Decadence News

State of Decadence - Part Three: All the little things

Tue Sep 23 05:21:44 -0700 2008

With characters and the capture system being the most prominent features of Decadence, it's all the little things that tie the whole experience together. As I mentioned in earlier State of Decadence articles, this is a rundown of features that are complete (except for a bit of tweaking of course) and in-game.

One of our promises we speak of on our website is that we will not feature a HUD in Decadence. This is somewhat still true today; it just depends on where you draw the line. As of today; we have no HUD elements in first person view. The damage information has been taken care of by a damage shader which blurs and darkens your vision. The same technique is used with Zoe's and Nikita's poison arrow. When you get hit with the arrow, the screen will get a green tint and blurry to disorientate you, not to mention the changes to your movement and mouse speed. You'll know when something happen to you, that's for sure.

Another feature that just got finalized the other week is the ammunition indicator on the weapons. Every weapon has unlimited clips, so the only thing you need to keep track of is the amount of bullets in your current clip. While there's no way of saying exactly how many bullets you still got in your clip, a warning light will come on the weapon when you're running low. This light can be anything from a LCD display as we got on the more advanced weapons, to as simple as a reused Christmas light on another weapon. When you're low on ammunition, the light will start flashing alerting you to the problem.

We have been play testing Decadence since pretty much day one, and testing is something very important to us and the way we work. To us, iterations are the way to go. Decadence has been in the state of tuning for quite a while now. This means that no big design changes are being made and we try to present the features and gameplay we got in a polished state. We have had some students and teachers come over and visit us at our little office at the university, and the feedback we got from these tests were positive while there were a couple of things we needed to address. Many of these comments were player feedback related, such as problems with knowing where the capture zone was, player identification, the ability to revive and so on. Some of these can be solved by information represented in the game world, such as a yellow and black warning decal on the ground to indicate where the capture zone is. Others were not as easy to solve, and this is where we will probably ignore our no HUD rule a bit. We want Decadence to be easy to learn so using some on-screen information is necessary. We're talking about adding a small icon above your team mate to indicate that the character is friendly, the same with the capture console. You don't want your players to be confused when they start a map, but at the same time, you don't want to use too much graphics and interface to interfere with the immersion. However, a bit of abstract graphics to convey information won't break the immersion and we believe that this is going to solve many problems for new players. However, if you do like the no HUD approach you can rest assured that we like it as well, and we won't go overboard with information on your screen; just the right amount to help you out.

Blog: Pomp heads for GRIN!

Fri Sep 12 10:05:15 -0700 2008

As the first member of the Decadence team goes pro I thought this would be a good time to shed some light on our beloved member Pontus ”Pomp” Karlsson.

Pomp has been with us since the very beginning of Decadence and started out as a environment artist at the team, then became level designer as well as contributed a lot to the game design of Decadence.

I think I speak for everyone in the team when I say that Pomp really has taught us all pretty much everything we know about texturing. Without him Decadence would never have been born. His enthusiasm for environment art, hardcore photoshopping and photography has truly inspired everyone in the group.

We all wish you all the best of luck as an environment artist at GRIN in Gothenburg! You are always welcome at our office and we will keep your workstation ready should you ever return <3.

State of Decadence - Part Two: Characters and Weapons

Thu Sep 11 06:49:20 -0700 2008

In this edition of State of Decadence, we're going to take a closer look at the characters you play as in Decadence, their roles, tactics, and what kind of weapons they wield.

The characters are one of the most important features in Decadence. Not only do all the characters have a back story and in-game voice acting, but they will also decide how you play the game. All together, there are four characters in the mod with their own unique appearance divided into two teams. The character you pick will decide what kind of weapon you get. There's an offensive and a supportive weapon both with a secondary fire mode, and these weapons is featured on both teams so there won't be a balance issue.

Let's take Zoe and Echo as an example. Echo was the first character announced for Decadence and he serves the purpose of being the aggressive character that always goes first into battle. Echo's weapon is a fast firing heavy machine gun built from scrap lying around the city. You can do a lot of damage if you're up personal with your enemy but the spread of the bullets makes it very hard to kill enemies at long range. If you're not happy with the amount of damage it can put out, the Harley as we call Echo's weapon, has a secondary fire mode which allows you to load up as many as 15 bullets and release them in a very short time frame into your opponent. You don't want to turn around a corner to find Echo with his loaded up Harley in your face, that's for sure! The secondary fire mode is only useful at very close range since the spread is even worse and you'll have to get used to handle the recoil.

Zoe on the other hand is best if used at long range. She is able to fire bursts of bullets with a steady hand into her target, and if you're sneaky enough, the enemy won't even know where it came from. Even though she has the upper hand when it comes to taking out enemies from afar, if she runs into someone at close range there's usually a problem. There are situations like this where her secondary fire comes in handy. Zoe is able to fire a poison dart which will slow down and confuse her opponent. This allows Zoe to outmaneuver for example Echo in a face-to-face encounter. Not only is this good in close combat, but an excellent support weapon for you and your team mate when storming the water node.

The first in-game screenshots!

Tue Sep 09 06:38:29 -0700 2008

Hello everyone!

I’ve taken the liberty to update our media gallery with two new in-game screenshots. One of the screenshots is showing off our damage shader which will replace the health counter that would otherwise be on the HUD. The shader gets more intensive the more damage you receive and will fade out when you regenerate your health.

So head over to the media page and check them out!

State of Decadence - Part one: The Capture System

Mon Sep 08 14:15:11 -0700 2008

News hasn't exactly been flying out of the Decadence camp lately, but that doesn't mean we’ve slowed things down. I'd like to take this moment to re-cap and inform you where we currently are in development of Decadence. With the risk of being lengthy, this news post will consist of a number of posts released in regular intervals.

As some of you might already know, the team behind Decadence is also friends with each other in the real world, and we're all studying game development at the University of Skövde. This allows us to involve Decadence in our university work for school credits. So now when the summer is over, the whole team has gathered once again to work full time on the mod as part of a university course.

The most important news of all, and something the team is really proud of, is that Decadence is fully working. All important features are implemented and working. Of course, there's still some tweaking to be done and hours of testing still left, but it's really nice to see the mod in a fully working condition. This has, however, some negative impacts on the development; a game test can easily last for three hours and everyone is enjoying the mod enough to stop working (which is one of our favorite pass times otherwise). However, there's still programming work left to be done, so our dear programmer can't take a break just yet! Neither can the art department, which is playing catch up to the programming at this point.

The topic of this news post will be the capture system. The capture system for Decadence is one of the key gameplay features and something we’re really happy about.

Every map in Decadence is divided into three smaller levels or arenas as we like to call them. The neutral arena is where the match starts out in, with two base arenas belonging to each of the teams. Each team fights over control of the water node in each arena of the map and when a water node has been taken over, the game moves on to the adjacent arena in favor of the winning team. The match will go back and forth like a tug-of-war until one team has captured the water node in the enemy's base arena.

