As some may have seen the HL2 mod (total conversion btw.) Crystalline has just been announced. We are a group of eight Danish DADIU students that have been working through March to make this game and we will release the mod at the beginning of April.
A couple of questions we get often is: One month production? And why Source engine?
The answer to the first is easy; since the group is made from student from different universities and art schools in Denmark it isn't practical to make the productions any longer. This has its clear limitations on the scope of the game and makes it necessary to prioritize everything very carefully. One month is what we are given and that is the rules we play by.
The second question is a bit more blurry to answer. Officially we use Source engine because this is the engine selected to be used by all DADIU games. This however has caused quite a discussion on a number of occasions. First of all, nearly no DADIU games have been First Person Shooters and the same is true for Crystalline. Last year in May you could see games like FLIPSIDE and The Way where absolutely nothing from Half-Life 2 was reused. Many DADIU students feel that there is too much Half-Life 2 in Source and that you constantly have to put up with the many limitations this creates.
Several times things are hacked together on top of something else and especially our programmers feel this.
Another thing is the content pipeline in Source which is horribly bad. Where several other engines have more modern tools you are required to have programmers figure out several command line tools, edit files, source code and rebuild/recompile to get anything into Source/Hammer. In comparison an engine like Unity can have content creators update to the latest files even while the game is running and changes are seen instantly. Source engine is 10 years behind in this area.
But enough about Source! We are working hard to bring Crystalline to life and look forward to releasing it! :-)
