Black Mesa News

[h3]Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Crowbar Collective.[/h3]
I’m Mike Hillard, My handle is CornetTheory because I’ve been a trumpet player for most of my life. In terms of games and mods, I’ve been a level designer, musician, and digital artist since 2004. I am currently composing or covering chip/game adjacent music over here: https://soundcloud.com/michael-hillard

I started down the path of voice acting because my Unreal Tournament 2004 level design friends needed voice samples for a mod. This directly led me to getting the role in Penumbra: Overture, and getting hired at a local radio station. Since then I’ve acted in at least 8 commercial indie games, and many many mod projects.

For Crowbar Collective I am primarily an actor, but over the years I have made tiny contributions in other areas, such as customizing vrad, programming the tau cannon’s wallshot particle effect, making small tweaks to the lighting on some earthbound maps, and manually editing the 2015 Multiplayer trailer on real VCRs.

[h3]How did you get involved with Black Mesa[/h3]
By 2006 my local friends and I were obsessed with HLDM and making silly custom maps and player models. The Black Mesa team put out a general casting call for voice actors, so I decided to give it a shot.

At this time, I did not start out sounding similar to Hal Robbins, but I’m told they were not looking for a dead-on impression because they wanted several kinds of scientists. Eventually, after I was given the first script for the general chatter, I recorded the whole thing in one night out of excitement, and I started figuring out how to get the voice very close. I think it took about a year or two of practice before the similarity got to the point of fooling people with A/B comparisons; Just in time for the 2008 trailer.

[h3]What was the most challenging hurdle that was overcome during development in your role?[/h3]
As soon as I joined the team, I moved away to college. So I had two options after that: Drive 6 hours one way to my house on weekends to use my own studio to record, or find out how to treat whatever dorm room I was in. I found that a lot of walls are too smooth to stick on foam, or too hard to hang up hooks for blankets.

Kevin and I did a lot of skype calls, testing solutions. Some of which are pretty funny, but effective. For example, Buying a golf umbrella big enough to fit my mic and computer monitors, and covering the entire thing with a comforter. Eventually I built a 7ft^3 room within a room, and treated it with deadening moving blankets.

When it came to driving home, I would have to disassemble my PC and lug it back and forth.
After a few years I had assembled two sets of PCs and equipment, one for home and one for college. This also helped out when we started needing the female scientist lines, It made scheduling my mother [Lurana Hillard] easier, and we could act scenes together.

The challenge wasn’t only to get a good environment, but also to make my space and mic placements, etc. match Kevin’s setup. We were pretty strict about the sessions and I would always send test lines to compare before starting.

I recorded all of the Scientist’s general chatter at least 3 times over the years. As more scripted scenes were created and added to the game, we needed to make it match how my voice and recording environment had changed.

[h3]What software did you use for your work?[/h3]
Adobe Audition. When I worked in radio I had learned how to edit audio to make commercials. Back then it was Cool Edit Pro.

[h3]What kind of microphones & preamps were used to record your vocals?[/h3]
Starting in 2007 through 2012, Kevin and I maintained using the “MXL 990” condenser and “M-Audio Delta 1010-LT” for consistency. Windows updates and driver support ended the Delta card, plus it was a PCI only board. After that, I began using the “Shure Super 55” and the “Scarlett 6i6” also, shoutouts to the Cloudlifter for dynamic mics.

[h3]When did your interest in game development begin?[/h3]
It began at a very young age, wondering how cartridges worked. But a real turning point was my older brother playing with WADED.EXE for doom. It was mind-blowing that you could make your own levels. I was hooked from then on. From Duke3d to Half-Life, and then to UT2004 where the majority of my released deathmatch maps are.

[h3]Any favorite mods for Half-Life games?[/h3]
Half-Quake is one of the most unique mods out there, and it really shows off what Goldsrc can do. Sven co-op, for consistently adding crazy features to the engine itself. Earth’s Special Forces (The Dragon Ball Z mod) was fun to fly around in. SMOD for HL2 because of the shovel and bullet time.