The capture system in place to make this work has been tested since day one, and we're really happy with the system we got right now. Here's the basic run down of how the system is in-game right how:

To capture a water node, a team member needs to be in proximity of a water node console which is located close to the actual water node. The speed of the capture will increase if you're two players in the capture zone at the same time. The console has a screen displaying two progress bars, one bar for each team representing how close they are to capturing the water node. However, if an enemy moves into the capturing zone, the capture will stop until the enemy retreats or is killed. If you manage to get yourself killed in the middle of a capture, the amount of time you spent in the capture zone will be saved into something we call a bucket. The bucket saves 80% of the time you managed to stay in the capture zone without getting interrupted, so when your team returns to the capture zone after getting killed, you will almost start where you left off.

What's more, there's an additional bucket in the base arenas called a permanent bucket. As the name suggests this bucket saves 90% of the time captured into a permanent bucket, which means you could lose the arena but when you return, there's still something in the bucket waiting for you so you don't have to start over from scratch.

If you manage to capture the last water node in the enemy's base arena, you win the match!

And as an extra treat, here's a screenshot of how it looks in-game. The dark colors represent old capture times (the bucket) while the light colors show you where you are right now.

Blog: Time to play some Decadence!

Sat Sep 06 03:06:58 -0700 2008

Hi everyone!
It's time for a small update on how the mod is progressing. The summer holidays are over and everyone is back in Skövde ready to work on the mod. We will start working 100% this Monday.

During this week we've had some really great and unexpected game design victories that really pushed the progress of the mod forwards. We do now have a fully working version of the mod with all important features implemented. The stuff that is left are mostly cosmetic or to help new players easier understand what's going on.

We have started letting classmates and other curious people who passes our ”office” at the university play the mod. The response has been very positive, personally I’m quite surprised over how quick everyone can pick up the game and understand the game mechanics. It takes about 5 minutes until the players understand it and start spitting curses on their enemies shooting wildly and try to apply smart tactics to gain control over the water node.

No serious game tests have been performed at this point of time, but will probably start quite soon as our producer, Mollstam, has come up with a good plan on how to put a quality assurance team together and assembled other regular game testers.

We have also talked about open beta release dates and such, but I will not make any promises at this time. :) Lets just say that it might be a bit sooner than you think. :P

Blog: News from da programmer!

Mon Aug 18 07:12:19 -0700 2008

Hello all, I’m Johan, the programmer of Decadence. I’m going to talk about the current development period that is coming to an end. As you may have noticed if you have followed the development of Decadence, most of the team worked 100 % on Decadence for ten weeks prior to the summer holiday (myself not included). During the summer most of the team have not been working actively on the mod, we have been three or four that have worked on the mod full time now during 10 weeks but we have gotten very far.

I am primarily going to talk about the code and how we are proceeding with the implementation of the gameplay. Since I am the only coder on Decadence I was a bit behind when the summer started since the rest of the team had been working hard for ten weeks prior to that.

First it’s important for you all to know how the main gameplay in Decadence work. Each map is made out of three distinct arenas (smaller battle grounds). On every arena is a water node and the main objective, on each arena, is to take over the water node. When a team takes control of an arena they proceed to the next one. If one team controls all of the arenas they have won.

This summer most of the core features of Decadence have been implemented and some problems have come up. Because we have been so few who have worked actively on the mod during the summer the testing has been very difficult. So currently we sit with a totally untested water node system, a semi implemented (on the graphics side) water node progress representation and a whole lot of other things.

The coming weeks we will really start testing the gameplay at full speed again and now since we have some new maps it will be really interesting to see how the gameplay turns out.

Will keep you updated.

Blog: Watch out for 61!

Fri Aug 01 15:15:22 -0700 2008

During the past week me and Mollstam have been designing the sound system of Decadence. Since Decadence is a total conversion, we have to replace all in-game sounds as well. Luckily, Decadence does not require that many sounds compared to most first person shooters today. We are not going to have any physics or breakable objects, which limits the impact sounds with quite a lot. However since we aim on making a personal shooter in which the characters play a big part we have a lot of custom sounds related to the characters.

The sound system in Source simply works like this; the game code looks for a specific sound (say a barrel hits the ground) in a script file, which then tells the game code which sounds that should be played in that specific case. Here comes the tricky part. Since we have decided to make a total conversion we had to redirect all sounds from their original directories to the Decadence-audio, even the sounds that we probably won't be using, like the sound emitted when a player steps on a grenade, when she shoots a watermelon.

This script-file was about 4000 rows long and took quite a while to get through. But it was well worth it. We can now guarantee that all sounds emitted, no matter what, will be our own recorded custom sounds.

I'm also pretty sure that the audio is the most well prepared and best designed system in the whole Decadence development. This is because the whole game is pretty much done from a design perspective and most of it programming-wise is also done, which made it a lot easier for us to predict which sounds that were required. Currently there are roughly 60 game specific sounds plus 44 character-related sounds. Then we have music, which is about 12 tracks with varying lengths. Luckily we already have a musician and a sound effects artist on the team, however we are currently looking for voice actors.

We gave each sound in Decadence a unique ID and recorded a computer voice saying these ID numbers when a specific sound is emitted to make it easier for our Sound Effects Artist to identify sounds in the game world. It's pretty annoying to have every sound be replaced with a synthetic voice just saying an ID, but you learn pretty quick which numbers to look out for :P. For example 3 is Echos primary fire, so when your computer starts spamming ”3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3!” you better get the hell out of there ^_^ . 61 is also really scary, which is the ID of the sound emitted when a tranquilizing dart misses and hits a wall. You really don't want to stay there long enough to make your enemy get ready for another shot!

Team Size +1

Fri Jul 25 07:38:15 -0700 2008

Our hunt for a SFX Artist has finally paid off! We've made space on our team page for Christopher "Cade" Diehm who's got about 5,000,000 sounds to make - lucky him!

In other news: We're rushing forwards in development and we're preparing for 100% of the team working 100% on the mod after the summer.

Welcome Cade!

Blog: Alpha reached!

Sun Jul 13 08:58:54 -0700 2008

It was about one week ago when a friend asked me how far we have gotten that I realized that we actually have passed Alpha stage. We have been working so hard and so much has been happening every day that we all completely missed this fantastic milestone!
Since alpha is a quite lucurative term in software development I thought it would be a good thing to let you know how we are defining these things. This a quote out of our milestone document:

The purpose of the Alpha version is to have a version with all the features of Decadence implemented which can be tested and enjoyed by the decadence team, and perhaps a few selected individuals outside the team. When the Alpha stage is reached, the overall feeling of the game should be done, both visually and game play-wise. After the Alpha-stage, a feature lock will be present.

Classes must be fully implemented, with primary and secondary fire. Primary fire should be tuned and feel balanced between the two classes. One ore more character models need to be in-game with appropriate animations, as well as the characters weapons, both world and first person versions. One level should contain level design good enough to work as a template for all decadence levels. Core features should be tuned and bug-fixed by designers and programmers. Audio and menu graphics are not needed.

• Two classes Fully Implemented (primary weapons tuned)
• Four characters Concept stage (Two characters done and in-game)
• In-game weapons Implemented
• Three levels Concept stage (One level with graphics)
• Core features Tuned
• Audio not implemented
• Menu graphics not implemented

Currently the game is fully playable (and sometimes also enjoyable :P) and all theese criterias have been met. Currently we focus tweaking the gameplay using parameters provided by our programmer. We have noticed that its most important to make things feel good before you start balancing stuff. Run speed, rate of fire, ammo and such are extremely sensitive values and really have to feel just right. Other than that we work hard on level design and have come a long way in implementing the two remaining characters. A media update with characters is about two months away though.

