Reepblue's Notebook

No, I'm not dead, but it looked like it with the lack of content. Its been a while since I've posted anything on Youtube and here. So what's been happening, well to be honest, nothing much. I'm trying to finish up school, I've been experimenting with code and ideas, and I've been working in Alive and Kicking. You may have a lot of questions, and I'll answer hopefully most of them here. First things first, Blue Portals. I know, its been since November since we posted anything! So what happened with that? Well, I originally wrote an article describing what has been going on with Refresh, and to my luck, Zilefile is no more, which contains a lot of WIP screenshots during the development of Blue Portals, Refresh, and other things. And since the maps were gone (They just needed to be recompiled and fixed up.), the article felt pointless without them. Here is the article: First off, we would like to thank you for being to patient on us, and we really feel bad...

As 2011, comes to a closure, its time to look back of all the nonsense I have done. I've put together a cheaply made video along with cheaply made royalty free music to summarize this not so cheap year. I don't go over every Hammer Notepad experiment, nor everything I did in just a day, but mainly things I've worked on (released or not) were I got some knowledge out of it. Life is just one big learning process. We start with Blue Portals: Extended Play. Blue Portals: Extended Play - March  After we got done with shipping Blue Portals and the update for it in late 2010, we worked on and released the extension: Blue Portals: Extended Play. This eight map mappack takes you back into the development center, and you now have access to the fully operational portal device along with the ECHO, a gravity gun like puzzle device. If you have the latest version of Blue Portals, it should already be there. If not, click the Download lin...

Ever since we were developing Blue Portals, we kept imagining how awesome Blue Portals will be in the Portal 2 engine with Blob tech, dynamic lighting and the whole bit. When Portal 2 went live, we config the Alien Swarm Authorizing Tools and started to work on Blue Portals 2 that May. It was in development on and off. We would be actively updating the mod for a solid week or two, then development would halt. Now there is more then one reason why we are pulling it. Blue Portals is a Portal mod that takes advantage of the I/O system. The mod showed how clever configuration of this system can produce neat things like Portalable light, Fans, Box types and many more! The original Portal did the same with its elements, as you needed to put together many entities to get box droppers, buttons and ball catchers to work, so the elements in Blue Portals worked liked that. In Portal 2, everything is coded, and when you compare it to the clun...

After realizing that the main game play is really flat, I decided to work into the game structure more. Before, you spawn, grabbed weapons, press the radio, and you killed Antlions until you die. Not really the thing that someone is going to look at it and go "WOW! THAT'S FUCKING AWESOME!". It was more fun playing it, but not much watching someone else. I'm not much of a programmer, the most I can do is take existing material and morph it into my own. And with this, most of the game rules are map logic. I decided to take a whack and use a system like the Nazi Zombies system with the weapons. Since Survival games are more 'arcade' games, I thought that this system will at-least help develop my own ideas. Again, using map logic, the player "buys" weapons, health, and others with his or her "points". But I could not get it to prevent purchases if the player was short. So, the game_score entity just makes a negative v...

After a whole summer of Hammer Notepad less videos, your probably wondering "What happened?" and you call back to when I use to post a video at least every month or so. Well its a long story. So lets start this from the top. Introduction: I have videos filled with Beta videos and interviews of Left 4 Dead, Portal, And Portal 2. And I still watch them even though I watched them hundreds of times over. Why? Well for some reason, watching videos like that gives me inspiration, and I say to myself "I wanna make something like this, with this style." Kinda silly since I have Left 4 Dead, Portal and Portal 2, but its not the same playing the retail and then watching a game in progress video. And If you know me, If I'm not creating something new, I'm recreating the old. I have the Left 4 Dead videos from QuakeCon 2007 and Showdown LAN, and I love the videos of them. Why? Well for those who don't know, In the older versions  of Left 4 Dead, (Remem...

Portal: Alive & Kicking was announced a few days back. Its a Portal 2 addon, which will recreate the adventure of Chell during  the adventure of the original Portal, with the current look of Aperture labs.  So why do this is a few other people are doing it too, and why play it? Portal: Alive & Kicking is pretty much a collaboration of recreated Portal maps for Portal 2. Not only Colossal and I are working on it, but also PortalPlayer, an admin for myApertureLabs, Omnicoder, mapper of the third place entry Edifice of the Summer Mapping Initiative Contest, Groxmapper, and  Wauterboi, who does music. This project is still under development, so please watch the ModDB page for more updates.

That's right, today was my official first day of summer vacation. I've spent the last few weeks not really touching my computer that much as I had school, and during the day, it was to hot to operate a PC. And folks, there is no need for A/C if we usually get 80 degrees for only a month. But now, I got more time open up. First off, I gotta say I have not touched the Portal 2 Authorizing tools in a while. Not only because I have not gotten a chance to really map, but its due to the fact that I'm pretty dry on ideas. No, I'm not asking for my inbox to be flooded with your ideas, I'm just saying that after a full 3 years now of Portal mapping, I'm sort of burned out. Although with Portal 2 and the new stuff that came with it, I can't find myself to make clever puzzles with them. I guess the Portal 2 Demomap was a bad thing after all since I made my Puzzles in Portal 1. Now, I'm not ditching Portal (2) mapping all together; I'm just taking a break from...