Took a trip to Valve, heres the story

[Algor]

This last Thursday (January 8th), I was given the opportunity to take a tour at Valve. I have been a level designer for about 6 years, and on an amateur level, working with mod teams and such. So it was really interesting for me to see all of this work and all of these people on a professional basis.
I showed up slightly early to my 2:00 appointment, just so I could tell where the hell I was going… and finally found the Valve office. I entered the office and met the secretary who had set up the appointment for me, and found out that Gabe was busy at the moment. So we talked for a while and I was told about the office and what not, and saw lots of Valve people walking around. Gabe came back, we were introduced, and the secretary helped me out with getting a picture with him, which was pretty cool.
I saw the Valve network room, which had tons of servers, including the steam content servers, and there must have been a couple thousand wires in there.
As far as meeting the team, I pretty much met everyone that was there. Included were lots of level designers, Marc Laidlaw, a sound artist (cant remember the name, he was programming, maybe it was Yahn?), programmers, concept artists, 3D artists, animators, etc. I met the Day of Defeat guys in their office, which was cool to talk to them, since I work on a WW2 mod (Red Orchestra), and they obviously work on one as well. So it was interesting to talk about our ideas of what should be in a WW2 game, and what our differences are and the like.
I saw a lot of Half-Life 2 in action- both in gameplay and in design, but unfortunately I did not get the chance to play it myself. Maybe if I would have asked, I don’t know.
Anyways I’ll just post the interview I had with Gabe for now because I’m sure this is boring… if you want to hear more, let me know.
I took my digital camera with me, but unfortunately only took 4 pictures...
- Me and Gabe
- one of Marc in his office
- One of.. Ken I think
- One of a sculpture of the Ichytosaur (sp) monster

If you want me to post those.. let me know
Oh, and no, I did not ask about the release date.

 

[Algor]

How was the idea for Half-Life conceived?

When we were starting the company, there was a certain trend in the fps game space. I think everyone had played Doom, and then multiplayer Doom, and they quickly said, “Oh the experience that we spend most of our time doing, is racing around, and shooting other people on LAN. And people got incredibly good at it; they got so much better at playing the game than other people had ever predicted.”
So people went from this experience that everyone had with Doom, that was scared silly, instead to a experience where they are "I am the king of the universe, I can whoop anything's ass." So a lot of people are keying off of their own personal experience, like after playing a certain fps for 2 years. The whole experience is about being king of the world, so a double barrel shotgun is good, so a quad barrel shotgun is better. They are missing this whole environmental, horror, survival aspect that they had actually had the first time they played Doom. So they are moving away from this, "I’m in the really cool environment” to “I’m in a place that I’ve never been before" to "I just want to slaughter everything in sight" to "bigger and bigger weapons are cool."
And I thought that was missing the point about what was the real opportunity for these kinds of games. I loved them, but I kind of wondered what about the story, what about the cool environments, what about the things that are happening, and the sense of being in this virtual world. So those were cool aspects that had been missed, and there were lots of game companies that were trying to make bigger and bigger shotguns and not so many that were trying to build interesting worlds, and interesting environments and more complicated feelings, rather than being master of the universe.
I'd also been reading a Steven King novel. The original code name for Half-Life was Quiver. That idea sort of grew out of King's novel called "The Mist", basically where a military/science experiment goes aray, where the story is told not from the military trying to fix it, but from people on the other side of that experience, as their day to day existence goes to hell. They are in a context like a player in a game, where it’s not like they are on a great quest that they understand, its more like "Ok things are bad, and now things are getting worse, and nobody is telling me what is going on." It’s not like I have cut-scenes in the middle of my story to explain to me what’s going on.
Because that’s what really appealed to me and this is what we tried to do for people; to be in this world that is spinning out of control. It was just that experience that we were going after.

What do you foresee in the future of fps games?