Things are going really well right now, and everything is right on track. The only thing that bugs us is that we still miss a good audio guy, don’t hesitate to mail us if yoiu think you got what it takes!

New Screenshots

Fri Jun 27 11:36:05 -0700 2008

Hey,

Just wanted you guys to be aware of that the media section has been updated with some fresh screenshots. They give you a good example of how the environment in Decadence will look like, so make sure to check them out.

Things are moving fast through development so we'll probably have something new to report in a while.

Until then...

Blog: Team structure

Thu Jun 26 11:00:27 -0700 2008

Hello everyone, its been a few weeks. Today I'm going to talk about something that has been changing a lot lately within the Decadence team: the group structure.

Introduction
One thing that i like to criticize about international mod developing teams is that they more than often are huge. This is of course a natural response to the insane demand todays gamers have when it comes to quality they expect and the increasing complexity of the game engines. It has become more or less impossible to keep up with the quality you can see in todays games and keep the team together at the same time when making a free mod.

One thing one could do to avoid falling into this trap is to aim at a very small but highly polished game content-wise. This is what we try to do with Decadence. Despite the fact that the amount of content is quite low compared to other games out there, the mod really demands a huge chunk of work hours to be pulled through. When making a game a lot of the work becomes repetitive if the same person works on the same thing all the time. Since we are a really small team only consisting of eight members we had to find a way to avoid this, which we did by creating a quite unique team structure.
The closest thing to how our group structure is actually anarchy. Democracy within game development teams has always been the rare and dangerous alternative to the much more appreciated dictatorship backed up with a strict hierarchy. Anarchy has never even been an option because of its chaotic nature. How is it that we prefer this method?

How our team structure works
Instead of handling out positions to everyone we take a look at the things that need to be done, and then everyone chooses something that he or she wants to work with from that list. The main reason is because we are such a small team and there are a lot of things that needs to be done which forces us to be very flexible. This has actually made us learn many different areas of game development in addition to our focus area which is really a valuable thing!

The good things
Because we can choose what to do from this list our work is as alternative as we want it to be. One day a first person weapon needs to be created, the other a prop needs some finishing touches and then maybe view-bobbing needs to be designed, its all up to oneself what to do. Most of us has two different jobs that we work with in parallel, so when you get tired of making one thing, you can switch to the other. For example, Claes currently designs levels, but he also works with finalizing the textures of two of the remaining secret characters. Me, on the other hand, works with a first person weapon, and will soon start to work with level design in parallel with the weapon as the core game mechanics are being finalized. Also, Henrik had mainly worked with game design and level design until a while ago when he got tired of it and decided to do some environment art, it worked out great and now he has completely left the game and level design areas and are focusing on getting better at modeling and texturing. This is fine since most of us knows level design already, and our new producer Tobias has agreed upon working with taking notes of the design decisions we make.

The bad things
Of course there are bad things about working like this as well. First and foremost, there are cases in which a problem becomes a lot bigger that it might have been if there where someone who was claimed responsible for it. Since we have no bosses and no leads, its really easy for everyone to put the blame on someone else if something bad happens. Avoiding this required maturity and some courage, which luckily everyone in the team has, which allowed us to avoid any major incidents.
Another bad thing is that it is difficult to assigning boring tasks to anyone since we primarily chose by ourselves, but this is mostly avoided by choosing a boring task in parallel with a more funny and challenging task.

Conclusion
I do believe there are pros’ and cons about everything, this includes team structure. There are no ultimate solutions. One must chose a team structure that works best for the team, and not because it worked good for a another team, or because its known to be good. This is a fundamental thing really.

In other news i found a nice picture of me, Claes and our lovely Sara when we promoted ourselves at Swedish Game Awards! (Note the awesome IRL fresnel effect :).)

Introducing Zoe and Much More

Thu Jun 19 12:02:32 -0700 2008

We're happy today to be able to feed you with new features and most of all to introduce a new playable character!

Meet Zoe Maximilia, fighting to regain her families honor back to back with Echo, whom you already know. Zoe prefers some range between herself and her prey as her weapon fires bursts with good accuracy but not with as high speed as Echo's Harley. If the target gets to close, however, she can use her secondary fire to shoot a tranquilizing dart which partly paralyzes her enemy. Read more on Zoe's character page.

More than introducing you with a second playable character we're happy to provide you with a new and fresh web site. Although it's a bit rough around the edges it will, in the end, become the perfect home for the Decadence Community.

One big feature of the new site is the ability for you to take part of the exciting story introduction to the world of the game. As you know, Decadence tries to get away from other shooters by providing serious and well thought purpose of the fighting for those who seek it. With only four characters being developed we're really able to get in deep with each of them to provide you with something extra. When you're done reading here, make sure you stop by the story introduction, it's well worth it!

Other than that I'm happy to report that we're making some real progress in developing Decadence. Progress, however, that isn't quite ready for the public eye just yet, but watch out for more juicy content in the future. :)

Until then, take care.

Characters Updated

Wed Jun 04 12:52:38 -0700 2008

If you've been hanging around on our about page you've probably read that Decadence will feature six unique characters over three different classes. However, for us to be able too provide you guys with even more polished and interesting characters a decision to only have four characters over two classes has been made. One of these four you already know, Echo, and a second character will be announced very soon(you didn't get this form me.. >_>).

The goal is to have the two classes complement each other, creating a kind of equilibrium between the teams which will make you and your teammate's skill count even more.

That's what we've got for you this time, but check this space really soon and you'll be able to feast your eyes on something awesome.

Until then...

Blog: Adventures in Stockholm

Tue Jun 03 07:56:05 -0700 2008

Hello everyone! Time for an update :).

Last friday we hit a milestone for the project and the summer holidays has kicked in. Some of us has decided to work on the mod during the holidays.
We finally have gotten our programmer Johan back as he finished a school project and is currently working hard with implementing the remaining features. Tobias is doing a great job as our new producer writing monthly mails and keeps in touch with all the external contributors. Me and Claes are working with level design at the moment.

A few weeks ago me,Claes and Sara had the opportunity to visit Swedish Game Awards, a contest aimed towards Swedish university students held in the swedish capitol Stockholm. Later that night we joined the big party after the ceremony. A tip from the coach for you guys who get the opportunity to party with the big companies; don't get as drunk as i was ^_^. We pitched the idea for some of the big companies in Sweden including Starbreeze and Avalanche studios and they seemed impressed with our efforts; especially the fact that we are doing all content ourselves. One ho didn't get too excited however, was the editor in chief of fz.se; a very well known swedish gaming site. He axed us for doing way to little PR and boasted about having like 250 emails a day (he was very eager to let us know this important fact, perhaps its some kind of e-penis thing among editors? ...lol).

Well, how about that? Isn't it quite fascinating that the editor in chief of such a huge site failed to realize that good reporters don't actually sit on their buts and wait for things to happen? The mod community hasn't got any chance to compete with big companies when it comes to PR, and it is a known fact that a publisher spends as much money on marketing as they do on the actual development of the computer game. Yet, the mod community is a big part of what makes computer games so cool. Its a shame that they get lesser attention.

