Dev Spotlight

Sep 15, 20195 min read

Development Spotlight - EZ2 Chapter 2.

I've decided to condense these into their respective chapters.

Beware! This post contains minor EZ2 spoilers.

Grab a cuppa and enjoy!

Arbeit? What's that all about? Well lemme tell ye'

Back in the old days of Half-Life 2 long before we ever got our hands on it, Valve were using a placeholder name for the scientific body responsible for the Borealis. That corporation was called 'Arbeit Labratories'.

Over time Arbeit has become Aperture Science. Instead of pulling a random name out of my ass, I decided to bring the Arbeit name back to life and actually try to tie it in to Aperture Science through the EZ2 canon.

You may notice some similarities between the logos.

I needed Arbeit to use as a base both physically and fundamentally for EZ2. The mod is set somewhere in the Arctic. That could be anywhere - but I didn't just want us to be walking around in the snow all the time. That would get old fast. I needed some kind of facility for us to explore.

As you may have figured out by now, Entropy : Zero is all about drawing contrasts between Half-Life. So really, I needed something that could potentially contrast Black Mesa. A mini-Black Mesa in the Arctic would suffice, and thus Arbeit was born.

Why am I going into this much detail? Because narrative is important as it serves as the foundation for which we can build upon.

So what is Arbeit Communications? How do I define it?

Arbeit is an old German comms base up in 'the mountains'. It's wayyyy up inside the Arctic Morty, far from built up civilisation. It was used as a communications forwarding base during the cold war (probably) and therefore has the appropriate facilities and security.

Sometime before the events of Half-Life 2, Aperture Science - jealous of Black Mesa's purchase of a European missile silo - acquired the Arbeit facility and used the space to do 'things' in covert isolation. There is another more underlined reason for Aperture's decision to acquire Arbeit - and the reasoning behind the Combine's involvement, but that's super spoilery and won't be included here.

With these foundations in place I was able to dive in and get to work on Arbeit.

EZ2_C2_1

This first map had to achieve a few things. First it had to cement the fact that the rebels had beaten us to it. Secondly it had to immediately convey our location to the player. This area you see in the image above became a vista showing off the first half of the Arbeit facility. We're also shot down and attacked by rebels as we approach the base, which ties everything in together.

This was a defining area for us as developers. This was the first area we tested with our new Rebel AI. Initially I was just using the stock AI and it was pretty boring. We had to do some trickery with Scripted Sequences to get things to flow properly - but it was too much hassle and it could be janky at times. This was when I realised that Rebels needed a BIG change if we were going to keep gameplay interesting in EZ2.

After the changes, we were blown away - literally. The Rebels kicked our asses. Machine gunners use suppressing fire, rebel Brutes rush into melee range and blast you with their shotguns. Everyone uses cover more effectively and generally tries to keep constant pressure on the player. It's nothing like base Half-Life 2 combat. It takes your focus because you're constantly moving to avoid fire.

It's a great introduction to the Rebels of Arbeit - which pack an additional punch along with some other surprises you may have noticed in our live streams.

It took me about two and a half months to put this map together.

EZ2_C2_2

One of the biggest requests I had after making EZ1, was to introduce some kind of squad gameplay. I spoke about that a bit in the first Dev Spot. Players really wanted to command a squad of soldiers. This is immediately brought back into Chapter 2 and players can take squads of soldiers through Arbeit.

With this in mind, I really wanted to create some kind of office spaces for us to destroy. I took a lot of inspiration for these maps from a map called Ziba Tower, from Battlefield 3. These maps in particular have a lot of destructible properties, because it's fun and it also underlines the violent advancement of the Combine.

When building the second map of Chapter 2, I ran into a problem. Arbiet looked really boring.

The drab grey and whites did nothing for the scenes. I started to doubt my direction. But before I did the usual Breadman thing and threw it all in the trash, I decided I would try to experiment with the colour pallet first.

And boy did it make a difference.

Here's another comparison:

With the colours sorted I dived in and got to work with the building. Initially, we get a look at Arbeit's administrative facilities. As I said above I wanted to create some generic office spaces and use them as direction to drive towards something else.

