Finnaly,freredarme.And welcome to Black Mesa.
Waiting time was longer than what was expected, but Demo Release 1.0 is now available to download! After about 2 developpement years, Wilson Chronicles now has a small demo that includes 2 maps which take place at the 2/4 of the game.
Download Wilson Chronicles Demo Release 1.0
The content of this version of Wilson Chronicles may contain bugs. Before installing, please check you’ve “Source SDK Base 2007” installed on your computer. If you don’t have it, please install it.
“Source SDK Base 2007” can be found in “Tools” in the library tab.
If you’ve any question, please send us on Moddb.
PS: Do not quit the game before the end of the credits!
Just beat it. Struck me as being very FEARish. The soldiers are way more suicidal though.
I also Just beat Wilson Chronicles Demo. It’s a very good Mod to hold tide me over till BM gets released.
I also played and enjoyed the demo. Very good and can’t wait for the final mod.
I think the death screams don’t fit to the soldiers but the rest of the demo is really cool! Those houndeyes are creepy. Will every weapon have ironsights? Because in the demo just the pistol had them.
Good work and I’m looking forward to see more 
Oh, wow. This looks awesome.
I remember coming across the deadHL1 mod’s release of all the finished stuff on PlanetPhillip, and feeling sad about how such an awesome mod is dead. I had no idea…
Edit: I wanna play the demo, but it’s downloading! Why can’t my ISP just lay a bunch more fiber-optic cables and redirect everyone’s bandwidth to my house!? I’d cancel my subscription if I was paying for it!
Edit: D’oh, it was announced on PlanetPhillip. :facepalm:
Only for Glock, Beretta and 357.
Smg doesn’t have the Ironsight actualy.
A different ironsight coming for smg maybe, example of Aug in CSS.
I don’t know if you’re looking for feedback, but I just played the demo and was unimpressed.
The lighting looks VASTLY different from the screenshots ingame; notably it looks darker on my machine. There were plenty of areas where everything was just dark or lit with a dim light source, which helped neither with atmosphere or level flow (because you can’t see anything at all without the flashlight, which seemed to disappear at random when pointed a certain direction - problem with the flashlight overlay maybe)
The second thing I noticed almost immediately after getting a weapon was the damage/health balance for weapons and the NPCs. I ran out of pistol ammo at the start trying to kill the houndeyes. The nature of their attack makes it impossible to melee/punch them without dying, and it takes 5+ (EXTREMELY SLOW) punches to kill them. I died several times right at the start, which isn’t a good way to introduce players to the mechanics of the game, even in a demo level. I thought it was strange that the houndeyes were introduced as the first NPC as opposed to something smaller to practice on like headcrabs. There was also little feedback on killing NPCs - the houndeyes do not have any luminosity on their skins, and they are often in dark areas where it’s hard to see - it’s difficult to determine whether you actually killed them or if they are still alive, because they just fall flat when you kill them and it’s hard to hear their death sounds. There is also little feedback from the vorts or headcrabs, they just fall over dead. The grunts on the other hand give you over the top feedback when they die; their death screams are annoying and too exaggerated.
Direction and interactivity in the levels was also something I had a lot of trouble with. There is little standardization between usable doors, what buttons can be pressed, etc - it just feels like an almost random selection pieced together at-will as opposed to a cohesive facility which would have standard doors, buttons, etcetera. It’s also very confusing - in some cases the breakable red fire buttons will open a door, like at the start. In some cases they do nothing - they don’t even beep with a ‘locked’ or ‘error’ sound, and they have no sprites or visual indications of whether they are usable - not even a HUD hint. Sometimes you can open the wooden doors with handles. Sometimes they don’t do anything. The fact that the levels are dimly lit make it difficult to figure out where to go next, there are few visual indications or cues as to what areas are important and what areas are there simply for extra detail.
I’m not sure if this is just because of the demo levels, but the maps were extremely linear and flat. Even though there are extra areas to explore there are no alternate routes to take which would have an impact on game play. There are no opportunities where I felt like I could do something cool or clever by making a choice in the level, or even a single room or area which had interesting combat as the result of a design choice. The areas that did incorporate variations in height and broke away from the ‘flat’ feeling of the levels were also the areas that had no combat at all. And please - I know this is supposed to be part of the BMRF, but it’s 2010 - vents should be more interesting than just dark tiny spaces with a headcrab or two in them. (I noticed that the coolest part of the vents, with the fan overlay, is also one you can bypass entirely!)
Aside from the design problems the levels also feel very ‘dense’ to me - even though the play spaces are generally compact they are full of props and feel very ‘busy’. This detracts from the overall quality IMO; sometimes throwing more props and detail at the environment is going to do more harm than good.
^ My expectations for BM just increased tenfold!
As for feedback, I’d like to add the following:
The shotgun has some kid of reload animation bug.
Don’t know if the quicksave worked or not since it didn’t show any “saved” message whatsoever. Since I never died I still don’t know.
The explosions take some getting used to. They deal monstous damage.
The soldiers sound very FEARish. Cople that with the office coplex setting and it’s …well FEAR. And why do they run at the player? The ones with SMGs. It’s suicide.
Granades thrown at the player are impossible to see, especially in dark places.
Usable doors/buttons are indistinguishable from unusable ones, as Rabid already said.