Blog: Meeting with the giants

Sun May 11 01:48:54 -0700 2008

Currently Decadence is in a really exciting state in development. Our university has granted us a small office space with 7 machines to work with decadence full time (40 hours/ week). This has of course led to a dramatic increase of content and other good things for the project. New stuff is being made every day, and it’s extremely rewarding to be working with the project.
We also had the opportunity to meet with representatives from the swedish game development studios GRIN (mostly known for Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter series as well as their current project Bionic commando) and Massive entertainment (known for Ground Control series and World in Conflict). The lead artist at Massive entertainment gave us some insight of their workflow at their studio which was very interesting. They worked very heavily with iterations, something that we have had in mind in some parts of development, but far from all of them. Here is how they worked when creating a new unit for the game;

Iteration 1: Make the mesh. No uv, just the mesh. Get it in-game and try everything out, if there arent complications proceed to iteration 2.
Iteration 2: Make UV and block out colors for the texture. Test in-engine again to make sure colors are consistent with the rest of the units and the world.
Iteration 3: When you are done with basic colouring and your lead has given you the go, it’s time to make the texture. This version of the texture is not final.
Iteration 4: Finalize texture and add normal and specular map.

This might seem a bit tedius but we have started to adopt this way of developing content for Decadence and its really refreshing. For ”lesser” models like trashcans, barrels, roots and such we usually combine iteration 1 & 2, as well as 3 & 4 since exporting to the source engine is a bit time consuming. However, for the important models (like characters, first person weapons and such) its important to work through all iterations.
We also learned that it is very important to work with all the important models (like the characters) simultaneusly and make sure that they are all on the same iteration level to keep consistency in quality. This is something that we hadnt thought of before, but it really helps out to work like this for other reasons as well. One character takes about 120 hours to make (mesh, texture, normalmaps & specular) and thats alot of time. If you would work on the very same character all the time you would get totally bored with it in the end, but if you worked on 4 at the same time you could easily switch to another character if you started to and then come back later to finish the current one some other time.

The decadence team working really hard in our new office.

In other news, we have got ourselves a new producer! Tobias Möllstam is now our new one,. He is really trying hard to adopt the Decadent lifestyle we have started to form by doing some really interesting wiki entries while being drunk the other night. Luckily no one was harmed ^_^.

Blog: Moving towards pre-alpha

Sat Apr 05 15:33:04 -0700 2008

Hello again! Its been about two weeks and here we are.

Progress
The core team are currently working full time with the project as we have been allowed to work on the mod as a part of a course at the university. On top of this wonderful thing we have also been allowed access to a small room with 7 machines to work with at the university (almost like an office!). I will hopefully be able to post some images of how it looks next time.

We are doing huge progress each day and it's really great to see how things are coming together art-wise. Our wonderful programmer (Johan) is sadly enough busy with another game project at the moment and has only time to work with us during weekends, but we love him anyways!

We have currently a fully playable version of the game, however it's NOT considered Alpha, not first prototype either. It still lacks a number of important features that makes it even more unique than it already is.

We usually test play about an hour a day to try out different parameters (such as cap time, weapon damage, spread and so on) and see how they affect game play. Its really exciting to see how the game develops into quite a unique experience.

Game play discussion
The game is currently very intense, much more intense than anticipated. The battles can turn really quickly as every kill really counts considering there are only two players in the opposing team. The game pace is also coming together really nicely. As one team is killed, and the other team moves for the control point, there will be a natural break for the defenders to take new positions until the attackers get a new chance to try to re-take the control point.
These mini-pauses, which currently lasts about 15-20 seconds, really reduces the fatigue you might have experienced when playing a too intense single-player game in which you are constantly attacked by AI soldiers for a very long time, or when you get killed first in a Counter-strike and has to wait several minutes for the next round.

One other really cool thing is how important tactics and strategy becomes when you are only two players. If you split up with your team mate you will have the ability to surprise your enemy from different angles, but you really loose backup as your friend could give you cover fire, or revive you when splitting up.
One other thing I noticed during tests is how efficient flank maneuvers can be when they are being executed accordingly. For instance, if me and my teammate attacks a control point from two different angles, I make sure that the enemies notice me by shooting at them like crazy, they will completely focus on what I'm doing and forget about looking in other directions. My team mate can then attack them from the flank and boom we get a really good head start in the mach while our enemies has to wait for respawn and try to stop us from capturing the control point.

Lastly we have also experimented with really long reload times to see how it affected game play. It turned out that if a player gets out of ammo during an intense firefight, he must run like hell as far away as he can while reloading. If the enemy happens to have enough ammo left, he will come charging after you like there was no tomorrow. Reloads isn't something you just do when playing Decadence, you really have to ask yourself wether it's worth the risk every time you do it.
A good team mate backs you up while you are reloading.

You really have to make sure that you have ammo if you are to survive long in the world of Decadence.
Every bullet counts...

Blog: Net-Compiler 2.0

Sun Mar 23 10:13:05 -0700 2008

It's been about two seeks since the last post, and now it's time to reveal one of the tools that is being developed by our wonderful programmer Johan to help us out with various things.

Today I will talk about Net-Compiler 2.0 and how this great tool helps us out in the compile process, but first I will give you a brief history of the tool.

Net-Compiler 1.0 got finished round July last year. It was a simple program that let the level designer send a level to a remote computer, which would compile the level, and then send the finished level back to the level designer. At the time, I was the only level designer, and I had the slowest computer in the team which really crippled my workflow as I often had to do compiles which took quite some time. With this tool I could send the level to be compiled by the quad core monster computer that Johan had. As I mentioned before we probably spared around 50 work hours because of this tool.

Now, Net-Compiler 2 has arrived. It’s a complete redesign of the tool, which is infinitely more sophisticated and efficient.

In November 2007 Valve released what they called ”VMPI”, which stands for "Valve Message Passing Interface". What this does is that it can distribute a level to a number of computers and then let them each compile a section of the level by themselves. However; to make this work one would have to play around with the command prompt on all computers that one would want to help out with the compile process. Needless to say it is anything but user friendly.

Here is where Net-Compiler 2.0 comes in the picture. What Net-Compiler 2.0 is, is that it’s a graphical user interface that lets ut use this distributed compile functionality that dramatically improves compile times without the command prompt, and without having to tell all your friends that they have to start the tools every time you would want to compile on their computers.

To setup the program, you simply have to set the destination of VVIS, VRAD and VBSP and then specify the location of your mod as well as add your friends (that also has Net-Compiler) to the client-list and hit the “add job” button. Net-Compiler will then find out which clients that are online and start feeding them with pieces of the level and letting them each compile a section of the level. Anyone in the network can add jobs, so there aren’t servers or anything, the one that adds the job will act as a temporary server for the job.

Other goodies available are the ability to choose whether you want it to use a lot of processing power or let it be considered a low priority process to let you work with other things as it compiles the level. Net Compiler can also be minimized to the system tray and notify you as a level is being completed.

One other lovely thing is that the compile tools fully support multicore (which means that a dual core processor would compile a level about twice as fast as a processor with only one core). The other day we tested Net-Compiler 2.0 with 4 clients connected. Two of them were quad core machines, and the other two was dual cores. That’s 12 cores in total. One singlecore with equal processing power would probably have to compile the same level in about 8-10 times the time it took for us to compile the level!
Needless to say we are already conspiring to install the net-compiler 2.0 on all the university’s 200+ machines without the admin’s approval :P.