But, Rocket Crowbar will always be the gold standard.

[h3]Anything you would want to add to Black Mesa?[/h3]
I wish we could pack-in the awesome Hazard Course remake mod by PSR Digital for Black Mesa.

[h3]Do you accept pineapple on pizza or are you against it?[/h3]
Everyone is allowed to have their own preferences, but folks should just let people enjoy things. Personally I think pineapple on pizza is tasty.




#TEAM RED SHIRT

[h3]Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Crowbar Collective.[/h3]
Benjamin Truman, Design, and Narrative Lead.
Comic author and teacher living in Tucson, AZ.

[h3]What do you enjoy the most about Black Mesa?[/h3]
Half-Life was such a resonant work of art for me. I really enjoy seeing my passion for the game connect with other people. It means a lot when I hear that our game recaptured or enhanced a memorable experience from a player’s past. It’s also wonderful to hear that our game has been an entry point to Valve’s franchise for so many people.
I also do a fair bit of work on our Twitter (@BlackMesaDevs) searching for fan-made Half-Life content. One of my favorite things to do is drop a couple hundred likes on an unsuspecting artist’s houndeye doodle.

[h3]What was the most challenging hurdle that was overcome during development in your role?[/h3]
Once Xen began, my writing job consisted of working against the idea that we needed dialog in Xen. When a design was struggling, it was only a matter of time before somebody would suggest audio diaries or a radio transmission from Earth to explain the objective. I wanted to preserve that sense of “alone in the unknown” once you reached Xen. That commitment meant we had to take special care when communicating our intention to the player.


[h3]How did you get involved with Black Mesa (If you joined later on?)[/h3]
I became involved while attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh for Game Art & Design. Some of my friends asked if I wanted to join as a 3D modeler. I declined and pitched myself as their writer instead.

[h3]Did you go to school for your respective parts of the project?[/h3]
Despite attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh for Game Art & Design, there were hardly any classes that dealt with design. The emphasis was on modeling/texturing/animating in 3D. I’m lucky that I got involved with the team when I did because I was quickly losing interest in school.
Black Mesa let me breakdown my favorite game and analyze the entire design. I also got to adapt the existing script, write new dialog, direct voice actors, choreograph big scenes in 3D, and design gameplay sequences. This project gave me the chance to pursue the exact education I was seeking.

I also had a lot of support for all my creative endeavors from both of my parents. I would say my real education came from my Dad, a comic author, and an illustrator. I was introduced to a lot of comics and movies from all over the world while I was growing up. I learned a lot about visual storytelling and narrative by hanging at his side.

[h3]What software did you use for your work?[/h3]
I used Faceposer for all the choreography work.

[h3]Any recommendations for people wanting to get into game design?[/h3]
I usually point towards this Gamasutra article about Shigeru Miyamoto’s influence while creating the original Mario (I’m especially partial to that one because it says sequential illustration is the foundation of game design).
I like to think of that article as a point-of-no-return for beginner designers. Once you understand the basic game structure in that article, you see it everywhere.

[h3]Any favorite mods for Half-Life games?[/h3]
I have fond memories of some Half-Life multiplayer mods, like Action Half-Life, Firearms, Science and Industry, Counter-Strike, TFC, but the most important Half-Life mods were always the singleplayer experiences.
The biggest ones for me were the Neil Manke/Black Widow Games “U.S.S. Darkstar” and “They Hunger” series that came on PC Gamer CDs. I also liked a short mod called Deliverance. I don’t know if Gunman Chronicles counts as a mod, but that also sticks out in my mind.

[h3]When did your interest in game development begin?[/h3]
My love of games began early on. I would fill up notebooks with game ideas. These were usually just little pencil or marker “screenshots” of imaginary games. I would draw up character rosters for fighting games and side-scrolling beat ‘em ups, with lists of detailed stats. When my family got a PC at home, I started making games with a program called Klik & Play that I received as a holiday gift. I eventually got into 3D level design after playing Duke Nukem 3D. I don’t think I knew the Build Engine existed until I stumbled across a How-To book for the software at a bookstore.

