Project Maternity was a 2010 Imagine Cup entry from Ninja Vikings with Claws’ (Dominic Bodman, Catarina Barros, Daniel Dexter, and myself). It made it to the second round of the competition — an non-trivial feat for first year students who had only a few weeks of development time..
Alien Swarm Holdout Mode
A big part of the Alien Swarm mod I’m working on is spawning aliens so that they attack in massive waves, rather than in response to triggers set off by the player. Luckily for me, the game’s SDK already includes a lot of this functionality in its incomplete Holdout mode (operated by the “asw_holdout_mode” entity).
Viewing Alien Swarm Models
Alien Swarm assets including models are all packaged into VPK (“Valve Pak”) files and cannot be accessed manually unless they are extracted with a tool such as Gibbed’s VPK Extractor.
Packaged models should be viewable with the Model Viewer but Alien Swarm‘s aren’t. That’s because the Model Viewer requires a proper folder/directory structure even if said folders don’t actually contain any models. Otherwise you’ll get a bunch errors.
Alien Swarm Mod: Dev Diary
Ninja Vikings with Claws (an indie game developer founded by myself and other students on my course) has started work on a modification of Valve’s freely available co-operative shooter Alien Swarm, and I’ve decided to document the development process.
Develop 2010 Expo Highlights
This year’s Develop conference in Brighton took place last month (July 14-15, 2010) and, while access to the conference itself carried a pretty hefty price tag, the expo that ran alongside it was free for anyone to attend. Headline-grabbing keynotes from the likes of Peter Molyneux and Tim Shafer were off limits to Expo-goers but a selection of smaller, 30 minute mini-sessions were open to everyone.