Let's Speculate!
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Into the depths, of Into the Shadows
I gave myself a challenge this weekend, something I had actually wanted to do for a while but I’d unfortunately been too absorbed into other things to find the time to take a proper look. Now, there’s a considerable amount of information you can draw from what’s here so I would consider this the first part which might be followed up with some additional information at some stage; it’s very difficult for me to add every single little detail here as much as I would love to.
Into the Shadows; this is likely a very unfamiliar name for a video-game to many people, which is quite unfortunate given that it was truly a technical marvel for it’s time. The game itself has often been touted in public as a action fighter, compared to the likes of many fighter games of the day such as Virtual Fighter and not so much as an RPG, though from my analysis I think the game was actually very likely a combination of both - I’m not entirely sure why there were mixed messages regarding this, it’s possible the development team weren’t entirely sure themselves, we are after all talking about a game that was incredibly early into it’s development. Regardless the depth of the gameplay that was to be featured in the game has not been publically documented in great depth, very little is known about how the game actually played.
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Let's Speculate! Half-Life 2 Lighting Zoo
The Lighting Zoo, otherwise known as ‘lightingzoo’, is a level included in the pack of development VMFs that was leaked with Half-Life 2 back in 2003. It’s one of the lesser interesting levels in the pack of levels, but we’ll be covering it anyway just to quickly get it out of the way. Obviously on this occasion I won’t be bothering to produce a video but expect a number of screenshots demonstrating the level.
The map is marked as being last modified on the 6th of May 2002 but it’s hard to be sure as to who the original author was but it was likely produced by someone within Valve who didn’t work primarily as a level designer, more likely the work of one of the programmers at Valve. We can pretty much conclude this as the map features incredibly simplistic geometry, though includes a few different sections that seem to test the capabilities of the lighting tool, VRAD, at the time; displacements, animated lights and normal maps are featured in the different sections of the level.
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Let's Speculate! Half-Life 2 WADs
This is somewhat of a disclaimer I must put forward here. I have a habit of finding little things, and then theorising about them for a considerable amount of time to people (much to their annoyance, I’m sure), but never actually sharing it or writing it down. I have a website specifically for this now, might as well use it. That said, some of my thoughts or ideas are very likely wrong, but I’d like to put forward some interesting thoughts and theories for people to consider. Don’t take my words and consider them a fact. Don’t take them and publish them as fact.
Anyway consider this the start of a new series!
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