After that, I purchased a Quake level editor from Electronics Boutique in the mall but quickly returned it. I struggled and failed to understand the Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight editor. I was frustrated that nobody in my life knew how to work this stuff.

But, Half-Life really compelled me to learn Worldcraft on my own. Once I figured out the basics, I was hooked. I searched all over this new frontier, the internet, to find info on the program. I would print out tutorials from Handy Vandals Almanac and read them over and over again, trying to make sense of them. This all came in handy when I had to start developing in Source on Hammer.

[h3]Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Crowbar Collective.[/h3]
My name is Anthony Stone and I am one of the long-standing level designers for Black Mesa. I have worked on much of the AI encounters and logic events across the game as well as building a few of the maps from scratch. I am the team’s encyclopedia of how everything works.

[h3]What was your first experience with Half-Life?[/h3]
My first experience with Half-Life almost didn’t happen. I had no idea what I was getting when I first Installed the game and only installed it because I wanted to play Counter-Strike which was a mod back then. I began the game just to see how the graphics looked on my new PC of the time. I started playing it and was confused at first… a 10 min tram ride and then I arrive at Anomalous Materials and walked around offices with no real gameplay insight. This was very unusual. I put the game down at that point with no real intent to go back to it, but I’m glad I did. The next day I booted it up to show my brother the game I was dubbing the “work sim” when I got to the residence cascade. I was blown away and finished the game over the next day or so.

[h3]What was the most challenging hurdle that was overcome during development in your role?[/h3]
Not the most difficult thing for me personally, but a difficult thing to watch was the differences in opinion on art and style across a group of very talented people. Everyone on the team is super good at what they do and everyone has an opinion of what works and what does not. This tends to do areas over and over again in order to really master the idea the team is going for and can cause a considerable headache if you don’t check your ego at the door. You are going to have to have many hands-on your work and you may see things you really slaved over get ripped out or changed. It could be a hard pill to swallow for some. It can lead to bitter feelings or discontent but in the end, we all just want the best product that flows well in the end.

[h3]How did you resist getting burnt out over such a long development process for Xen?[/h3]
MUSIC!!! LOTS AND LOTS OF NEW MUSIC! Seriously, I can keep working for hours with music I have not heard before. It makes the hours fly by. Just no country music please… and for my wife’s sake keep me away from dubstep.

[h3]When did your interest in game development begin?[/h3]
I originally started making maps for the HL2 leak way back when and then moved into making Counter-Strike Source maps. There was something super satisfying about creating content and seeing how people enjoy it and the way they play it. It also was a great creative outlet for my mind. I always loved to build stuff and this was a great way to take things in my mind and get them into a 3d world I could actually visit.

[h3]Was there ever a time you were close to giving up and quitting?[/h3]
Yes and no. There was a point where we had to choose to release the Earthbound section of the game or keep fighting on to get XEN done as one major release of the game. I was very on the side of we should put out what we have rather than take the additional years to finish the full game with no end in sight. I set an ultimatum for myself. So while it was not giving up… I felt very strongly that we needed to give our fans something. It never came down to it because we did release. Truth be told it probably would not have left anyways…

[h3]How often do you watch youtube videos/Twitch streams of Black Mesa?[/h3]
I am so guilty of this. I love to watch streamers play my work. When it first came out, I would watch a few hours a night. Nowadays I check it once or so a week if I am super bored. I’ll never get tired of seeing people blow themselves up calling the lift up in the trip mine puzzle in Surface Tension.

[h3]Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Crowbar Collective.[/h3]
I’m Nate! Lead Animator, VFX, Simulations at Crowbar.

[h3]What was the most challenging hurdle that was overcome during development in your role?[/h3]
The limitations of trying to make a good looking game in 2020 on an engine that first came out in 2004.

