9/2/2023 0 Comments Half life source funny things![]() That came about when Laidlaw and level designer Brett Johnson decided to fix up some of the latter’s ruined lab areas and bring them to the rest of the team. Nowhere was this more keenly felt than in its famous opening train ride, into the bowels of Gordon Freeman’s unorthodox and intimidating workplace. Half-Life’s continuous and consistent fiction left you with the sense you were passing through a cross-section of a larger world, rather than a set of fairly narrow levels. It’s this approach that resulted in Half-Life’s trademark flow and perfect pacing - as well as a lot of black comedy, in which scientists were pulled into vents and belched out again in pieces. Then when characters do pop up, they can say lines of dialogue that make them feel like characters instead of signposts.” You don’t need NPCs popping up to tell you what to do if your visual grammar is clear enough. “Really good level design tells its own story. “Lots of traps and detours and obstacles and occasional moments of breakthrough,” he says. Rather, Laidlaw had the dev team explain the stories they were trying to tell, and helped them solve narrative problems through level design. In fact, by modern standards, there’s very little dialogue in Half-Life. That loneliness became a defining characteristic of a campaign that only ever granted you temporary friends - an endless succession of AI tagalongs. “You were supposed to be alone in this vast scary environment, but also alone in your head, and you could be whoever you wanted to be in that world.” “The main one was simply the chance to not wake you from the dream,” Laidlaw says. But when they ran out of time, the team doubled down on the unbroken first-person perspective and found unexpected strengths in it. Originally, Valve planned to tell its story more traditionally through third-person cutscenes. Half-Life was already recognisable as the FPS that would change everything: the disaster at the government lab, the dimensional breach, the battle to break through to Xen and end an alien incursion. It was all there when I got there, in embryo.” This is one reason it’s so weird to me when people try to attribute authorship to me that I’ve never felt. “I could see the whole world they were aiming at somehow, and I felt it was a collective vision. “I’d seen bits and pieces of the levels they were working on, but as soon as I heard the name, I just got this amazing buzz,” Laidlaw says. Laidlaw first discovered that community in the mid 90s, in the office of Valve, where Gabe Newell and team were already hard at work on Half-Life. ![]() It just seemed like a fun thing to do… until I did it.” “I was living on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community of the last couple decades, I was completely out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. ![]() “I was deranged,” says Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw of his decision to publish the plot of Episode 3 as fanfiction. ![]()
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