Corigami's WIP Thread

[Corigami]

I assume this is where WIP threads go?

I've been looking forward to this competition since it was announced and I'm really excited about the theme. I haven't been able to do any mapping since shipping off to college a couple years ago and I'm still worried that I won't have enough time to spare while I'm studying but since the deadline is a little ways into summer hopefully I'll be able to get something together.

There a few locations I'm thinking about for my level:

- Asylum/Sanitarium - The past couple of semesters I've been in disability studies at school and become interested in the identity politics of representation in media, and the Half-Life 2 universe could be a really fertile ground for disabled narratives or characters. A huge part of the Half-Life 2 back story deals with eugenics and genocide, which have have historically impacted people with disabilities. The lack of disabled people in city 17 implies that the were killed or converted into stalkers, but I'm really interested in the idea that there may be resistance groups or escapees out there.

The problematic associations of mental illness and violent behavior have created a lot of tropes about the locations these people were held (how often are asylums the sets of horror movies?), so if I do end up going in this direction these tropes are something I'd like to play with.

I'm probably getting too bogged down in characters and narratives for this challenge, but I still wanted to write these interests out somewhere and here is as good as any.

- Change in Season - Half-Life 2 takes place in such a vast array of locations that it's tough coming up with an entirely new place to map, but I was thinking that revisiting some type of area that already appears in HL2 during a different season like winter might change the place enough to feel like a fresh location. This would probably require a pretty decent chunk of new assets, though.

- Fort Casey - Over the summer I had a chance to visit a seaside military fort that would be easy to adapt to the HL2 universe. Actually getting to be in and walk around the place gave me a lot of ideas for how gameplay would function, and that insight I won't have for any of my other location ideas. It wouldn't require many new assets and there's also a wealth of reference images to work from.

- Cut HL2 Locations - It's not very original, but I've always been enamored by some of the cut HL2 locations and I'm thinking especially about recreating parts of the Depot in it's original sea-floor setting.

I've been skimming photo references and will probably try and come up with more location possibilities but this might be all I have time to do tonight.

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So I'm leaning towards a narrative in which, Gordon is is teleported near the crash site of an advisor pod and has to race combine forces to the pod to destroy it. I guess time travel would have to be involved because there's no teleportation sequences after the collapse of the citadel so I'm not sure how jarring that would be.

[[Steve]]

Some super interesting ideas you have in there Corigami,plenty you can expand on and develop further.
I would stay away from doing any Cut hl2 locations tho!

[Corigami]

Finals week is coming up and I haven't had much time to spend on this but I've picked a location and found an abundance of reference images to work from. I find it really difficult to plan gameplay before having some sort of space to work with, so I started by doing a really rough block out of the location I'm modeling this after. Once I had some kind of space to play with I could start deviating from the reference and changing the space to fit the gameplay possibilities I'm imagining.

[Corigami]

More baby steps between final papers. I have the first little section of gameplay all blocked out and have been making detail assets (all brushes at this point lol) so I can make sure I have the scale of everything correct before I move on to the insides of the building

[marnamai]

I really dig the look of that facade, but I think it would be better if you focussed on completing the gameplay for the entire map first.

Most people tend to start detailing way too early, losing focus on what should be their priority; gameplay (I am also guilty of that on occasion)