Rebels are used as a kind of buffer, as they advance towards us through corridors. From there the AI takes over and they can run to take cover in one of the offices or closets. Bullets fly and glass explodes. It's a chaotic combat experience and we've laced it with some incredible music from Spencer. All of it ties in to create a memorable experience that always feels like it's over way too soon.

We might still add some extra corridors and avenues to this map because the combat is SO MUCH FUN! If we ever do a demo, this will be the map you'll play because it embodies a lot of what we're trying to do with EZ2's combat.

EZ2_C2_3

Originally the third map of Chapter 2 was going to take us under Arbeit and into the more familiar Aperture-like facility you may have seen us showing off. After putting the map together though, it became obvious to us that there was so much potential in that map alone, that we had to run with the theme for an entire chapter.

So the old c2_3 became c3_1, and c2_3 got put on the burner for a while. A few months ago our Programmer 1upD picked up c2_3 to take the load off of me, which allowed me to go ahead and work on Chapters 3 and 4.

1up has been doing some amazing work with c2_3. The map brings us into a more industrialised shipping area in Arbeit, which fits really well considering the first half of the facility sits on a frozen shoreline.

Nice open spaces give us a break from confined corridors.

This area also serves another purpose; it allows us to introduce Bad Cop to Long-Jump Rebels. These Rebels can jump around all over the place and will do so, making your life a living hell. It's been a lot of fun seeing these new Rebel variants come to life. They're fun to fight - very intense.

The map is sprawling and is filled some optional content which I'm not gonna spoil here. In fact, I'm not going to say too much else about this map because it's still a work in progress. I'm sure once we've wrapped it up 1upD would be happy to fill us in on all the development details!

It fits really well into the EZ2 scene and I can't wait to see what else 1upD can do for us.

There is another map planned for Chapter 2, but that's gonna be too spoilery for me to mention here.

That's a wrap for now on Chapter 2. We can't wait for players to get their hands on it!

If you want to support me, please consider buying me a coffee!

Apr 25, 20195 min read

Development Spotlight - EZ2_C1_1

Hey folks! Time for something new to keep you going whilst we try to churn out Entropy : Zero 2. I'm planning to do one of these for each map - so look out for them!

This could get lengthy - so grab a coffee and enjoy!

EZ2 has gone through some pretty major story changes since the start of its development. And just like with the first mod, the story has been deliberately malleable from the start. This gives me freedom to change things as I go and helps the mod's narrative develop naturally.

Check this out:

Those are the very first scribbles of EZ2. The game is marginally different now. This entire section was scrapped because I didn't like how it played out. I only have one hammer grab of this initial area.

Not a fetish thing I swear! There's a reason for the Alyx's

In the older drafts, the player would wake up whilst being operated on by a stalker. The idea was that the stalkers would prepare soldiers and 'activate' them. For the operating sequence, I bound a camera to the eyes of the Alyx model and had it animate (ironically) the operating sequence from EP2. This provided the player with a decent view of being worked on whilst paralysed / immobile.

Ultimately, this single scene has made the cut and will appear in the form of a dream sequence in EZ2.

The whole area was redesigned twice. Some of the secondary changes have remained and I'm sure will be familiar to some of you.

Bad Cop Elite had his first photo shoot here, you may recall.

Fun fact, Griggs and Sheckley (HL2 EP2) made an appearance here in the first draft (just past that monitor down the hall), and were seen escaping Nova Prospekt as Bad Cop passed them. This had to be cut as the timeline for EZ2 changed.

These areas were supposed to be lower levels of Nova Proskpet that we never got to see as Freeman. They were meant to be completely infested after the events of Half-Life 2.

Bonus tidbit: You can see a working concept of an objective system in the lower right corner.

Webbing was prominent on the walls and ceilings of this older build. It was hard to implement in way that complimented it's surroundings, and took forever to place.

Something that has been consistent from the start is the Pulse Pistol. It made sense to me that the Combine would have also experimented with the pistol after refining the AR2. I was proud at myself for being able to hack together some basic code changes to get it working at a prototype level.

The Pulse Pistol plays an important role. You wouldn't see a Combine Elite wielding a stunstick. I had to figure out a way to give the player a means to attack regardless of ammo - without a melee alternative. The Pulse Pistol does just that because it never runs out of ammo. It simply recharges.