I think one of the interesting things, is that we are taking big steps in the interactivity of the worlds in the physics, where simulating how the world behaves is really useful in terms of creating play. More and more of the world can respond to what you are doing. And it’s done in a way that is really predictable to the player. If they can have a reasonable expectation that if I do this to this thing, then this is going to happen, then it is just one of those things that you want to create.
Having predictability and expectation is a big part of the reward system that games work off of. And baking that into the engine, so that all the objects in the world have those characteristics, like what is the friction of this object, or what happens if a bullet his this, or if something scrapes against this, and having that just be derived from physical properties from those objects is really useful. Being able to manipulate physical characteristics, for example a whirlwind; I don’t want to have to program the behavior into every object that is affected by it. Nor do I have to worry about what happens when two objects collide in the middle of the whirlwind. It gives you a structure for building a lot of predictable, cool interactions that the player can affect and be effected by.
Another feature is movement towards more virtual, compelling characters. We are going to see that these people are fun to be living in a world with them. They react to you, they look at you, they respond to what you are doing. If you try to do something, they may tell if you if it’s not a good idea- not in a triggered way, but in a real way. So that it feels like they are people, rather than automatons.
We can solve these kinds of problems because we have a much more limited problem of creating a simulated human. So I think what we will see, is that in certain contexts, there will be very interesting reactions, from various people in the worlds, and also trigger interesting reactions with you; to really hate people, to be fond of people, and be sad, which just doesn’t happen in most games today. We are reaching a point where when bad things happen, you will feel really sad, because you are reacting like, that person saved me, and queued me in a lot of low level ways, that they were a real person, rather than a fake person. Their blink rate changes when I do certain things, they turn towards me, I can interrupt what they are doing, they are not going to be running through a script, they are going to say, "Excuse me" and then naturally continue what you were doing.
I think we will reach a critical mass, where I think a lot of people are going to feel more compelling, in the sense that designers will have a much wider palette to draw on it; the design of experiences for people playing these games.

How much of an impact do you think Half-Life 2 will have on the professional gaming community compared to Counter-Strike?

I think the opportunities for people to do interesting work in Half-Life 2 are so much greater, that I don’t think there will really be any comparison. We've actually had a lot of interest from people in Hollywood, people who never in a million years would’ve occurred to them to use our toolset of our last generation, who are really interested in using our next generation tools.
That’s one tiny group of people who never could use our previous generation, now find our next generation tools to be really useful. And actually for them to solve problems that they don’t get, so now people will be able to do a lot more interesting stuff.
Like one of the things you can do now, is create a 5 minute animated TV show, and distribute that from your desktop, to everywhere in the world. You can view that as an individual animator and story teller. You can show that to a professional animator, and they may see that and say, "That’s incredibly cool, so I don’t need a studio anymore, I can own everything I create, I can use Steam to do my billing,” so that’s great, and the quality is great. It’s better than The Simpsons, it’s better than South Park, and we're over this quality bar in terms of what you can do. Yet the cool thing is that I can distribute it around the whole world, rather than just the United States.
So I think a lot of people are going to have a blast.

What advice would you give to someone trying to start their own game development company?

Well, I have huge amounts of advice for someone trying to start their own game development company. Do it with people you really trust. If at all possible, avoid distributed development, not because you can’t do things with it, but because you are going to be half as productive as you could be. If you could get something done in a distributed environment, you could get those same people together in one place.
Ship often- don’t try to make it perfect the first time. There’s a legacy from the retail package goods world, that says, “Take two years, make it really big,” and nowadays its really clear that the success stories are coming out of people who ship beta 1, beta 2, beta 3, etc, version 1.1, version 1.2, etc. That’s the way to go, that’s the way to build it on. It’s much more natural for the developer to get that feedback quickly, much more natural for the customers to continually see the process of updates and improvements rather than trying to get it right the first time.
Make sure you have good relations with whoever is making the platform you are working off of. Understand how you can take those products commercial. I think its fine to use other peoples tools and technology to get you jump started.
Ship, ship, ship. Don’t be too ambitious, because you learn a huge amount by getting something out the door. And it helps you build a lot of momentum that you won’t get otherwise. It’s ironic coming from a company that can’t seem to ship hl2 in under half a decade. I think you see a lot of things like Day of Defeat, or Counter-Strike, who have regular, rapid updates, versus Half-Life 2, which has been under wraps forever, and is taking us forever to do, it’s clear that it is a lot easier to make progress when you are biting smaller chunks rather than larger chunks.

- Dan Grafstrom

 

[SpuD]

why didnt you ask him when it was coming out!!1

 

[sharp]

Algot, nice to hear you got to their office.

Can you plz post the 4 pictures?

 

[Algor]

Sure, I will post them later tonight.

BTW, I bet you anything if Fragmaster posts a snippet of this on PHL, it will contain this:

"It’s ironic coming from a company that can’t..."

 

[Orange]

I'd be skeptic, but who spends as much time as you typing to be an ass ?

