WE DID A THING OR TWO.
DEC. 25 - paradoxBefore we venture into our final Dev Blog of 2022 I would like to briefly go over why 2022 was an awesome year for Anti-Citizen. When 2022 began we were still trying to figure out what we really wanted to do with Anti-Citizen. We’ve always had a decent idea of the bigger picture, but with nothing set in stone development was difficult, a constant battle between creating unique gameplay and the limitations of Alyx systems. This is an issue that we believe we have solved. In August of 2021, we revealed the first iteration of a new combatant system that allowed us to add multiple bipedal characters with combat ai and unique weapons using a single shared set of animations. It was a huge step forward for gameplay and narrative, meaning we could create Lenny as a fleshed-out NPC character and add new enemy units such as the HL2 roster. However, the new combatants were only the beginning of what we wanted to accomplish for Anti-Citizen, so we hit the drawing board with even more crazy ideas. Through experimentation and conceptual work, we have learned we have the ability to give Anti-Citizen an extremely high standard of quality, at the cost of development time. In other words, this is going to take a lot longer than we initially expected and be a lot cooler than we initially thought possible. So with that out of the way, I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas, and let’s dive right into our Christmas gift from us to you.
This little thing called release
The original plan was to release Anti-Citizen in 2021. We kinda missed that mark. The whole project has ballooned massively, which is good because the project is gonna be way cooler now but bad because it adds multiple years of development time. In order to help offset this large increase in development time we’ve collectively decided that doing an episodic release for each “act” (an act should consist of 4-5 maps) of Anti-Citizen. This means you can play the first chunk of Anti-Citizen significantly earlier than you would have otherwise, and it means we can collect valuable player feedback as we continue to work on the game.
OUR BIG BANG
Ever since Anti-Citizen was solely developed by me and called Refugee (with some of the worst level designs known to mankind), its goal was to push the boundaries. At the time that was fully voiced characters and exotic environments, and in a way that still does push some boundaries in the Alyx modding scene. However, I’ve always wanted Anti-Citizen to be a mod unlike anything else anyone has ever played, and now after 2 years of trial and error, I can confidently say that this will be unlike anything else anyone has ever played. With the help of an amazing team (and john) we’ve been able to make strides not only in levels, writing, and asset creation but now mechanics and systems built from the ground up by us. Though the sudden shift in focus to mechanics is a peculiar one, in a nutshell I went to go design an original VR game in Unity and john went to go mess with VScript. Eventually, I fell off my high horse of being a Unity developer and reeled john back. We both had discovered how liberating coding custom mechanics was and realized that we could not only add our own mechanics but improve some of Alyx’s weaker components. So over the course of about a month, we’ve been ripping out the guts of Alyx and transplanting our own mechanics in. And oh boy, do we have some mechanics to show you.
The first thing we ended up making was something we introduced you all to in our last dev blog. The HL2 grenade! Valve in their infinite wisdom decided it was a wonderful idea to hardcode turning the armed grenade’s collider into a sphere. This meant whenever we ended up rolling our cylindrical grenade it’d act like a sphere. So instead of just living with it, john merely coded a new grenade from the ground up. All of that entailed creating a save/load system and a few other things but that’s BOOORING and I don’t even think we understand it enough to explain it. By creating this new grenade along with its systems, it gave us some valuable VScript insight and more importantly it laid out the groundwork for everything else we’d end up creating.
Using the approach of "feature creep now, ask questions later" we decided on a set of 4 weapons plus a multitool to be unlocked throughout Anti-Citizen. The issue is that 2 of these weapons would need to be generic pistol entities using different ammo pools (and would have to carry ammo across level transitions) and another would need to be entirely custom. Using the inventory system from the base game would have required either a lot of shortcuts and compromises that we were unwilling to settle for. Thus we disabled the Alyx inventory and simply made our own. Our new inventory system allows us to store any type of entity as a weapon, with no limitation on quantity and a brand-new look. Now we can keep talking about it, but we’d rather have you take a peek for yourself.
That is only the tip of the iceberg for what we want to create, but we’ll tell you about the other things another time. Oh and the best part about this all is you’ll be able to create with our systems and tools. In all honesty and in the least cringe way possible, the production of Anti-Citizen has seemingly stepped up from mod development to game development. And it only makes sense to allow all of you to create your own content with our vision of a more refined and mature version of Alyx. Don’t expect it anytime soon though, the primary goal is of course to ship Anti-Citizen!
GOING FORWARD
As we venture into 2023 we definitely want to bring you guys far more dev blogs than we currently do. In order to make that goal possible we’ll need to make them a bit lighter content-wise (kinda like this one). Basically, we just want to let you guys know what we’ve been up to when we get stuff done instead of waiting months at a time to get a larger sum of stuff to share. Anyways, everyone on the team would like to wish you a very merry Christmas and happy holidays. As always thank you for sticking with us and being very very patient. Thank you for it all, ‘til next time!