The downside with the program is that you really need a lot of bandwidth to be able to use the program without bottlenecks. During testing we noticed that 10mbit up and downstream is a bottleneck. 100mbit has proven sufficient, but with a big network with many clients connected it would be optimal with 1 gigabit of bandwidth. This is because the compile tools are sending tons of information back and forth all the time during the compile process. This downside does not affect us since we are all connected to a student network here in Skövde with access to 100mbit.

Currently the program is quite stable and does it's job quite well. We have chosen to keep the tool in house and do not have any plans on releasing the tool on the internet, at least not for quite some time however if the interest is big enough we might change that opinion.

In other news we will very soon start to work on Decadence fulltime at the university, so stay tuned for more info!

Blog: Status report

Wed Mar 05 12:27:37 -0800 2008

Hello everyone!
It's been a month since I posted anything here I apologize for that, but it has its reasons of course.
Some of you might have been wondering what we have been doing since last time we made a big media update.

Well, we have actually been working alot, however much of the stuff have been started, but are not yet finished. Currently the core team are struggling with a really tough course at the university and havent had time to work on the mod on a regular basis. But let's cut the negative stuff and talk about what's been accomplished!

The course prior to this one we artists had the possibility to work on models and such for the mod. We made alot of textures and models and have already been exporting some of it into the engine, however we have chosen not to show you guys any renders since we think its a bit lame to just show off beuty renders of props when you can put them into an environment and give you a more proper impression of how it will look like.

In addition to that we've had the opportunity to work with mr Theodore Wohng, our musician for Decadence in a "secret" project yet to be announced :). Its really great to work with you Wohng!

We have also got a new member onboard the Decadence team who will help us out with animations, both for characters and first-person stuff. Welcome aboard Erik Wiklund!

Our programmer, mr Johan Bernhardsson has programmed a nice application for us named "Net-Compiler 2" which distributes a level to a network of computers which compile a section of it and then puts it all together. This has really improved compile times with ALOT. Currently we havent noticed any upper limit for how many computers that can be connected to it.
I will talk more about Net-Compiler 2 in my following blog post.

Yorick is currently finalizing the background story for Decadence, and I can promise you, it's really awesome!

The work with Decadence will continue att flank speed as soon as this course is over. In our next course (named gameproject 2) the whole core team has been allowed to work with Decadence. This will allow us to work 8 hours a day, five day a week with Decadence at school for ten weeks. We will be given our own "office space" and everything. We will of course tell you guys about our progress as soon as we start the course.

Yes, by the way, we are currently looking for talented sound effect artists!
Send us an email if you think youve got the know-how!

Give me 10cc's of news - STAT!

Thu Feb 07 13:39:19 -0800 2008

Remember last time when I told you about the next update shouldn’t take too long? Well, me neither! I’m glad we can forget things together. It’s been a while now since our last update, and I’ve feel strangely compulsed to write the obligatory “We’re still alive!” news post.

I don’t have an awful lot to update with however, but trust me; we’re still getting stuff done! What I can show is a render of Echo’s weapon which somehow got the nickname “The Harley”. The key design philosophy of the weapons and gear is to take what the world has to offer and combine them to build or improve the gear you already have. You can clearly see what kind of components the Harley is built of, mainly an exhaust pipe and motorbike parts. You’re going to see more of this style in the future designs!

You know the drill; visit our media section to see the render!

Everyone likes interviews and so do we! We did an interview with halflife2.net a while back and there’s a lot of new more in-depth information on how the gameplay works, so it’s worth checking out. This is rather old news actually, seeing the interview was conducted in December of 2007, but it’s still interesting!

Until next time…

Blog: About our health system

Tue Jan 29 02:17:01 -0800 2008

Hello again!

A few days ago our programmer had made great progress in implementing our health representation system into the source engine. I wanted to share some of it with you as well as discuss more in detail how it will work in Decadence.

If you read about the health representation system in the about section it says something like this:
"Your vision will start to deteriorate when taking damage, and you will have a hard time trying to see. This will fade away if you take cover for a few moments."

This is pretty a very accurate and simple explanation of how it works. Lets discuss it in more detail: As you get hit by a bullet, you are in shock and get tunnel vision that for about half a second. This is created by a shader that simulates radial blur and darkened corners in the edges of the screen. This effect will be proportional to the abount of damage dealt.

As the tunnel vision dissapears after a short moment, some of the effect stays in the borders of the screen. This illustrates the amount of damage that has been dealt. After a few seconds, the health will start to replenish, and the darkened corners will dissapear illustrating that you are in full health again.

Currently theese effects are implemented and working using custom made pixel-shaders in rendermonkey. The quality of this effect will be dependent on you graphics card pixel shader support. Currently we have a few shaders under development for different pixel shaders, however we are pretty certain the lowest pixel shader we will support is 2.0. Players with graphics cards below this wont be able to see the health representation, or more likely not be able to play at all. This might be a subject to change.

Luckliy roughly 90% of all steam users has graphics cards that support at least pixel shader 2.0 accoarding to steampowered.com's hardware survey.

I'm would really like to show you guys a video of how the health representation looks like, but its a bit too early for that since there are alot of other in-game related stuff that needs to be done as well. Hopefully I'm able to do that within two months, but I cannot promise you anything :).

Blog: New codebase on the way

Sun Jan 13 09:31:20 -0800 2008

Mike Durand wrote:
The source code merge is done and tested, but we need to coordinate it
with the release with a Steam client update.

In the interim I'm working on some annoying bugs that I didn't get to in
December.

-Mike

About time...

I have heard a big cheer among all modders in my contact list the last few days. Everyone is really anxious to start working on their projects again.
Its really sad that this engine update contains very little of value for most of us.

Updated dynamic lighting is a pretty cool thing, if it werent for the gigantic performance loss.
Multicore support would also be a cool thing, if it werent for the fact that it has basicly almost no performance impact what so ever. I guess its only measurable when handling large amounts of particles.

Bah, this update is from my perspective pretty pointless, it has just taken alot of time to implement and wasn't worth the effort.
It's good that they finally managed to finish the bloody SDK. At least the tools have gotten some pretty handy new features, if Valve could fix all the bugs that came along...

As soon as the SDK is released the Decadence team can start working at 100% again, and I'm very eager for that to happen.

Blog: Morale killers

Sat Dec 29 15:25:44 -0800 2007

In this blog post I will discuss a few things that kills the morale and willingness to contribute in a team developing a mod, or a computer game. I got inspired to write this article when reading the BlackMesa Source’s Christmas 2007 Media Release. Not because of what it said, but of the positions they where currently looking for. In this article I will focus on morale killers from an artist’s point of view.

