9th August 2009 - New Trailers

Sweating over the game recently. I've finally put together a couple of new trailers. Here they are!

update 15th july 2009

You’re in a garden surrounded by tall buildings. It’s dark but there are distant noises that sound like groans and screams. Walking toward an alley you peer and see a figure. It sees you, makes an unearthly sound and starts sprinting towards you; it’s orange eyes glowing and fixed with an expression of mindless rage. It strikes out at you and you leap out the way running for your life toward the main road. But the road is filled with more and more of the creatures. All their eyes glowing orange. All fixed upon your destruction. You see a car on the road, its doors wide open, the keys in the ignition, you jump in and drive before they can drag you away. As you drive you knock down every creature that stands in your way. You drive because your life depends on it. You drive toward the bridge and just hope that this is one road that hasn’t been mined.Welcome to my newest map. There’s no hurry. You can wander around at your leisure. That is if you can survive the persistent zombie attacks. The street lamps glow through the rain but this remains the darkest level. The eerie quality of a dull twilight adds to the nightmarish quality of the horror that surrounds you. You may decide you don‘t want to hang around. It may be a little… intense.. You may want to head for the tunnel that leads… well… Let’s not spoil things eh.

I’ve added an effect called Iron Sight. This basically means you can look right down the barrel of the gun and see what you’re shooting at through the crosshairs. You can turn iron sight off and off according to your preference but it might make aiming your handgun a little easier when you know you have a zombie in your sights.

But I haven’t just been adding this map and playing around with weapons aiming. I’ve also been creating and coding a brand new creature by the name of Zombo. This is an affectionate nod to the character recently created by Al Ewing and Henry Flint for 2000AD. The creature is also inspired by Hell Knight from Doom the movie. The look of the creature bears some resemblance to both Hell Knight and Zombo but has its own unique characteristics.

My next step is to create the city centre. This is going to be partly inspired by London’s west end and filled with bright neon lights, bars, and restaurants and night life. I needed to build something that would offset the oppressive dark atmosphere of this level. I’m hoping that this next area will be my most detailed.

Video Games

There was a time when children used to run and play and laugh and frolic in the sun while darting between speeding cars on the M25. Of course there are many people who still feel that sunshine is good for you and not the cause of heatstroke and skin cancer and it may be that today’s young aren’t getting out in it enough. I have to confess, however, that given the choice of actually risking my life climbing trees or causing harm to other people’s lives by throwing things at them from those same trees I prefer the dark, mysterious and intensely violent world of the video game. I like to exercise my primal instincts fighting my way through hordes of zombies. Caught in a grim and cathartic fight for survival I can walk away, after an hour or two, without even needing to clean the blood from my semi-automatic.

The gaming experience really only comes alive for me when I believe in it. I like to be confronted with the consequences of my actions and if I lack stealth or wisdom or the ability to negotiate my way through puzzles and obstacles I expect to pay the ultimate price… Game Over.

In designing the 7 Tasks modification I’ve added elements that some gamers probably won’t notice. The main advantage of modern games over those of ten to fifteen years ago is that now we can have fully textured worlds. Your footsteps echo on cobbled stones or sink into snow or mud. Birds scatter as you approach. Trees catch reflections of light. A room that has been inhabited by people is filled with the objects they owned. I’m constantly adding such details to my map. Hopefully even those players who don’t notice these details will still feel that added sense of entering a believable world.

On Saturday, working from a rougher version of my map, I put together a minute long teaser trailer. Obviously this is a work in progress and it only shows one small semi-developed area within a single level but I wanted to put it out there anyway to show people how things were advancing. See what you think:

7 Tasks: What's New?

Last time I said I wanted to complete the following: A zombie with no arms with it’s own animations, an AK-47, and new blood effects. I’ve accomplished an AK-47 and new blood effects but haven’t yet got round to the armless zombie. I’ve also completed a new zombie texture which, according to the people who‘ve seen it, are bloodily effective. In addition to this I created glowing eyes for the zombie, and a handful of new weapons. The weapons I’ve completed so far are a baseball bat, a fire axe and a pulse rifle. I’m quite fond of the bat because there‘s something about a bat that seems tangible; like you could pick up almost anything and use it as a weapon (I’m thinking of adding breakable furniture which could be used in the same way). I’m also developing a shovel because there’s just something iconic about attacking (and possibly beheading) a zombie with a shovel. I like weapons that you can thwack things with.

The map I’m working on at the moment has to be the most exciting for me so far. It’s a section of a city that you can wander around freely discovering many hidden areas. Within that map there is a destination point from which you can carry on with the rest of the game but there are many different routes you can take to arrive there. Hopefully the depth of this mod will be impressively immersive. I want to make as much of the city as possible available to explore. There will also be a route through a cemetery for the hardier gamer who doesn‘t mind being up to his neck in flesh eating zombies. Alternatively you could take to the road and find a car or swim through the sewers (luckily nobody has perfected smellovision yet).

