Post Script an experimental Half-Life 2 mod
Lewis Denby, a videogame journalist and modder, had a chat with Games Modding about his Post Script mod:
GM: What is Post Script about?
Lewis: It's about love, and hatred, and the ways humanity deals with terrible events. It's about the nature of reality. It's about trying to toy with people's minds a little bit. It's about five episodes long, and has a few puzzles along the way.
GM: Tell us more about the story.
Lewis: Okay. High concept: a series of characters look back, from some sort of undefined afterlife, on the period between a terrible disaster that almost wipes out mankind, and the proper end of the world a while later. The central story arc is about how that actually came to happen. Within that structure, each episode explores a single character, and we learn about their day-to-day lives and personalities over that time period. So there's kind of stuff running parallell.
There's a fair bit of ambiguity to its storytelling, though I'm not trying to be obtuse on purpose. File it next to Dear Esther, probably, or The Path if you want to head outside of mods. It's more gamelike than those, I suspect, in that there are minor puzzle elements. But it's probably less playful than either, as well. Hmm. Wait and see.
GM: Tell us about your process of modding.
Lewis: My main thought on the mod process, whatever you're doing: steal as much content from the mother game as possible. I see so many peopl egetting up in arms because there's a Half-Life 2 texture or model here or there in a mod set outside that universe. Why does it matter? If the focus is on creating an engaging new experience, why does recycling material matter if it works in the new context? As such, you won't see a great deal of new physical content in Post Script - apart from the actual environment builds, obviously. Yet I can guarantee not a single bit feels like Half-Life 2 in any way.
I tend to build iteratively, as well as doing a lot of things at once. Current phase is this: I'm finishing off the design document, a mammoth piece of writing that details just about all of the eight gazillion story interpretations, as well as going through the basic structure of levels, character designs and so on. I've just about finished Episode 1's script, which I'm writing at the same time as designing the world so I can see how it fits together. I have some ideas for Episodes 2 and 3, and I know how it's all going to end in Episode 5, so just filling in gaps really. The town in which the mod takes place is about half-finished, then it needs a proper art pass. Oh, and I've done a short teaser trailer. Got bored, y'know?
GM: Thanks for sharing with GM. Anything else you'd like to tell us?
Lewis: Yes! You should totally keep your eye on the dev blog at postscriptmod.wordpress.com! That would make you very lovely indeed.
Post Script ModDB
