Companion Blades
A Half-Life 2 Mod
Details
Companion Blades is a Half-Life 2 mod created in my first semester of SMU Guildhall. Set in City 17, the player takes the role of Gordon Freeman using the Gravity Gun to fight zombies and the Combine. The primary mechanic of the level is using Manhack enemies to fight other enemies, break through barriers, and detach objects for the player's use.
Mod Statistics:G
Game: Half-Life 2
Engine: Source
Platform: Windows
Team Size: 1
Development Time: 1.5 months (100 hours)
Gameplay Design
Duties
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Organically taught player how to use Manhacks as weapons and puzzle implements in the level.
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Created consistent affordance through red wooden plank design to show that the player could and should use Manhacks on them.
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Timed Manhack spawns so puzzles could be completed without overwhelming the player.
Problem Solving
Gameplay Overview
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This whole level's conceit was built around using Manhacks, a little bladed helicopter drone enemy, as both a tool and a weapon, since it can destroy certain objects and damage enemies if it bumps into them.
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To facilitate this interaction, the player starts the level with only a Gravity Gun, giving them an extremely versatile tool for picking up and shooting small objects forward but no guns to distract from the central gameplay mechanic.
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However, players can grab Manhacks with the Gravity Gun and fire them like a bladed cannon ball, and because they are still aggroed on the player then thrown, they come back to be used again like a malevolent boomerang.
The Trouble With Manhacks
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Using Manhacks as the primary gameplay gimmick was a deviously simple idea, but it was almost undone by a glitch in Source.
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For some reason that still eludes me to this day, Manhacks do not spawn more than once from the standard Enemy Spawner entity in Source.
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This was a massive problem for me, because I needed the player to get a consistent supply of Manhacks until they have defeated a certain number of enemies or completed a puzzle.
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Some players might be able to do that with one Manhack, but many might need three or four, and still others might want to mess about and might not get to it until far later.
Finding the Workaround
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I had a number of false leads.
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I tried having multiple spawners and triggering them with arrays, but I couldn't reset them.
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I tried using a standard entity template spawner, but they just weren't spawning at all.
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I tried using an Enemy Template Spawner, but they spawned only inconsistently.
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But I didn't give up. Even though my professor and I couldn't figure it out, I asked around for help from my peers, and a friend of mine had successfully managed to spawn Manhacks in his level.
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We analyzed how his conditions were different from mine, and we determined that the standard entity template spawner needed to have a certain amount of space around it to spawn.
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I found a good place to test this and, lo and behold, it did exactly as I needed it to do.
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Once I had the solve, I implemented and tested it efficiently so I had time to attend to other aspects of the level.
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Puzzle Design
Duties
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Created physics puzzle along the lines of classic Half-Life 2 in the form of wooden elevator carriages the player must shoot barrels into to ascend.
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Balanced the puzzle so it wasn't too easy or too difficult, fine-tuning the weights of the metal barrels and elevator cars accordingly.
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Laid out room so player could understand the gist of what they needed to do at a glance
Problem Solving
Overview
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Though this was not my first puzzle design in my career as a level designer, "Companion Blades" presented unique challenges that made it one of the hardest puzzles to create for me, before or since.
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The central conceit is that when the player enters a cistern from the sewers, they find a balance scale that has an elevator platform at the end of either rope. Putting weight in one pushes up the other and vice versa.
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The player was meant to find metal barrels throughout the room, shoot them into the opposite elevator car from the one that would take you to the exit, then get into the correct elevator as it ascends to the top. I knew this was possible in Half-Life 2 because there were similar systems in use throughout the base game through the Source physics system.
The Elevator From Hell
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However, while I knew this balance scale elevator was theoretically possible, I had not actually prototyped it until later in production because of time spent covering the Manhack problem, using a proxy ladder instead.
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This was a mistake, because it turned out that there were a number of factors that I had not considered.
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For instance, the elevator car could spin, which would often cause it to get caught on parts of the map
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And the bounce that I had thought would work to get barrels into the elevator car was too inconsistent for most players to easily execute.
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Keep Calm, Lift On
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But instead of despairing, I sat down and playtested, digging into the editor to narrow down exactly what it was capable of.
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To solve the spinning issue, I found a brush that was invisible in-game and didn't stop the player from getting in, but did interact with the elevator, essentially acting as guardrails to prevent the elevator from spinning.
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As for the bouncing problem, I found that if I fired the barrel from far enough away, the bounce wasn't enough for the barrel to fall out. So I moved the elevators across the chamber from one another and added opposing slabs of wood on the cars that the players could use as backboards to get the barrels in.
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Both of these solves made the elevator far more consistent, allowing the players to focus on the puzzles themselves rather than the finicky mechanics of each individual element.
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Retrospective
What went well?
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Puzzle and Manhack mechanics tested well by the end, capturing the feel and atmosphere of Half-Life 2.
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Bridge-breaking mechanic created a distinctive set-piece and clear goal for the player to get to the Combine camp.
What went wrong?
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Manhacks were extremely finicky in the editor, making it difficult to pursue and refine core level mechanic for most of development.
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Came up with the puzzle idea with only general knowledge of Source physics, resulting in steep learning curve during implementation.
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Aesthetics fell by the wayside as the former two problems proved harder to tackle than first surmised.
Even better if?
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Create comprehensive action blocks for puzzle and gameplay mechanics in pre-production so there are less likely to be level-breaking surprises in production.
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And when mechanics run into problems regardless, resolve to make steady, concrete progress on each issue so they don't pile up late in production.
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Don't be afraid to ask for help. Chances are someone has run into a variant of this problem, and they have a solution.