SourceWorld - What is it all about news

Have you ever heard of theories about Valve games being in the same universe? The well known Source Engine spreads across many games and mods all of which are derivatives of Half-Life 2 in one way or another. There are so many community-made projects made on this engine that even several years isn't enough to play them all.

And despite everything being Source Engine, many different stories, levels and characters, are obviously not being connected between each other into something much bigger.

SourceWorld is a project basing itself around the idea of connecting all hypothetically existing universes of Source Engine. It originally started as a RogueLite project, but then was reconsidered to be a combination of several genres, like RPG, Dungeon Crawler, Adventure and FPS.

This project uses Mapbase as its core, due to its outstanding additions and opportunities it gives to modders. The development is currently led by me (SellFace), an experienced VScripter with passion for working on things that others haven't thought of making before. Second developer being The_Guardian™, a level-designer and writer, helpful in regards to improving mod's lore.

Let's get closer to what this project is about in its current state:

Being made entirely withing VScript, this system aims to generate random unique environments(also known as universes) for the player. They have considerable size, filled with dangers, puzzles, etc. After getting into such environment, player has to complete various objectives to make progress.

Story-wise all these possible universes represent "all Source Engine environments to ever exist", without all characters, including the protagonist, being aware of it.

Protagonist lives in the mod's "hub area", named The District that belongs to the City of Lunacy. It takes place in alternate HL2 universe, where humanity had won against the Combine Invasion and been using the latter's technological advancements.

One of such advancements turned out to be an Inter-Dimensional travel technology. A highly secret device that belongs to a not-so-legal underground organization, which focuses on exploring and researching the parallel universes.

As the only solution to his worsening life situation, the main character acquires a dangerous job of an Explorer. Investigating the secrets of Multiverse is up to him and all the companions he gets on his way.

Gameplay-wise, player will get to see this area many times upon returning from exploration. District(and the underground facility) are planned to be highly interactive environments with other characters, stores, hangouts, etc. The story progresses not only by having player explore random environments, but also having them engage in dialogues with characters around the District, buy their equipment from stores or maybe improve their combat skills.

Combat, like many other HL2 game mechanic systems, will get overhauled to be more satisfying. For example, have a look at new melee system, inspired by L4D2's counterpart.

Of course, this is far from everything I can tell about this magnum opus project. There is still lots of progress to be done, many mechanics and systems to be implemented. But all that is for the next time.