Chat Show Nicolas Hates Mountains
The Chat Show takes us inside the mind of the modder, to interview some of the top level designers and scripters.
A little while back GamesModding.com interviewed Nicolas of Portal: Prelude. Nicolas has started a new project 'I Hate Mountains' (Left 4 Dead) and talked with us about it:
GM: Please tell us a little about I Hate Mountains.
Nicolas: Well.. I think we summed it up pretty well on our website:
I Hate Mountains is the name we found for an upcoming non-official Left 4 Dead campaign that our team is working on at this moment. The campaign is built the Valve way, a short intro, 5 maps (forest, manor, undergroudn, lumberyard, lakeside) with different lengths and difficulty, and a finale. We are not trying to revolutionize anything, we just want to provide more content to this awesome game. We decided to name it this way during a (very) long brainstorming where we were trying to combine morbid words (death, blood, dark) and themed ones (mountain, forest, cold) to form a conventional campaign name. Geoffroy "Kane" Espinasse (one of the members of the team) shooted "I hate mountains" as a joke and everyone remained silent. Eventually, we kept it as the campaign name because it sounded original and somewhat "private joke" for us and for Francis fans.
GM: Will players be going up the mountain or down?
Nicolas: The mountain word was mostly used to describe the atmosphere and environment of the campaign, not to describe what the players will have to do, just like Blood Harvest or Death Toll (even if I'm not really sure why the later is named this way).
The campaign is set in a mountainous environment, but players will not have to climb it or go down it. In fact, the overall campaign path is somewhat going through it during the third map.
GM: What atmosphere are you aiming for? (rush, fun, fear?)
Nicolas: We are definitely going for a darker atmosphere. Left 4 Dead was cool, but seriously, why the hell did they packed it with a flashlight when nights are as bright as days? In fact, we're not trying to achieve a particular atmosphere, you can't really setup a frightening atmosphere when you're playing with three other people and when it's non-stop action. You can't setup a "rush" feeling either, because it would be too difficult to rush through hordes of infected. No, we're not trying to do something different than what Valve with Left 4 Dead. It's pretty much the same thing in another environment, but darker and longer. We wanted to bring some new challenge in different types of environment, challenging the player though excessively open and excessively closed environment.
GM: Will you be paying homage to any movies or games?
Nicolas: Yes and no. We're paying homage to multiple things and we're borrowing from multiple sources for inspiration, but we're not trying to reproduce anything existing. Some people are stuck in this "let's make yet another copy of this famous zombie movie/game/whatever" idea. I personally think it's uninteresting, people should try to innovate and create something new and fresh instead of always copying and reproducing everything from game to game. The original work will always be the best. Our primary source of inspiration are the Canadian mountains and a bit of Dawn of the Dead for some details. Everything else was built from scratch.
GM: Anything else you’d like to tell us?
Nicolas: When we first talked about the campaign, a lot of people thought that we were doing the same as with Portal: Prelude : keeping everything secret and then revealing what we were doing at the end. This is not the case with I Hate Mountains. With the non-release of the SDK, a lot of people are working on campaigns in the dark, waiting for it to be released. And we sure don't wan't to keep everything secret because when the SDK will come out (if only it comes out), a lot of campaigns should pop up from nowhere in a matter of time. That's why we're not done with this campaign yet, there's still a lot of work to do, and we're only beginning to talk about it via a devblog.
Thanks to Nicolas for his answers.
Website: I hate Mountains
