Final Salvation

Final Salvation is a custom campaign for the zombie apocalypse game "Left 4 Dead 2". I worked on this project with a small international team of developers since 2011. We expand upon the main storyline of the game by adding our own sub-story with our own setting and locations.

The players find themselves on a boat and reach the shore. They quickly discover that the city they just arrived in has been overrun. Together, they fight their way through along a once-safe escape route towards the nearby outpost, their only hope for survival.

We started off with a small transcript of the story and the setting, and from there we went on to create the environment the players will travel through. To do this with such a small team we had to gain experience in a pretty diverse set of disciplines, ranging from the world building (level design), to modelling, texture creation, animating, sounds, ...

Of course we have the original game's assets at our disposal, but to really create original content we had to get creative with custom assets like models, textures, animations, particles, scripts and more...

The game is built upon the Source Engine, which powers some of the most popular games like Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Portal, ... This engine provides some very good tools for the community to create custom content (for free), but the technology is becoming very dated, and the development cycle is pretty slow for today's standards. Maps have to be compiled, a step during which various lighting and visibility optimization algorithms are pre-calculated to make the game run faster. This process can take up to a few hours, so you can't test your changes that often. While it is easy to start building something with the Source Engine, it can also easily become very frustrating. This is one of the reasons why this project is taking a little long to complete.

This project taught me a lot both technically and communicatively, since we are all working remotely. We have a team member in Finland and had former team members from the USA. Working together for so long while never seeing each other in person is certainly challenging. But this lead us to set up a good workflow to manage the project, like using Trello to manage issues, Git for version control, and regular playtesting. Working in the Source Engine and with a remote team really put my motivation and perseverance to the test. This project is a pretty big undertaking and is taking a lot longer than expected, because we wanted to create so much new content ourselves. That's why it's still not finished after almost a decade. But creating your own world and story like this, and seeing it come to life is a lot of fun, and that keeps me going.

Visit the website: Final Salvation website