I hope to include a number of puzzles to be solved and keys to be discovered that will open up more areas within the mod but this week I’m working mainly on improving this map.

That’s pretty much it for my latest update. As soon as I’ve completed this map I want to put up a video on YouTube and embed it here.

Eastern Condors (1987)

In a time of desperation the American army call in two Chinese lieutenants. They are asked to go on a mission to Vietnam to destroy dozens of American warheads that were left behind during the Vietnam war. On this mission they take10 criminal convicts with them. The only thing is they don‘t know what the mission is. As all 10 men jump out of their plane to reach ground level their lieutenant is alerted that the mission has been cancelled. They all jump down to start their dangerous mission.

“Eastern Condors”, AKA “Dung fong tuk ying”, was directed by Sammo Hung; a Martial Arts expert who has his own style of making Martial Arts movies. He also made classics like “Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars” and “Mr Nice Guy”. Sammo also plays one of the lead characters in the film named Ming-Sun Tung. This film also stars famous action choreographer Yuen Woo Ping ( choreographer of Kill Bill Matrix etc…)

One of the many things great about this film is the way characters stand out in the memory, they come across as real people with their own idiosyncrasies rather than bland cardboard soldiers whose only role is getting killed; that job’s been taken by the bad guys. Their liveliness adds warmth to the film and makes each death scene matter. The action in this film is different from that in other war movies. Fast moving Martial Arts is combined with more standard bang, bang action. The skills of Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung are well employed to make every scene visually memorable.

For me the stand out scene was the final battle in the arms depot between Yuen Biao and Yuen Wah, the chief villain whose slim form and almost comical laugh belies the fact he is the most powerful fighter in the film. When Yuen Biao finally collapses, Sammo steps in and finishes Wah with a grenade sandwich.

Eastern Condors is a truly fascinating variation on the men on a mission type of movie such as “The Dirty Dozen” and “Inglorious Bastards”. Well worth the rental price.

What is "7 Tasks"?

“7 Tasks Source” uses the “Half-Life 2” engine to tell the story of Charlie Crown. Crown is a scientist working for the Hypothesis Research Facility, a company engaged by the government to run top secret research projects. He becomes involved in a mission to recover certain sensitive materials; materials which may have originated from an alien dimension which could be used to create havoc. This mission leads him to encounter a number of aliens and zombies and other creatures who all seem bent on making Mr Crown history.

My inspiration for “7 Tasks” was… Wait…. I’m probably getting ahead of myself. My name’s Fred. Fred Turner. I am 13 years old and I’m the developer of “7 Tasks”. I live in Littlemore; a part of Oxford, England that lies on the trans-dimensional fault lines between Heaven and Hell. I’ve long been drawn to the infinite possibilities that lie in the world of gaming and it seemed only natural that I enter that world by working on a modification of “Half-Life 2”; a game which, itself, seems to stand at the bridge between the world we know and something much darker.

It all started with one map… I was at my grandmother’s and found myself writing a story that seemed to come from the deepest recesses of my mind. As with many ideas I put it to one side and forgot about it. Several months later I found the story in my room and found myself thinking: “Why not? This could work as the plot for a modification of Half-Life. I’ll give it a shot!” So I started up “Hammer” the “Half-Life 1” mapping program and started creating a map based on the story. I created the opening scene in which Charlie meets with Larry, the HRC company representative. When the first map was complete I saw how this could be a great game mod, my only obstacle was that I had no idea how to create a game mod.
It took a bit of internet based research but eventually I found a way. I got loads of mapping and texturing resources (like Wally and Gimp) and ended up creating an entire level.

After playing around with simple mapping I decided that I wanted zombies; the traditional kind with rotting flesh and blood covered jaws. As the zombies in Half-Life 2 have huge parasites attached to their skulls I needed to make some serious changes for my own story. I found a useful forum called ‘TWHL’ which is a “Half-Life 1” and “Half-Life 2” modification resource. I posted a question on how to get rid of these head crab things and somebody gave me a link to a site called Valve Developer Community. Here there was information on using C++ with which I could code my own zombies.

After editing the zombie I thought that “7 Tasks” needed more changes than a simple zombie adjustment. I looked online for all kinds of coding tutorials. After getting the ones I thought were important I only ended up using about four but those four were enough to give me a good start in making my own code.

I got a modelling tutorial from TWHL and studied this. My first model was not success but I kept working on it until I had something I was satisfied with. I may have got my models working but I soon found out that this was an extremely time consuming hobby.

After creating about a million test maps to play around with I got used to mapping for “Half-Life 2” quite easily and am now comfortable working with all the coding and mapping resources I picked up.

The other day I created my own zombie animations by mixing the codes for zombie animations and the codes for human animations. The result was a zombie who can move like one of the infected from the film “28 Days Later”. I thought I might as well try my hand at animation as well and created a zombie standing animation from the ground up.

What I hope to have accomplished next is an all new walking animation and a zombie who has lost his arms. I’m also creating to an AK-47 to be used in the mod as well as new blood effects.

Well that’s about it then. Thanks for reading.