Bouncers, Rebels, and Hacking - August Devblog
What we’ve been up to
I feel you’ve all come to expect us to drip feed dev blogs to all of you with some super-duper cool news about development. Unfortunately, this time isn’t the case. After our dev blog back in February, work slowed down in March, and then completely halted in April. To put it simply, life got crazy for everyone. After the craziness of school finals and whatever else occupied our time, summer came around. During the month of June, we wanted to take some time and unwind, so we didn’t do anything then either. Finally, in July we picked the project back up and it’s been going absolutely great since then. As we’ve said millions of times before, this project is huge, luckily you guys have huge patience. Seriously, thank you for sticking with us even when we go quiet for months at a time. But rest assured, we have work to show! It’s some pretty cool stuff so let’s go ahead and dive in.
Bouncer Bouncer!
Since Anti-Citizen is more thematically aligned to HL2 than HL:A, why have stuff like the weird yellow grenade? There are a lot of reasons why we've changed the grenade, but a big one is nostalgia! It’s a nice little touch to further separate AC from HL:A and to cement the timeline a bit better. The model is from Juniez’s MMod remakes.
Apart from using the design from HL2, we wanted to match its likeness in VFX & SFX. So John went ahead and removed all the strange “techy” sounds from the HL:A nades and swapped ‘em out for ultra-realistic gritty realism ones. In addition to that, we also added the iconic explosion SFX as the core layer, so there’s that too. Now I could talk about how good these sound all day but it’s easier if you take a listen, try clicking the grenade!
The trail & spot VFX have been made a bit more pronounced to better reflect the Half-Life 2 nade. Light painting with it also looks super cool, almost makes you wanna paint with it rather than toss it. Still have some more work to perfect it, but it’s getting along really nicely!
(Click the grenade if you haven’t already)
Everybody likes a team up
Back in March, the awesome fellas over at Project 17 reached out to us, we talked for a little bit and eventually came up with a “joint project” agreement. It's kind of old news now, but still very beneficial for both teams. They make really really well-done assets and in exchange, they get our mostly well-made soldiers! That’s the basis for the collaboration, and it's great that we get to work with other members of this awesome community. At the end of the day, we all want to make bad-ass projects and we can help each other out by showing support! We’ll be releasing assets (i.e rebels) and perhaps some useful documentation when we feel like stuff is ready. Also, the most “important” thing about this collaboration is we finally have an HL2 SMG instead of the Vance MP7, you’re welcome :).
The figures of rebellion
HL2 rebels have a really nice outfit, neat details, and great voice acting. They’re iconic, but we knew we could step it up: so we did! Well, in everything but voice acting. We may never come up with genius lines like:
“sometimes… I dream about cheese.”
With a lot of model kit-bashing, painstaking weight painting, and a loooooooot of texture work, Allen came up with something that goes beyond its predecessor. Behold the Anti-Citizen rebels, with more customization than you will ever really need. The inspiration for these rebels was this concept art sheet on the Valve Archive. We thought the vast variety was definitely needed as once implemented, it added much-needed depth to these characters. It finally gives the rebels personality & uniqueness in their looks.
(Preview a few possible variations by clicking on the rebels)
The rebel’s customization rivals that of anything else we’ve made so far. The previews only scratch the surface of what is possible with them as you can customize: injury states, armor, clothing, insignias, clothing styles, facewear, and headwear. There are literally so many combinations, so you can safely use a ton of rebels in the same environment without risking repetition, a significant step up from the bare-bones citizens. The best part about these Rebels is we’ll be releasing them for your own use once we are 100% satisfied with them. They’re really really really good right now, but we have a little bit more in store for them. Stay tuned for that!
Become Hacker Man
This is going to be unbelievable, but we finally got a modeler on the Anti-Citizen team. As any reasonable project lead, the first thing I did was make him sign a contract forcing him to work on the project until completion and prevent him from leaving his house unless I okayed it. Now that he can’t leave the project, we got him working on our custom multi-tool. It’s inspired by a lot of 90s tech, most notably the Nokia 3310. The multi-tool functions identically to Alyx’s but better reflects the personality of Percy and once again stands out as something to separate AC and HLA. A big design philosophy for us is: if it can be changed then we should change it. We want Anti-Citizen to not just reflect Alyx but evolve beyond it.
The reason why we took a more 90s/retro tech route with things such as this multi-tool is that it highlights the resourcefulness of the Rebels and especially Lenny & Percy. We’re under the interpretation that the 7-Hour war occurred sometime in the 90s, so human tech only got as far as the late 20th century. Therefore, Percy took whatever tech he could find and tinkered around with some combine parts to make a combine interfacer.
‘Til next time
Thank you for reading, we all hope you’ve enjoyed it! Let us know what you thought in our Discord! Just a week ago we hosted our first ever developer AMA and I have a feeling we’ll be hosting some more, so bring your best questions! But for now, we must continue to pour our blood sweat and tears into Anti-Citizen. Thank you for your support as always, it keeps us going. We can’t wait to share more exciting news with you in the coming future. Thanks for sticking with us, and ‘til next time!
