"..There's been some progress..."- Sarah
Hello again ladies and ghouls, its Lou back again to bring you an exciting update on the story so far. Up until recently Day of the dead l4d2 has been on a bit a back burner, time constraints being what they are. With the summer being upon us again.
I have taken the opportunity make some progress, "what kind of progress!",I hear Rhodes insist in the background, well when I originally began production on Day of the dead for l4d2 I was at the very beginning of my experiences with Hammer and level design, i did no preliminary work, knew only the very basics and was still very green, since then i have gone onto create the S.B.S (survival barricade system) for night of the living dead and expanded that to return of the living dead, i have also created blight path which is a full campaign, so when i returned to my old saves for Day of the Dead I quickly realised I had to start again from scratch.From the beginning i decided i did not just want to make a "theme-park" for day of the dead in l4d2, i want it to be its own story and maybe even a community contribution to the Mythology around "the dead" series which is why I have decided to name it Day of the Dead: Retribution, as this fits aptly with how this particular story ends...
Map 01: A Dead Place
when approaching this level I wanted to include signature places such as the Edison theatre and the bank, in the opening scene of the film Sarah and Miguel shout down the street with a megaphone and i wanted the street to be an important part of map, originally i had decided to create a gauntlet down this street but have since thought better as gauntlets don't leave much opportunity for players to take in the scenery i was going to put so much work into , also a gauntlet event on the first level would most likely frustrate players.
In l4d and l4d2 campaigns the convention is that the first level short and to the point and i wanted to go with the convention on this.
The players begin inside an apartment building, through the window we see John and billy's chopper flying across the city and the level begins from there, I am considering sampling billy's radio broadcasts appealing for survivors for this safe-room just to drive the point home. From the safe-room the survivors battle through the city to reach the helicopter.
From the apartment building the survivors travel through the Edison cinema, past the bank, and down the main street to the harbour, which is where the chopper landed.
Their are a few big challenges with creating this first map, the main street which is an iconic image from the film is like most streets, a straight line, this is not a very interesting route for players to travel also it raises a few issues on where the infected will spawn as they need sufficient distance and cover to spawn, firstly to allow infected to spawn i created the interior of stores on either side of the street and detailed the appropriately, also I want the campaign to play well with versus, previously I have read many accounts of a designer creating a campaign and not considering versus only to have to return to the campaign at a later date and put the time in correcting as well as updating so i decided to tailor areas to accommodate versus right from the beginning, which entails a death charge or two and lots of versus ladders. The straight nature of the street itself was a nice little problem, however in Blight Path i had to handle that exact same problem, I began by drawing things out on paper, using squares and squiggly lines to create lots of different ways I could complicate this painfully straight street, eventually i realised i could only use small to medium vehicles to create the route as the larger vehicles were too distracting from the movie, also no matter which route i created it would always be a simple mater of navigation, nothing wrong with that however I am a bit of a sadist when it comes to these things and also I wanted the street to be a feature in the map, and so i created 5 alarmed cars, calm down they are not all active, only 3 are active in any one round, like alternate which cars that are alarmed do change however.
after the street the survivors must battle through the harbour where the chopper is waiting, now the film itself does not give much away about this area and so this was my chance to add some artistic license and created a section of the harbour which had been exporting people to an evacuation point which added a second layer of storyline to the harbour, while not feeling out of place. In the climax of the first level the survivors run for the chopper, but the films characters are assumed to not have noticed the survivors and take off leaving the survivors in trouble, in desperation the survivors squeeze into a speedboat and roar off after the helicopter leading us into map 2.