Steam sometimes burns and sometimes doesn’t. Confusing.
The vorts spawned in a very dark area where they immediately died. I never got to have a proper look at them.
The red barrels really look explodable.
This is a big point. Try to make us feel clever, even if we’re not (like me, ha).
The houndeyes were confusing. I tried to punch one and made what looked like a bullet-hole in its face. It didn’t seem to care about that. I was so surprised that I stopped punching and I died.
It is a big point BUT i’m alone on the mod and my mod is released (demo) on 2010, your mod wasn’t released in 2009 after 5 developpement years, with a huge team, and still isn’t released not even a small demo.
Its a Nice feedback, but a bit big for one person on the Mapping and the current project.
Beretta is a bad weapon of the game because on the full version you have the glock… Glock is better than the beretta.
Besides the criticism, do you all hate the mod or are you just jealous because it’s the first mod arround Black Mesa?
I’m not Valve or the Black Mesa Team with three or four members on one map (one map for 3-4 members… :lol)
I’m sorry, the modding is not easy for me since i’m alone with Mapping, Coding, Scripting…
The small team of Wilson Chronicles will not make a big mod, just a small mod arround the Black Mesa environment.
Jealous?
Us?
Not in the least, We think its a great Demo, it just has a shit-ton of gameplay problems.
Don’t get me wrong, as far as mods go this one is very good. It’s just that as proper HL fans we are pretty spoiled what with Valve making those awesome games. As for critisising only, that’s how feedback works, I guess. People tend to take the good aspects of a game as a norm and don’t bother to point them out.
Wow, way to take criticism maturely. Everything that was said was constructive criticism which you could have used to improve your mod. Instead you have decided to state repeatedly how you’re not a large team and as a lot of the points relate to level design (and thus fixable by one person) I don’t understand your point.
Seeing as how most of the comments have been positive (and those that weren’t were complete with constructive criticism) I fail to see how you can read that as people hating your mod. And I don’t think anyone is going to get jealous of a demo of a mod which, from the sounds of things, has a long way to go before being finished.
Disclaimer: I haven’t played the thing yet, I’ll have a look after work.
I’m really impressed with what you’ve done, particularly since you’re working alone.
Don’t let my clumsy attempts at humor undermine your hard work.
I actually think his response is a little lost in translation. I think what was meant to come across as a joke just came across as aggressive. I could be completely wrong though, but he did say the criticism is nice.
But to be honest who knows?
Edit: Just saw your avatar Luka. He is a brilliant character, love the bit where he goes ‘Aaahhh’ and disappears into a bush.
It isn’t because he’s jealous, it’s basic game and level design knowledge. Visual (such as lights) and audible hints should help guide the player around the levels, not just leave them guessing where to go. Levels shouldn’t be dense with props and objects limiting player movement, the player should be given plenty of space to mess around in, and the difficulty is supposed to grow at a linear level; the player shouldn’t have to fight for his life at the very beginning of the game.
Personally, I also feel that the particle effects were too obtrusive, they need to be more subtle. The explosion effect, for example, with the really big flash looked really good, but all the smoke and little fiery pieces (of something) afterwards kinda ruined it.
Don’t take this the wrong way, you have impressive custom content and the environmental design was also good at most times, but there is really room for improvement, game-wise.
I have nothing to be jealous about; my feedback is simply my unadulterated opinion of the mod. Fixing some of these fundamental (and simple!) level design problems would do wonders with helping the player out and making the mod more fun to play! It has nothing to do with development time or team members. If these are problems you noticed prior to releasing a demo then maybe it would have been worthwhile to fix them ahead of time before releasing it? Unlike a commercial game, there are no time limits on creating a mod.
If you’ve been working on and/or playing a level for an extended period of time you tend to miss a lot of these issues, especially with difficulty or direction - as the designer you already know where to go, where sequences and NPCs are, etcetera. But as a random gamer, who has never played the levels before, it’s a little more difficult - we don’t know where to go, what to press, and that level of uncertainty is frustrating. It becomes a puzzle in it’s own right of ‘guess which button works’ or ‘guess which door opens’, and it’s not fun. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the player, and if you can’t, you should have other people to test the maps and provide feedback on what they liked and what they didn’t.
Modding isn’t easy for anyone. It’s extremely difficult to make even a small mod, and I’m not attacking your dedication or progress at all; I know first-hand how difficult it is to create even a single level from scratch with custom content! But, without feedback, you are never going to improve, and your mod will never get better. I wasn’t unimpressed out of jealousy, I’m unimpressed because I didn’t have fun, which is usually the desired result when playing a game or mod.
My thoughts exactly.
I found that it was easier if you gave houndeyes like a third of their original health.
The new flashlight overlay thingy was a nice touch, but it looked ugly, like they’re trying to emulate L4D and not doing it right.
It took me ages to figure out that I was supposed to open a fire door by using a glass panel, causing it to break, then using the logo behind it again.
The maps were also horribly optimized, and they legged my computer to death if I look towards areas busy of the maps, whereas well-made maps don’t have that problem. At least, I hope BM won’t. :fffuuu:
I didn’t like that the MP5 and handgun used HL2’s default reload sounds, because I really hate the SMG reload sound now that I’m using sexy custom ones.