Description
Meltdown is a fairly large Singleplayer campaign with plenty of scripting. It contains large open outside areas mostly covered with ice and snow, but also rather narrow pathways and caves in the lower levels, which mainly consist of volcanic rock and lava. The buildings are kept in a medieval style, which also defines when the story is taking place.
The gameplay is oriented to classic arena shooters like quake, but also has elements from other games. Aside from shooting up monsters the map also contains some jumping puzzles, same as some intended trickjumps for speedrunners and such (If you're doing really good the script might even comment on it, hehe). You shouldn't have any problems with finding enough ammo since i placed plenty of it, because for me there is nothing worse than having to use my pistol.
If you notice any bugs, get stuck, or have any suggestions please leave a comment so I can fix/improve it. If you really want to help me with the optimization and balancing it would be awesome if you would record your really first playthrough and send it to me, since that would show me how it works for players not having played it 100 times and knowing every corner (so don't feel ashamed if u die a lot, it's my fault!).
Storyline
Last night monsters broke into your mates house and stole their gold. One of them saw them running up the hill and entering the abandoned church. None of the locals dare to go in there, but they offer you half of their gold, if you manage to get it back. You decide to take the challenge, but what you find is worse than expected...
Timelapse Video
I recorded a timelapse video in 2fps FullHD with the ingame recorder, which has later been speeded up x15 to 30fps. It covers the creation of all the geometry, texturing and lighting until version 1.0 of the map. I did not record the moster placing and scripting, as it required endless playtesting, what isn't very interesting to watch. The video is five and a half hours long and I obviously don't expect anyone to watch the whole video, but I had to uplaod it as it was there and you might find one or the other part interesting. :) Would be nice if you leave a coment on YouTube too, but that's up to you of course!
Changelog
Week 1:
- Layouted terrain
- Layouted and detailed church
Week 2:
- Finished church
- Layouted some rooms below the church
- Started to smooth out terrain
Week 3:
- Detailed one room below the church
- Smoothed out more terrain, mainly inside the cave
- Made a few props to paste later on
Week 4:
~ On holiday ~
Week 5:
- Smoothed out more terrain inside the cave
- Layouted and made a few mountains behind the cave
Week 6:
- Smoothed out more snow terrain
- Layouted and made more mountains
Week 7:
~ On holiday ~
Week 8:
- Made many more mountains
- Connected mountains with each other, the cave and flat terrain parts
- Set up the mapmodel config
Week 9:
- Made few more mountains
- Built a third lava fall into the cave
- Connected many individual areas
Week 10:
- Added a waterfall to one side of the river
- Finished the inner part of the cave
- Built a wooden elevator
Week 11:
- Finished the snow terrain geometry
- Blendbrushed the outside area
- Lit the inner part of the cave
- Made a house at the spawn area
- Redid inner part of the church
Week 12:
- Detailed and lit several rooms
- Built doors and trapdoors into the arenas
- Layouted the finale
Week 13:
- Detailed and lit more rooms
- Detailed and expanded the finale
Week 14:
- Finished the geometry
- Finished the lighting
- Placed sounds
- Placed monsters
- Placed pick-ups
- Added triggers
- Did all scripting
- Playtested
- Fixed a LOT of bugs
Update v1.1 (2013-10-04)
- Trigger placement optimization
- "killsendsp" is now set to 0
- Small changes in the script
Update v1.2 (2013-10-14)
- Fixed dialogs
- Fixed plenty of geometry errors
- Fixed some clipping mistakes
- Added a 3rd hidden HP Boost
- Began skytexturing glitch cubes
- Optimized item placement
- Housedoor opens again now, if you die before the first respawnpoint.
- Cleaned up the script a bit
Update v1.3 (2020-04-15)
- Added lots of secrets :)
- Plus some bugfixes
Credits
Special thanks to Yves 'evillair' Allaire and Gregor Koch for the textures.
Happy fragging!
-Skur