NICE
thank you

 

[ray_MAN]

DUDE! Tell us about the gameplay! And why didn't you tell us you were going before you left? Where the hell is the SDK? THANKS!

 

[Letters]

PITCHERS! And I assume you recorded that interview, right? Or you're a really fast writer...

(ed. And yeah... what ray_MAN said... gameplay... details... )

 

[CrazyHarij]

Awesome , man! Post the photos please!

Do you remember anything of the HL2 gameplay, like the areas and such?

 

[Maxi]

Wow, grats on the trip to valve!

Did you hear anything on the current status of HL2 or Steam?

 

[Gorgon]

Very interesting indeed. Post the pics if possible please.

 

[Axyon]

Stickied. Nice job on the information and questions!

 

[Algor]

As a matter of fact they were having a big Steam meeting when I was there.
And yes I recorded it. (The interview, not the steam meeting )

As far as gameplay, I think they were all testing out a new helicopter they had
recently made. It looked pretty damn cool.

BTW, can I give the pics to an admin here so they can host?

 

[Shuzer]

Yeah, tell us about the gameplay Did you see anything new?

 

[Letters]

Soooo they are taking advantage of this time to make some new stuffs!

 

[Orange]

150 posts are about to appear in the span of 5 min im predicting, haha

 

[Dile]

Wow, good job, Algor!
It's really nice to have some positive news this time around.

 

[Maxi]

You can give them to me, i can host them.

 

[The Dark Elf]

D'oh Abom beat me to sticking it

great post though!

 

[traesko]

Good God! I must stop reading this kind of stuff. I get all pumped up, wanting to kick some combine ass.. then I realise that the game isnt out yet.. gah..

 

[Gorgon]

My hype is increasing steadily.

 

[Sashswash]

woah a helicopter.....what stuff did u see in the gameplay???!?!?!?!?!?!???? :thumbs:

 

[Fender357]

Algor Rocks!!! But tell us the gameplay info!! Good Lord!!! INFO!!!!

 

[Sashswash]

its amazing what happens when a bit of new news is availabe :rolling: ...imagine what will happen when its released!! :E

 

[Maxi]

Yeah... 100% member increase in a month... mods starting to get finnished... people starting clans.... patches coming out... ahhh...

 

[Sashswash]

craziness.... :rolling:

 

[Letters]

its amazing what happens when a bit of new news is availabe :rolling: ...imagine what will happen when its released!! :E

Ahhhh... this is nothing compared to how it was... memories of the 100+ page in mere hours 'New Video' thread come to mind... now THAT was something...

I'm sure it'll happen again, though...

 

[Sashswash]

probably will... :bounce:

 

[CrazyTalk]

Give us the pictures! Before We riot!

 

[ComradeBadger]

Hypitty Hype!

I wasn't sure if this was fake or not at first, but seems real

Hypitty Hype!

 

[Chris D]

This is some cool stuff

I've sent the information to PHL so they'll probably post it on their site.

Was the helicopter player controlled or was it AI? If it was AI then it was already in there as I've seen it in HL2 (a much better looking apache from HL1 basically). Did the game look complete/close to completion? Any inidcation on release dates?

 

[Sashswash]

it better be real... :sniper:

 

[jimbones]

HELICOPTER?!??!?? AS IN "FLYING AROUND IN A HELICOPTER 0WNIN EVERYONES A§§??"
DETAILS!! ARRRGHGHG

/me faints from screaming so long

 

[sharp]

Helicopters would be cool. I think according to Algot it seems that they are still working on animations, sounds, models etc ?

What about the re-coding because of the leak?

PHL, what site?

 

[Bitchslapper]

PITCHERS! And I assume you recorded that interview, right? Or you're a really fast writer...

lol, i was just thinking of that

 

[Gorgon]

For god sake, mods com on post the pics.

 

[Maxi]

They don't have them yet!!11

 

[Axyon]

I've had no word from him, I dunno if any of the other mods have been contacted. That said, only Munro (possibly the other admins) can upload pictures to the site... if he sends them to me quickly, however, I'm sure I could optimize them to make a collection of attachments.

 

[CrazyTalk]

Those bastards weren't done! I knew it! muahahahaha!

 

[Bitchslapper]

(a much better looking apache from HL1 basically).

hehe... yeah it better be!! Has anyone try`d DF: Balck Hawk Down? in taht game you can sit in a black hawk down and shoot from it, once you are in there air. But it is AI that controls the helicopter around... Anyway i cant wait to see those pics of yours