Decadence Development Blog

Our team has grown from just being five persons to now, having two new members, being ten members strong. The new recruits I like you to meet are Björn “Kobi the leopard” Claesson and Johan Aronson both of whom will join the art team.

The mod is currently in a wild production cycle with content added every day, this bodes well for our upcoming announcement on the 24:th. The things we’ll be releasing on that date is still classified information, mind you, we just like to tease our readers.

There’s not much time left now until the deadline, so keep watching this space for more information!

The team and I would like to welcome a few new faces to the team. We have Yorick and SolSara which will focus on writing the stories and history behind everything you’ll see in the mod. SolSara will provide much of the support writing which we need as developers to create a living and breathing world. The artists also got a new friend by the name of Mollstam. He will be heading up the webdesign work and everything related to that.

The deadline is fast approaching, but we’re positive that we’ll be able to release something awesome at the end of it. Stay tuned!

Welcome everyone, now get to work!

For he’s a jolly good fellow,
For he’s a jolly good fellow,
For he’s a jolly good fellow,
Which nob’dy can deny.
Which nob’dy can deny.
Which nob’dy can deny.
For he’s a jolly good fellow,
For he’s a jolly good fellow,
For he’s a jolly good fellow,
And an awesome artist as well!

I’m not a big fan of relentless hype; it’s like the necessary evil in game development. You can now feast your eyes on a brand new countdown clock in the sidebar to your right. The countdown will be reaching zero at the 24:th of September, so be sure to mark your calendars. I cannot go into detail on what we’ll be releasing but there will be visuals, in some form or another. The first ever gleam at what the mod is really about.

And by those words, I’ve set up a pretty big goal for me and the rest of the team. No refunds, it’s out in the open now! It’s time to get to work.

I talked earlier about gameplay and how we work to bring forth our features in the best way. Even though we’re very keen on getting our gameplay to be top notch, we’re also very interested in how we present this to the player in terms of art style and graphics. The way we go about this is to create what Valve call a Zoo. A Zoo is a level which sole purpose is to give us a complete picture of our art direction and how everything fit in our universe. So in other words, a Zoo is a showcase of what we’re about to do so it’s easier for us to see where we’re going. It also serves other purposes like PR and reference. It’s much easier for a new level designer to take a peek at the Zoo to learn about our style than to read it in a design document or just concept art.

Every level in the mod is located in the same city so you’ll be able to see the landmarks of those levels in other locations. This is something we’d like to include in the Zoo as well. When you look at screenshots from the Zoo, you’d be able to see parts of the other levels in the distance. This is an excellent way to tie the world together.

The most important part of any video game is gameplay, and that’s nothing we take lightly on. It might sound a bit obvious, but it’s easy to rush through if you have an army of artists at your disposal. We’ve put a substantial amount of time into just gameplay testing without worrying about how the maps or weapons look, what we’re after is the fun factor. All our maps consists of large brushes in grey and orange (You got to love those dev-textures) just to get the feeling of the flow and gameplay of each level. If we do not like something about it, we could just go in and change it very quickly and try it again. Another thing that is quite critical for this to work well is to have the basic features of the mod implemented. The art side of things has a tendency to move a bit quicker than the programming, and it’s very easy to get ahead of things and that can come back and bite you later. For instance, we got most of our basic features coded in a matter of weeks. This lets us tweak and design our maps with the features in mind right from the very get-go. If we do not do this, we might end up with beautiful maps, but they lack the essential parts that show off our new gameplay features in the best way.

Valve introduced the Steam Community since the last update, so if you’d like to join the Decadence group, then follow this link.

I think I speak for all developers when I say there’s one thing that makes game developers extra happy, and that’s tools. Working tools. If we see a chance of making our pipeline faster and more productive, we’re sure as hell going to jump on the opportunity. What I’m showing today is the first custom tool we use to make Decadence. It’s a remote level compiling system which let’s level designers send .vmf (uncompiled level files) to a compiling server (in this case, our programmer’s overclocked quadcore) which in turn compiles the file to .bsp (compiled level) and sends it back. You still have all the controls as you’d have if you’ve done it yourself, but instead of wasting your precious computing power, you waste your friend’s precious computing power.

This saves our level designer a lot of time, since he doesn’t have to wait hours for his computer to do it when he can leave it to the mighty quadcore to do it in a fraction of the time!

This blog is focused on a mod currently in development by students from the University of Skövde in Sweden. This is by no means the final homepage representing the mod, but rather a way for us to give you a glimpse on what we’re doing while waiting for the official site to go up.

Decadence is a FPS mod currently in development for Half-Life 2. The goal of the mod is to create a story-driven multiplayer experience for two versus two players in a very strategic environment. As the name suggests, the story is about decadence in a future setting. The moral traditions have collapsed due to certain events in history which has lead society to break down as well.

More in-depth information will be revealed in due time, but this is all for now.