▊ Science & Industry (2012-2019)

Maintaining and reshaping a very old Half-Life mod (also called si), which was created in 1999. Beginning in the winter of 2012, I lead a group of si players through a several-years-long project to revitalize the game, releasing new updates and playtesting through weekly pickup games. We were the fifth team to carry the torch (at least we think so - the history is a bit murky).

This was my introduction to game programming, because I don’t want to remember the time I spent modding early builds of Natural Selection 2 with Lua earlier in 2012.

• Game (re)design, programming
  • Focusing on changes to support competition (reducing randomness, increasing speed and stress, “balancing” different mechanics/strategies, increasing the number of viable options)
  • Giving the game a stronger identity (less “Half-Life” and more “teamplay CTF mod”)
  • Cross-referencing Quake, Half-Life and related open source code bases (Xash3D, ReHLDS..) to make changes and work around legacy issues in the upstream engine and SDK
• Project management
  • Including models/skins and maps made by teammates (I’m banned from mapping)
    • New maps were a crucial part of how we refined the game’s identity and brought consistency to the experience
    • Today there is a similar pattern to many other old FPS games: the “big 4” maps are played the most. All 4 were created during the 2012-Present era of the game.
  • Mentoring junior developers collaborating on gameplay changes
  • Learning from game industry professionals
• Playing pickup games with a small but dedicated community to playtest our changes
• Infrastructure: VPS-based servers for our development tools, pickup game server
  • This was initially how I learned about things like Docker, which sent me down the rabbithole into DevOps, Infrastructure and SRE topics!

We haven’t made a new release since 2019 - it’s difficult to set aside time to develop a very old game with a very small community while other things compete for my time. However, we still play pickups and occasionally some of the community members work on new maps.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think we improved the game a lot.. but we should probably add headshots back to it. Maybe someday!