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I've decided to start my quest by creating a mod. When I interviewed with Ritual, one of the questions that was asked was have I ever modded a game. I had spent pretty much the last year and a half working on my custom 3d demo and had never thought m...

Criss Martin, Blogger

March 9, 2009

2 Min Read

I've decided to start my quest by creating a mod. When I interviewed with Ritual, one of the questions that was asked was have I ever modded a game. I had spent pretty much the last year and a half working on my custom 3d demo and had never thought much about modding. He told me this was a good way to learn about game design and integrating into an existing engine. I've decided to mod the source engine, because I've played Half Life 2 and enjoyed a lot of the features of the game.

So far I don't have much going. I've created a mod that shows up in the My Games section of Steam and I've played around with the Hammer tool to create a very basic map. I've been running through some of the tutorials on http://developer.valvesoftware.com. The tutorials are ok. They've gotten me this far, but I'm beginning to find its usefulness as a teaching tool dwindling.

I think I'm going to push my little map to the limits and make an actual complete game out of it. The object of the game will be to stay alive as long as possible, while entities spawn randomly and become increasingly stronger as time goes by. For every entity you kill, your score will go up. If you die, your score goes back to 0. A HUD will keep track of your score as well as display your top score for the current session.

It's a real simple game but it will lay the foundation I need to create a much more complex mod once I'm done with this.

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Quest Progress:
Latest Programming/Design Achievements:

  • Created a mod with the Source SDK with a really simple map I created using the Hammer tool.

Currently Reading:

  • Code Complete 2nd Edition by Steve McConnell (Currently on Chapter 11)

Read more about:

2009Blogs

About the Author(s)

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