#1 Don’t give anyone too many repetitive tasks!
So, let’s start with the positions that the Black Mesa team are currently recruiting: “Compiling technician” who the fuck wants to work with compiling others models all the time..?
If you give one member of a team the job to create all the 20 crates for a game in one go he will probably become insane after making 8 of those 20. Creative minds need stimulation, and repetitive tasks are only stimulating to a certain point.
The Decadence team only consists of highly creative individuals, and we all really need to feel that we are doing something challenging most of the time, which can be a really difficult at times. To solve this we mix “boring” tasks such as creating a chair, with more challenging ones like creating a character, or a first person weapon. If someone in the team wishes to do a specific task he or she is of course allowed to do that, even if it’s beyond his or her area of responsibility.
Black Mesa on the other hand relies on a big team, in which each member is responsible for a very constrained and small task. This has its benefits, but seriously when the team is recruiting Compiling technicians I think they have gone a bit too far… That poor fellow will die out of boredom before he even starts!
We made sure that all artists in the team has great knowledge in how to export and compile models into the source engine, as well as how the engine works. This lets us discuss various issues together, and how to optimize our artwork. Our simple rule of the thumb is; if you get the task to create an object, it’s your responsibility to model it, texture it and put it into the engine yourself.

#2 Don’t constrain creative minds!
Everyone in a team must feel that they are allowed to be creative in some way, and shouldn’t be constrained more than absolutely necessary. The best way to do this is to give a team member a framework to work with, and then be allowed to throw around ideas with the rest of the team before getting to it. One great example of this is when Henrik (our game designer) set up the framework of the background story of decadence so that our story writer Yorick had something to go on when writing.
The framework was something like what is said on our website:

“The story of Decadence takes you far into the future, to a world where governments are scarce and survival is all that matters. Various attempts to grow food have lead to poisonous chemicals flowing through bodies of water, and plants growing in ways never thought to be possible.”

Yorick then started to make drafts and came up with ideas that he threw up at the wiki. Suddenly the whole team was discussing and suggesting ideas for the backstory. This was an extremely creative process and everyone that wanted could participate in the discussions. In these cases it’s very important to have someone responsible who has the final word to prevent stagnation in which two or more persons are arguing.
Another example is how we work with concept art. Its not unusual that artists are forced to make environments exactly like a concept art just because the picture itself is cool. We do feel that this is quite constraining since everyone wants to be creative and wants to make it their own. Therefore we merely use the concept as guidelines and pick ideas and elements from the concept into the actual environments. You can clearly see this in our media section when comparing the concept art with the in-game shots.

#3 Let everyone feel important and able to change things
It’s never fun to only do what you are being told. Sometimes you want to be able to contribute with ideas, and come up with better solutions without being rejected. In the decadence team we often have meetings in which we discuss many things regarding the game design. Everyone is free to say what they think about a certain feature or something that they think should be removed.
This way everyone is participating in the actual game itself, and everyone feels involved. For example Mollstam, our web designer, has become more and more involved with the project and his commitment has gone far beyond web designing.

Blog: Our pre-production

Sun Dec 16 03:18:01 -0800 2007

Introduction
If you haven't already read it, weve got an interview over at half-life2.net. One of the comments we got was from a very caring guy called “qdog” who gave us some very basic tips about common mistakes when creating a mod. A few days before this I also read the post mortem of Nightfall, a failed hl2 mod with some serious team related issues as well as lack of planning. I got inspired by this article, and this comment, to write how we (The decadence team) set up the pre-production phase of Decadence and how we did to avoid some of the biggest mistakes. I want to give the community our opinion of how things should be pulled off to minimize failure.

How did it all start?
It all started with our designer, Henrik, who presented a design draft for me, Johan (programmer) and Pontus (Artist). The design draft was very short, only a few pages in written format, but contained all the key features of Decadence. The mod was adjusted for a small team to be able to pull off. Note that the design draft is very simple and never explains anything in great detail. Its sole purpose is to give the reader an insight in what the mod is all about, what makes it unique and what makes it fun, nothing more nothing less.

Discussing the design draft
As soon as Henrik presented the design draft, we all sat down and discussed the idea from an artists, programmers and level designers point of view. Johan made it very clear what things he could and could not implement, I had my saying about the level design and the whole team discussed about the art and style we should have. Before we did anything, we took a look at ourselves and what knowledge we had, what knowledge we could acquire without too much effort, and what we needed someone to help us out with. It was pretty clear that we needed more knowledge about model and animation exporting to the source engine, so we spent a few weeks researching that area. At the same time Johan had a look at the source SDK. We also introduced Claes to the project since we understood that we needed more artists if we would be able to create a total conversion, even if the mod is far from epic, it really takes time to create all the custom content.

I believe this step is often missed, when a designer creates a draft, he immediately starts recruiting people that he thinks he needs to pull his idea off, instead of discussing the idea with representants from the different principles first and adjusts the draft after the feedback. Ask programmers, artists and level designers what problems that might arise, and what problems that WILL arise and what simply isn’t doable. Have solutions ready for ALL those scenarios before moving on.

Prototyping!
We started to make mockup levels as well as scripted some of the most important features into the levels. The scripts where really buggy and some features wasn’t possible to implement, but they did give us an idea of how the mod could be played and what issues that might arise. This was extremely helpful and gave us an insight in issues that we really hadn’t thought of at first.

I believe that this step is also not really taken seriously. Many think that prototyping takes time from development, this is only partially true. Prototyping takes some time from development, but if you prototype the right way, some of the content created can actually be reused further on. We created lots of levels that probably will, after hundreds of iterations, might end up in a final level.

Creating concept art and fleshing out the Design
In parallel with our prototyping phase, we had lots of discussions about the visual style. Claes did lots of quick concepts for this which we all discussed. Many ideas came up, many where scrapped, but some of the best ones where kept.
During this phase Henrik worked a lot on fleshing out the design document. We had lots of meetings in which we brainstormed lots of crazy ideas for the game design. All of these ideas where discussed with both our programmer Johan and us in the art team. Many ideas where scrapped because of time limitations, many where scrapped because of inconsistency, some weren’t possible to implement into the source engine, and some where just plain bad. However there were really good ones too and we made sure to keep those ones.

“kill your darlings” is something that many developers often talk about, this is because it’s such an important thing to do when working in teams. Just because YOU think it’s a good idea doesn’t mean that it IS a good idea. Listen to your teammates carefully. It’s also good to some sort of timeframe for the project, it will really help you out with estimating if the feature is doable within that timeframe. Constantly ask your programmer and artists about your ideas and if they are implementable.

All these stages where more or less done within three months from when the project started. Now we had a kickass visual style, a unique mod concept, original story and most importantly, we where now prepaired, we knew that we things we wanted to do was doable.

These phases might take longer for bigger projects, it might take shorter, but make sure you give these stages the time they need because these things will later on lay foundations for the rest of the project, and if you don’t make this as seriously as you possibly can, you will FAIL.

It’s been about three or four months since. We have done great progress since then, and I will for sure write about how we progressed from here in the future.

Stories from the Decadent world

Mon Dec 10 14:54:08 -0800 2007

One of our goals for Decadence is to create characters with a wide range of weaponry and background stories. They all got their reasons for what they are doing and what they fight for. The weapons are designed to allow a variety of game styles ranging from support, defense to offensive. Thanks to our relatively low player count, we’re allowed to offer more radical differences in how the various characters work and play, just to ensure that there’s always a character that will fit your favorite game style!

The first character we’d like to introduce you to is Echo Aelian. Echo will serve as a support character to provide cover for his teammate, both in the form of a portable energy shield and with the help of a massive onslaught of bullets from his heavy machine gun. Head over to the Characters section of the site to find out more!