The whole focus on this earlier build was to reach the surface to evacuate. Bad Cop was waking up moments after Episode 2 after that time, and he was being woken to take vengeance on the resistance for closing the super portal.

The story was vastly different, with Bad Cop being tasked to return to the ruins of City 17, enter a fragment of the Citadel and recover some sort of bio key from Breen in order to interface with another Citadel fragment, to ultimately try and re-open the super portal.

Sadly, this concept didn't make it very far in practice.

But there were some huge problems I ran into with this story, and I had some personal qualms about the direction I was heading in. This lead me to run with a dramatic branch-off / overhaul of the entire intro section. For a little while the story changed dramatically, and I moved Bad Cop to a random Combine facility in the mountains.

LambdaGen actually featured a clip of this.

But again I became uninterested in this approach. It felt too disconnected to the Half-Life story. At least in City 10 we had some relationships to the original canon. With this new re-write we were being placed in a totally random location, only to be moved immediately after the first chapter.

After three weeks of not working on EZ2, I knew I had a massive problem. I wasn't motivated in the slightest to pursue this new narrative. I had to sit down and re-think the whole thing.

And I'm so glad that I chose to do that because Nova Prospekt has never looked so interesting (In my opinion).

My spin on the Antlion infestation of NP.

Everyone in the public facing Source community has had a crack at bringing back Nova Prospekt. My original writing was to have the player below the ground - how could I skip out on the opportunity to actually bring players back in my own re-imagining of the place? And how cool would it have been if I could actually manipulate existing Valve maps to see how they look in the days after the events of Half-Life 2?

Luckily, Valve have let me do just that. I got permission because I wanted to be 100% clear on what I was doing.

I jumped right in and redesigned the first part of the mod. This time, we're only underground for a few minutes. Then we're back up to the surface. The first map gave me an opportunity to explore my own interpretation of an area we never got to see as Freeman.

Here are some devshots:

And this really, is a great example of unplanned map progression. None of this was drawn, it just came to life on it's own as I put it together in the editor. In the images above you can see how I was using things like the handrails, to define the dimensions of specific areas. This is mapping by-prop, essentially. That way I can map unplanned, produce results and have it all looking nice and aligned. It's the 'John Romero' approach, apparently.

Re-visiting this area was a must. A total mandatory design anchor, it had to happen. It was such an iconic scene from the first mod, I had to include it in the mod. It's easy to casually stroll past this if you're distracted by other things. In older builds, approaching the coffin would produce a very faint screaming sound, as Bad Cop's mind rattles off the memory of having his face melted.

We get to experience that area in a different light and absorb all of the mysteries it bought at the end of EZ1.

And speaking of a different light, one of the major things I did to improve this area was introduce some new colours along with colour correction. I've really pushed hard with the colour blending in EZ2.

This one is actually from ez2_c1_3 but, you get the idea.

The strong oranges with the subtle blues blend really well. But you should know that these colour choices aren't random. In fact, pretty much nothing is random with EZ2. When you're seeing things like colour blends and such in EZ2, there's a process of thought that's going on behind them.

The colours in this chapter are meant to represent the Rebel vs Combine aspect of Half-Life 2. The blues are an established colour in the Nova Prospekt environment, but the strong oranges are prominent and stand out. It's meant to resemble the underlying reason we're here; the fight between the Rebels and the Combine. The Combine are overrun on Earth, more so now that the Citadel has been compromised. The orange nests resemble the rebel presence, encroaching the Combine domain.

Subtle background choices like these are rife in EZ1 and 2 - but may not necessarily be easily interpreted or understood by the player. And that's just fine with me because all of that design theory aside, it looks real good and serves to light the world as well as enhance it.

I spiced things up big time. I made the initial Pulse Pistol acquisition fancier. I implemented squad control right at the start of the mod to show players you could use soldiers. I bought in Trivvy to voice Bad Cop, and CW3D to give me some new, interesting sounds.

From that point on EZ2 practically started writing and building itself. As did the rest of ez2_c1_1 - which is one of my favourite maps in hindsight. It struggled to exist, but I found a way.

Rain tattles through broken ceiling windows. The occasional rumble of thunder grabs your attention. In the distance, Antlions buzz and hiss.

You could cut through the atmosphere with a knife.

Thanks for reading!

Please consider buying me a coffee so I can keep doing this stuff!