[h3]How did you get involved with Black Mesa (If you joined later on?)[/h3]
I was one of the first 5 people on the team, in early 2005. Back then they had no animators at all so my mere application meant I got accepted immediately haha.

[h3]How difficult was the task of reimagining Xen?[/h3]
The planning did not fall primarily on me, but it was incredibly challenging for all involved. Much of the difficulty was the immovable pillars of the original Xen campaign itself. Jumping puzzles have aged very poorly in FPS games, but we’ve got this long jump module that we have to use. We have to brainstorm emergent gameplay with only like 3 enemies (headcrab, bullsquid, houndeye) that were all early-game enemies that stopped being challenging 10 campaign hours ago. We have to make non-linear and alien-feeling levels without the aid of objective markers, tooltips, cutscenes, or any of the other crutches that modern gamers are used to.

[h3]Any recommendations for people wanting to get into game design?[/h3]
Join a mod project for a game you’re passionate about. They’re full of like-minded people just trying to have fun and make something cool. They’ll let you make mistakes and learn the skills you need while on the job.

[h3]What do you want to improve about Black Mesa?[/h3]
I’m very proud of the end product we shipped and don’t think there are that many areas it could have been better. But parts of the campaign could have been shortened so the whole experience was a little tighter in places. It’s not really an issue compared to so many modern games that pad their campaigns with pointless stuff, but just in further pursuit of a perfect FPS, there are sections of Black Mesa where you’re kinda thinking “how much longer until this part is done?”

[h3]What was the worst part of developing Black Mesa in your role?[/h3]
The Source engine had several limitations that made it very difficult to get the types of animations the Xen campaign demanded. In any game engine, most movement is controlled by “bones”. That’s easy to visualize with a character like a human that anatomically has a skeleton, but bones are also controlling the pieces of a building as it blows up, or the pulsing of a protozoa membrane in Xen. With regards to bones, Source does not support “bone scaling”, it has a 128 bone limit per model, and each vertex in the model is only allowed to be influenced by 3 bones. These are all limitations that modern game engines do not have and it caused a lot of headaches. Many of the bigger destruction models were split into 5-10 “parts” and reassembled back together in Hammer to get around that 128 bone limit. When you’re dealing with something like a barrel cactus swelling up to a huge balloon and bursting, that should be just a couple of bones being scaled up. But Source can’t do that, which means you need “point clouds” of bones all over the model moving outwards to achieve the same effect. Only 3 influences per bone also meant those bone clouds had to be pretty dense or else you would get jagged deformations instead of smooth. I had to develop all sorts of strange pipelines to work around these limits.

[h3]If you had unlimited time, money, and help, what game would you make?[/h3]
I’d love to see a game with the crazy weapons and enemy types of Painkiller combined with the intricate level design of Half-Life. I also think technology is at the point where, with a little engine resource re-allocation and gated level design, we don’t need to have disappearing corpses, we can use bodies and gore as part of the gameplay loop.

[h3]Where did the purple hat come from?[/h3]
That was the result of several inside jokes. There was an application we got early on in development that was over-the-top ridiculous (we later found out it was submitted as a joke). And we started imagining how this applicant might dress himself, and one of the artists whipped up this purple hat. Our Level Designers love to cram their maps full of easter eggs, and then Half-Life 2 Episode 2 with the gnome run gave them the idea to do a hat run.

[h3]Any movies or other games besides Half-Life you took inspiration from during development for your role specifically?[/h3]
Oh, lots. Anytime a good FPS game came out in the last 10 years we’d be like “oh we need X, Y, and Z in Black Mesa!” For the Xen campaign, probably DOOM 2016 was the strongest influence in terms of how to craft cool boss encounters, and lots of sprawling vertical levels with minimal navigation hints (though they did have objective markers like everybody else these days).