In other community related news, we got an interview with the guys over at Halflife2.net which should be up and running in a couple of days, so keep watching this (or their) space for more information. Last but not least, we’d like to inform you about a competition Moddb got running for mods and indie games. Decadence is of course one of the mods up for voting so we’d like you all to go and vote for us! We promise to treat you good if you do!
The next news update shouldn’t be too long, and who knows, we might even have more stuff to show off then.

Oh one more little thing, We got two new concepts to show off in our Media section along with updated screenshots with higher resolution, enjoy!

Peace out.

Blog: Tools of the trade cont...

Thu Nov 29 14:59:40 -0800 2007

In this post I’ll continue to talk about tools, but from a completely different perspective. Today I will talk about Valves tools and what I think about the company’s support to the community.

I’ve always been a big Valve fan, mainly because their games are great, but one thing that really has made me so grateful was that it was thanks to valve that my interest for computer game development has become a lifestyle, and one day it will be my profession.
My friends at school and everyone in the Decadence team often like to tease me for my unconditional love for the Half-Life series as well as all other games produced by Valve. Despite of this, there are lots of things that really upset me about Valve and how the profile themselves, as well as their support for their tools.

One of the main things that really made me pissed recently is the Orange Box SDK update. I understand that the company has been under a lot of pressure to release the SDK tools. It’s been really obvious that everyone has been really eager to make portal and Team Fortress 2 maps, as well as taken part of all the new engine-wise goodies that Episode 2 had to offer.
That really doesn’t justify why they released a completely non working SDK one bit, they have only made things worse. It’s really obvious that they pretty much uploaded their tools right into Steam without testing anything. The worst thing is that Valve knew that the Orange Box wouldn’t work for shit; I mean they didn’t even remove the Perforce integrated stuff from the model compiler. A professional developer doesn’t just “forget” these things.

Another interesting fact on this is that Mike Durand (the guy responsible of the source SDK) decided to release the SDK on the morning, so he could act as support during the whole day. Now this is a really nice thing to do, but it also proves that he knew that the tools were completely broken.

Why release broken tools one might wonder? Probably because Valve isn’t really interested in testing the stuff themselves, they use us, as testers for their bugged updates instead of sit back for a while and try to make everything fool proof before uploading it to Steam. I personally think its perfectly OK to use the community as beta testers, as long as one has the choice to join the beta program, not the other way around.

Sometimes I wonder if they understand what actual damage that can be done by this kind of mistake. First off, they have managed to less stop the development for many mods until they fix the tools. Since we are waiting for the SDK base update, our programmer hasn’t been willing to make any coding for a month because we want to avoid a too painful migration of the code from the old build to the new engine. Ironically no one knows how long it will take before the SDK base update will arrive… Hopefully before New Year, but when Valve hopes anything, it’s not very likely to happen.
I also know a group of students at my university who works with a mod in a course who had serious problems with the tools as a result of the SDK update, even when using the
“ -engine ep1” command. They’ve got issues with meeting their deadline because of this and may fail their course because of this.

Valve has always profiled themselves as a very community friendly company with almost half of their staff originating from the community, and therefore they feel that it is important to invest in it.
In an interview with Gabe Newell over at driverheaven.net Gabe stated that they plan on “investing a lot of time and energy” into the development of the tools prior to the orange box release. Where is that investment when it’s really needed I wonder? As far as I have understood only one person is currently working on the SDK, and he is busy with fixing the buggy tools. And where are the tutorials about coding for the source engine as well as an explanation of how the animation system works in Source? I believe that Valve is relying too much on the community to write these kinds of things. The company is even making profit of it by selling DVDs explaining how you export your models, animate them and make maps to Source. How can a Gabe say that they invest in the community while selling DVDs teaching us how to make mods?

Its perfectly OK for a company to admit that they don’t invest in tools for their community if they believe they have little to gain, that happens all the time. But when a company says that they do invest a lot of time and energy into the community, but don’t I get very disappointed.
Compared to tools that come with Unreal Engine 3 and Crysis the Source SDK is many years behind. Light preview was available as early as in 1998 in UnrealED, how about that? Not to mention how much easier it is to export props into Unreal engine.

Now, nine years later, Valve has almost managed to implement lighting preview into Hammer.
Thank you very much…

What about all the code that you forgot to comment? What about the insanely difficult and time consuming exporting procedures to the source engine? What about all the tutorials that the community is desperately need?

Blog: Tools of the trade

Thu Nov 15 13:15:51 -0800 2007

When making a computer game, there is lots of time to save if the artists and designers are equipped with proper tools, we all know that. There are literally thousands of programs and plug-ins that can make our lives so much easier, and that can ensure that we make good and bug free games.

There are one question that I’ve been wondering about for ages, and that I would like to discuss in this blog post;
Why don’t all developers release the tools for their games? With the possibility to modify the content of a game, the community grows stronger… Right?

It was not until recently I found the answer to this question, very much thanks to Johan Bernardsson, our programmer of Decadence who really helped me look at this issue from a programmer’s perspective.
Let’s start discussing this question from a time and effort perspective. The first question one should ask oneself before making the tool is “is this really worth the effort?”. Making a good, user friendly, bug-free tool can take ages and requires lots of work from the programmer who writes it, but also lots of testing and bug-reporting as well as feedback from the artists and designers who use it.

Its often not worth the effort to make such a robust application, both money and time wise. Instead the company chooses to quickly make a tool that only works if you use it in the right way.

For another project, Johan programmed a level editor to help designers to quickly make single-player levels. The program was only going to be used by about two people in the project, and because of this, a minimum of time was spent developing it. The program was so buggy that it crashed instantly if you did anything that you wasn’t supposed to do, like printing a letter in a field that was supposed to contain numbers. These bugs were of course extremely irritating at first, but once you got used to them, you also learned how to avoid them. These bugs could of course be fixed, but then our programmer would have to spend days tracking them down. Time was nothing we had plenty of, so instead we learned to avoid them.

I can imagine that tools buggy as this one is common in the industry, and that is one of the main reasons why companies don’t release their tools.

We currently have one really useful tool in the decadence team that we call “Net Compiler”. The program sends un-compiled levels to a extremely powerful quad core machine, which compiles the level, and then sends the compiled level back.
We have saved hundreds of hours using this tool and it has really improved the workflow. Many friends from the community have been interested in the program and would like us to share it to the community, but we don’t.
Why? Because the tool is again only made to be used by a small group of people, and therefore is very, very buggy and un documented. If we would release the tool in its current state, our programmer would be flooded with hate messages and people wanting to get help.
We simply don’t have the time to deal with this kind of things.

We are currently thinking about creating a tool that would easily help designers with balancing the characters in Decadence by adjusting things like health, damage and such. If we would release this tool another big problem would emerge. People would probably instantly play around with all the numbers, and because all these things are server side, clients wouldn’t know if the server had been modded or not. Suddenly there would be hundreds of altered versions of Decadence where users had tweaked the MOD to their liking.

Would that be a good or a bad thing from our point of view?
Should developers regardless of the tools buggyness release their tools?
I guess there are no true answers to theese questions...

Updated Screenshots!

Wed Oct 31 16:20:29 -0700 2007

We would like to thank everyone who commented on our first media release a while back. We appreciate all the feedback we can get, which comes in handy when we try to improve Decadence in every way possible. So as a gift from us to you, I’d like you to feast your eyes on some updated screenshots in our media section. Not only is the lighting better, but you will also see new textures, models and brushwork.

