Dr.T

Half-Life: The World Machine – Post Mortem

The last 13 months, when I was working on The World Machine (TWM), went by pretty fast. Although, the whole year went by pretty fast. So, I'm more than happy that I could actually finish TWM in 2023, which was a goal. And I finished it pretty much the way I envisioned it, well, mostly. The playtime of TWM is about 40 minutes if you rush through it. I didn't want it to be longer to be honest. It is a rather short and intensive experience.

I could have been faster with development time but I had some hardships this year, I needed to rest, get some distance and come back to it rejuvenated. There was also a timeframe where I completely lost interest in working on TWM, after I released the demo. But luckily, motivation for the project came back. Sometimes in the middle of development, I just wanted to give up on the project, because the workload was so high (making over 200 textures pixel by pixel), it is truly my greatest videogame project I ever realised.

In comparison with Uriel, I wasn't rushing this project. I took my time. Time to get inspired by ideas, other games, and films. The main inspirations for TWM are the first Alien movie, the first Dead Space game, and Kubrick's 2001.

The most important thing to me with TWM was having a thick atmosphere, conveyed through annoying alerts and sirens indicating a state of emergency in Black Mesa. I was also experimenting with ambient drones as a constant background noise to give the player a feeling of deepness and isolation. But that didn't worked well, so I went the way of auditory overstimulation.

The second important thing was visual darkness. Like in Dead Space, but TWM turned out to be bright in some places, I think it is a nice contrast. Bright laboratories and dark hallways that connect the former.

Another thing that was important to me, was a good pacing. Because there are people who find Uriel, my former Half-Life mod, having a very bad pacing. Now, from the reviews of TWM, it seems that I may have improved in that category. Which makes me happy.

It also seems that I achieved with TWM a good balance when you play it on hard, the balance of healthkits, ammo, etc.. So that you have just enough to do the job, to fullfil your mission, to play through the mod. I especially tried to optimize TWM for the hard difficulty level.

Initially I wanted to introduce a new monster type, which I envisioned it being a kind of a xenomorph, fast and deadly, the idea was that you just need one shot to kill it, but through the speed of the monster you better be quick before it attacks you with its severe melee attack. Unfortunately I'm not a coder or animator or modeler. Hopefully in the future.

Now I'm enjoying the reviews, videos and comments about TWM. I plan to do a version 1.1 with some improvements and changes, and then that's it.

I'm thinking about a next project, personally, I'd love to do a Star Wars themed goldsrc mod, where you play as a bounty hunter and do mission to earn money to buy weapons and new gear and so on. That would be nice. After i finished Uriel and before I started developing TWM, I played around with some Star Wars themed textures. See the images below. I also, would like to work in a team, it is OK to work alone, but sometimes I think it would be nice to work together on something.

Very well then.

Cheers