[h3]Having now seen Valve’s interpretation of Xen elements in a modern engine (HL: Alyx) are there any elements of this interpretation that you would like to have included in Black Mesa Xen?[/h3]
We knew that our Xen was going to be dramatically different from Valve’s, and in turn both of our versions dramatically different from what Laidlaw originally envisioned. Comparing Half-Life Alyx and Half-Life 1, you can pretty much see how that’s the same artistic vision, despite a 20-year graphics jump. But Half-Life 1 to Black Mesa Xen, absent the iconic Half-Life fauna, you wouldn’t peg those to be the same universe. And we knew that. It was part of our core strategy to break from the original Xen campaign and forge our own path. We didn’t want 6 hours of green-grey levels, we wanted to experiment with distinct biomes and different color palettes, so it was an intentional choice for us.

[h3]Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Crowbar Collective.[/h3]
I’ve been a level designer at Crowbar Collective since around 2007. My first task after joining was to rework Undertow and bring it up to the standards of other multiplayer maps we had at the time, although that version was never released and was subsequently redone again; it was still a great learning experience. Following after Undertow I started work on the later parts of Unforeseen Consequences (the coolant labs & lower canals sections) & then onto assisting with detailing and level design work on a few parts of Questionable Ethics.

Following the mod release in 2012 I & others set about working through the large number of bug reports we had received and endeavored to resolve all possible combined with making level design & visual improvements where possible. A few old blog posts I wrote regarding the fixing endeavors can be found here & here if you are interested in reading more. I also assisted in detailing & optimization work on the multiplayer map Crossfire.

My primary focus for Xen development was assisting in extra detail work that was needed on the Xen chapter followed by early blockout work and assisting in arting sections of the Gonarch chapter; in particular the headcrab canyon and water cave & assisting in detailing sections of Interloper chapter both interior and exterior.

[h3]When did your interest in game development begin?[/h3]
I’d always enjoyed tinkering with map editors that came with games I played like the Age of Empire series & Red Faction, but I think my interest in modding and then subsequently game development stems from being introduced to Half-Life modding by an old secondary school friend of mine. He was part of a modding community called TWHL (The Whole Half-Life) from there I started to experiment & make levels for various competitions they ran and then onto joining various Half-Life and Half-Life 2 mods before joining Black Mesa.

[h3]What was the most challenging hurdle that was overcome during development in your role?[/h3]
I don’t think I could point to one specific thing but trying to figure out creative ways to overcome hurdles that are thrown your way due to engine limitations and such has been the general gist of working as a level designer while on Black Mesa.

[h3]What was the worst part of developing Black Mesa in your role?[/h3]
When the Hammer model viewer would break constantly requiring it to be restarted. But then realizing that I could fix it by simply closing the browser and moving the mouse cursor between the 3D & 2D views to resolve the issue instead of restarting the entire program: that was definitely a boost to my productivity when it came to arting levels and in particular the various parts of Xen.

[h3]Did you go to school for your respective parts of the project?[/h3]
While I didn’t directly study game design, I did however for Graphic Design & Communication which indirectly helped in regards to composition, lighting & detailing among others for my role as a level designer & environmental arting.

[h3]How often do you watch youtube videos/Twitch streams of Black Mesa?[/h3]
I try to watch streams of Black Mesa when I have the chance, usually lurking, however. They’re a great source of seeing a wide spectrum of people playing your game and seeing if something does or doesn't work to perhaps try and improve it. My particular favorite thing to do is watch people's reactions to seeing parts of Black Mesa for the first time, the reveals of Xen & Gonarch and its subsequent chapter-long battle never get old to see.

[h3]Any favorite mods for Half-Life games?[/h3]
Poke 646 is usually one that springs to mind whenever I think of old Half-Life mods that I had a lot of fun playing, But I think special mention should be given to the many multiplayer based mods that I have sunk many hours in to like Day of Defeat, The specialists and in particular Natural Selection which was a personal favorite with its interesting gameplay & setting. In recent years Half-life: Echoes has been a standout, along with Caged, Year Long Alarm & Azure sheep among others.

[h3]Do you accept pineapple on pizza or are you against it?[/h3]
I will always accept pineapple placed atop a delicious pizza, especially on a sourdough base.