Head over to the media section and keep the comments coming, we appreciate it!

The next update shouldn’t be too long from now, and will mainly focus on the story for Decadence. And who knows what else might be in there, so keep watching this spot (after you been watching our screenshots that is)!

Blog: Congrats Sara!

Mon Oct 29 01:36:55 -0700 2007

While everyone else in the team have been arguing, making compromises, accused eachother, fighted and done all those destructive things that boys do. Sara has silently been writing fantastic short stories about all the remarkable places in the world of Decadence to support artists and designers when creating the wonderful environments of Decadence.

Sara moved to Skövde to study computer game development with an emphasis on game design last year and studies in the same class as Henrik Alfredsson, our lead designer.
After a short while, she and Claes (one of our talented artists) got together and they now live in a nice flat one floor above me.

Sara has always been a very caring woman who, for some reason, seems to love to feed me… I have no idea why ^_^.
She is really good at making pies, which most of us in the Decadence team have had the honor to taste.

Congrats Sara on your 20th birthday!
You no longer need to make Claes buy the alcohol for you!

Blog: Our lovely Rubber Johnny

Thu Oct 25 10:20:15 -0700 2007

This is the very first blog post written in the history of Decadences serious, and unserious, blog posts. Let us make this one a lovely memory which we all can carry around for the rest of our lives.

Yes people, Im going to dedicate this first blog post to our very own little Rubber Johnny, Tobias “Mollstam” Möllstam, hand his ever ending support of the Decadence team.

Tobias is one of our newer members in the team. He moved to Skövde only a few months ago to study computer game development with an emphasis on game design. He and our game designer Henrik Alfredsson had grown up in the same neighborhood and are very close friends.
Tobias was introduced to the team as we needed a website, and without hesitation he started to work on the coolest website ever, the decadence website. Tobias has proved a great companion with a huge sense of humor and has picked up all our internal jokes impressively quick. He always shows great interest in the MOD and supports us in every way he can.

The ultimate proof of his dedication was when we had our Artist-LAN a week ago, and suddenly Tobias showed up bringing us cake.
Needless to say, we all love you Tobias!

Blog: Report from the Artists

Sat Oct 20 07:01:10 -0700 2007

Hello this is Coulianos, lead artist and producer of Decadence, reporting directly from the second official developer LAN. This LAN consists of the core artist team; Me, Claes, Pontus and Björn. The focus on this LAN is to make the dummy map look more like our vision of Decadence.

We have also taken all the great feedback we got from you guys into account, and I can promise you that we will be releasing some really cool stuff on November 1st.
Many of you have shown interest in the differences between working in the same room, almost like a studio, and having the team scattered across all over the world. The difference is huge; it is actually so huge that we do as much progress in one weekend as we would if we would be working on the project separated from each other for a whole month.

Since the core of the art team consists of only four members, we all have to know everything from animation, UV-mapping, exporting and texturing ourselves. Here comes the real beauty of working in the same room; if there is a problem you can simply ask your team mate. Everyone in the art team is a specialist in their respective area. Pontus is our pro texture artist, Björn is our experienced 3D modeler, Claes is phenomenal on concept art, architecture and 3D modeling and finally I’m the Greek; the guy who has experience with the source engine, level design and exporting.

Yes we do listen to death metal bands, like In Flames... And the portal song.

The aftermath and beyond

Wed Oct 03 09:45:43 -0700 2007

I’d like to thank everyone who commented and reported about Decadence first media release. The overall opinion has been a positive one, and we’re happy for that. It’s always fun to see your work being appreciated by others. There were some critical comments about a couple of things though, and I’d like to say that those things are being considered if not already changed to the better. All comments are welcome!

So what’s going happen now? Well, we already got new deadlines to work towards so the development goes on like always. The next deadline is in early November, which will include a lot of story and characters, complete with descriptions of the weapons and gadgets. We will also show you the new and improved screenshots, based on your comments. So that’s something to look forward to!

Decadence is announced!

Sun Sep 23 15:04:29 -0700 2007

The time has come to uncover Decadence and show the world what we have been up to for all this time. Decadence is an up-coming Half-Life 2 total conversion currently in development by students from the University of Skövde. Promising a heavily atmospheric world and an interesting twist on team-driven gameplay, Decadence is a unique multiplayer experience that the most casual online gamers and most hardcore FPS gamers can enjoy together. See our about section for more in-depth information about Decadence and its features.

What you are able to see in the Media section is an accumulation of a month's hard work, starting completely from scratch art-wise. The whole team excluding our writer Yorick from across the pond has been crammed into a student apartment for the past three days, devoting all our time to the development of the mod. We are really proud of our work and we hope you will enjoy it as much as we do.

Click through to our forums to catch a time-lapse of the last three days!

Developer LAN status report #2

Sat Sep 22 13:18:01 -0700 2007

Time to give you guys another update on what we’re doing. The momentum I was talking about yesterday is still going, and we’re very happy for that! It actually looks like we’re going to make it in time, believe it or not.

The difference between working over the Internet, even if you live close to each other, and when you’re actually sitting in the same room is huge. We haven’t been doing anything else than working on the mod, and if you put nine people in the same room doing the same thing, you’re bound to get a great result out of it. So if you’re going to learn anything from this post, make a note of that.

We’ll be releasing a time-lapse video in connection to the “mysterious” deadline, so you can see in detail what we’ve been up to these days.

The picture below is just showing six of the nine people involved, we have another little room to the right with the rest of the team. It’s a bit tight, but you’re not supposed to move around!

Developer LAN: Status report #1

Fri Sep 21 17:00:00 -0700 2007

We would like to show you an inside look at what goes into Decadence. You won’t see anything interesting on our screens, but we actually do get some work done. Trust me!
We have content constantly going into the mod, models and textures are literally flying across the room (not really, but close). If we keep this momentum going, I’m pretty sure we can offer something really good for you.

We can play a little game while waiting for the 49 hours to count down. In the following picture, spot the web designer.

That special day is fast approaching

Wed Sep 19 17:00:00 -0700 2007

You might have seen that the counter has reached three days and still counting. We, too, have seen this and are working very hard to get things done before the lil’ bugger reaches zero. The whole team, except for our friend from across the pond, will be gathering for a weekend long development LAN at Claes and Sara’s apartment. We had a couple of these development LANs in the earlier stages of development and we got a lot of work done, we hope to get even more work done during this LAN though. I’m also quite certain that alcohol will be involved, so it will be a spectacle to say the least (speaking from previous experiences). Filip has also talked about fireworks, if the alcohol wasn’t enough.

We might update the blog with pictures from the LAN if we can find anything interesting enough, we’ll see. Keep watching this space!

Is this room getting crowded?

Thu Sep 06 17:00:00 -0700 2007

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!

New Faces

Wed Aug 29 17:00:00 -0700 2007

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!

Congrats Claes on Your 25th Birthday!

Sat Aug 25 17:00:00 -0700 2007

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!

Hoo hoo, here comes the hype-train!

Fri Aug 24 17:00:00 -0700 2007

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.

Graphics can come too…

Fri Aug 17 17:00:00 -0700 2007

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.