-Life should be - including where its levels should take place. I therefore assumed that its textures would likewise have been created by multiple different artists. Yet Valve had several programmers, several level designers, several character artists. Of course, '90s games were made by much smaller teams than those that build video games today, even first-person shooters. Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary Here's the documentary, produced in partnership with Danny O'Dwyer's Secret Tape: Valve also reunited the game's original developers for an hour-long making-of documentary in which its original programmers and artists reminisce about creating the first-person classic at a time when many of them had never shipped a game before.Ĭhief among the revelations within is that all of Half-Life's textures were created by a single person, Karen Laur. Half-Life turns 25 years old tomorrow, with new maps and updates to celebrate.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |