The modern AAA single player first person shooter consists mainly of two things: shooting faces in implausibly realistic levels with a pistol, machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle, or rocket launcher -- and obeying NPCs when they trap you inside a room so they can emit voiceover lines at you. Half-Life's legacy in the latter is well-mythologized in history, but what if we re-visit Half-Life as a masterpiece of technical design, enemy encounters, AI scripting, weapons tuning, and architecture? Spoiler: we'll find out it's a pretty well-crafted game.

1. Well-Made:
Back to Black Mesa
SLIDES PDF AT: tinyurl.com/backtoblackmesa
Robert Yang (@radiatoryang)
NYU Game Center / Parsons MFADT
PRACTICE @ NYU
17 November 2013

2. "When we made the first [Mario 64]
prototype, Mario and Luigi were on a flat
field. [...] because of hardware limitations
we had a choice between cutting Luigi or
making more elaborate landforms.
Then, in tears, we had to ask Luigi to
leave.”
- Yoshiaki Koizumi
http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/super-mario-3d-world/0/0

3. this is game development

4. 2) Half-Life's
legacy

5. A NEW FRONTIER IN
INTERACTIVE DRAMA
INTERACTIVE
STORYTELLING
INNOVATIVE DEEP
AMAZING, ART!!

6. Half-Life, before
reboot in 1997

7. FOOTNOTE:
mythologizing
crunch is gross.
* This is the dev floor at Bungie, which as far as I know, actively tries
to avoid crunch instead of scheduling it as part of a “natural part of
the development process” like certain other AAA studios... crunch
is of course a complicated topic, the result of poor planning +
publisher demands + market forces + blah blah blah... but I think
the first step toward fighting it, like a disease, is to stop claiming
that “crunch” is worth it OR that it is inevitable OR honorable?
Do you know Guildhall mandates crunch for its game dev students?
Isn't that sad? Learned helplessness? “As a result, The Guildhall was designed to
simulate the pace and work style of the games industry. During heavy development periods,
students sometimes spend up to twenty hours a day coding, designing, fixing, debugging.”

8. HALF-LIFE'S LEGACY:
depth and diversity
in environmental
storytelling and
scripted sequences

9. THE MYST
OF VIDEO
GAMES

10. 3) How to love
a game's guts
and you can too

11. Diagrams above from:
“Skyrim’s Modular Approach
to Level Design”,
GDC 2013, Joel Burgess

12. “should the
next-gen dumpster
get 2 1024x1024 flats?”
important dumpster
innovation questions
for AAA developers

13. YES

14. NO NO NO :(

15. ART HISTORY TO GAMES:
AAA sandbox / open world =
LARGE SWEEPING PASTORALS
even w/ post-apoc or urban setting,
function / values are the same:
Awe + manifest destiny
This landscape is big + beautiful
AND IT IS OURS?? (*boring!*)
xoxo, Thomas Kinkade

17. Game dev =
Code + asset + content +
concept + design +
workflow + politics =
transcendence?

18. 4) Black Mesa
Inbound:
its legacy

19. Work commute
Nothing happens
Slow, foreshadowing
Mindblowing!
Revolutionary!
Brave!

20. So one of the programmers on Half-Life
created a track train that would move
over long distances and turn and pivot
[and when he told me about it] the first
thing that came to my mind was an actual
train. I just took it too literally, and I
started thinking in terms of, "What could
we do with a train in Half-Life?"
- Marc Laidlaw

21. 5) Black Mesa
Inbound:
func_tracktrains

26. 6) Black Mesa
Inbound:
magic in
motion

30. 7) Shark Cage:
the setpiece

34. 8) Shark Cage:
behavior and
scripting

40. 9) Shark Cage:
health, damage,
tuning workflow

41. from /dlls/player.cpp:
from /cfg/skill.cfg:
#define AIRTIME 12
// Icthyosaur
sk_ichthyosaur_health1 "200"
sk_ichthyosaur_health2 "200"
sk_ichthyosaur_health3 "400"
// 9mmhandgun Round
sk_plr_9mm_bullet1 "8"
from dlls/weapons.h:
sk_plr_9mm_bullet2 "8"
#define CROSSBOW_
sk_plr_9mm_bullet3 "8"
DEFAULT_GIVE 5
// Crossbow
sk_plr_xbow_bolt_monster1 "50"
sk_plr_xbow_bolt_monster2 "50"
sk_plr_xbow_bolt_monster3 "50"

43. 10) The
Well-Made

44. Made

45. “THE TECHNICAL”
IS RELEVANT TO
EVERYONE AND
YOU ARE WRONG
IF YOU DISAGREE
AND HERE IS WHY:

46. "When we made the first [Mario 64]
prototype, Mario and Luigi were on a flat
field. [...] because of hardware limitations
we had a choice between cutting Luigi or
making more elaborate landforms.
Then, in tears, we had to ask Luigi to
leave.”
- Yoshiaki Koizumi
http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/super-mario-3d-world/0/0

47. (Jack Halberstam)
hand animation:
“loopy narrative”,
small cast

48. (Jack Halberstam)
CG animation:
Wars, accumulation
Instancing, mobs,
Many characters,
Geopolitical conflicts

49. Dead Island

50. default_player_setup.scr:
sub Skills_Purna(){
[...]
Skill(“TeamSpirit2Purna”);
Skill(“FeministWhorePurna”);
Skill(“MeleeDurabilityPurna”);
[...]
}

51. "The line in question was
something a programmer
considered a private joke. The
skill naturally has a completely
different in-game name and the
script reference was also
changed. What is left is a part of
an obscure debug function."
- developer's response

52. "I found a way to alter the items
you get when choosing a chapter."
- a Dead Island modder, on the
functionality of default_player_setup.scr
2+ weeks after release / day one patch

53. default_player_setup.scr:
sub Skills_Purna(){
Skill("TeamSpirit1Purna");
Skill("SharpApprenticePurna");
Skill("BoostAura1Purna");
Skill("GLMeleeDmgPurna");
Skill("ElemetalDurationPurna");
Skill("ComboCriticalProbPurna");
Skill("ElemetalDurationPurna");
Skill("MoreCraftedAmmoPurna");
Skill("RVTiefPurna");
Skill("TSDmgIncrasedPurna");
Skill("CraftedWeaponKillFuryPointsPurna");
Skill("ChanceToFireUpEnemyPurna");
Skill("TeamSpirit2Purna");
Skill("FeministWhorePurna");
[…]
}

54. “PRIVATE” TO
WHO? JUST TO
EVERY SINGLE
DEVELOPER?
"The line in question was
something a programmer
considered a private joke. The
skill naturally has a completely
different in-game name and the
script reference was also
changed. What is left is a part of
an obscure debug function."
- developer's response
“OBSCURE DEBUG” AS IN
“RUN THIS EVERY TIME A
PLAYER STARTS A NEW GAME”

55. "... First, we want to establish
the idea that a computer
language is not just a way of
getting a computer to
perform operations but
rather that it is a novel formal
medium for expressing ideas
about methodology. Thus,
programs must be written for
people to read, and only
incidentally for machines to
execute."

56. 10 PRINT
CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
by Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost
Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas
Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter (2012)
Criminal Code: Procedural Logic
and Rhetorical Excess
in Videogames
by Mark Sample (2013)

57. “Screen essentialism”
"… the graphical user interface is
often uncritically accepted as the
ground zero of the user’s experience”
- Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008)
in “Mechanisms: New Media and
the Forensic Imagination”

58. this is game development
cultural, political, social,
technical, scientific,
artistic, creative,
diverse, relevant
THANKS! @radiatoryang