Talk:Choreo Era

Summary

After almost two years in development, Half-Life: Alyx was starting to shape up. As it grew out of prototyping phases, it needed a writer to tie the locations and characters of the game together. The sole story writer was Rob Yescombe, whom Valve hired in December of 2017., as the original writers of Half-Life 2 left the company one year earlier.

The Choreo Era is the most recognizable period of Half-Life: Alyx's development, and tells the tale of the "Old Story" of Half-Life: Alyx. During this Era, the developers heavily expanded upon ideas and plot elements which arose prior during development, as well as adding new ones. This Era began in December of 2017 and ended on January 7th, 2019, after Robin Walker, the head of development, held a meeting amongst developers to discuss the state of the game after the company-wide holiday playtest.

The scope of this Era was larger than that of any other part of development. This required the significant expansion of development team, which allowed for creation of the largest number of assets, unmatched by any other Era. The game had the largest team at Valve during that time — around 80 developers working on the game.

At the end of December 2018 Valve developers began a company-wide playtest. The game was playable from start to finish, had chapter preview images, chapter titles, own soundtrack, and lip-syncing implemented.

Choreo (short for Choreography) scenes are animated scripted story sequences in source games. This era of Half-Life: Alyx's development heavily utilized these, hence the "Choreo" naming of this Era.

All information surrounding this era is pieced together using following resources:

• The readonly .bin file, which references almost all of the assets made during this time of development;
• The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx;
• Information shared by developers;
• Tyler McVicker's stream of an early build of Half-Life: Alyx and various files inside the build that he shared with the public;
• Strings of code and assets Valve developers left in other games;
• The game files.

Features

At the time of the company-wide playtest the game had many features such as...

Weapons

• Pistol
  • Reflex Sight
  • Burst Fire
  • Bullet Reservoir
  • Laser Sight

• Shotgun
  • Ammo charger
  • Tau Cannon
  • Speedloader
  • Grenade Launcher

• SMG
  • Stun Grenade Clips

• Multi-Tool

• Grenade

• Xen Grenade

Setting

A piece of concept art showcasing distressed apartment buildings of City 17.

With the game set after the Seven Hour War, the overall tone of Yescombe's initial narrative was darker and more somber than previous Half-Life games. Initial levels featured Vorts being rounded up by Combine soldiers and paraded in front of citizens as roadkill, citizens of City 17 nervously shuddering in food ration lines, and a particularly squalid part of City 17 overrun with Xen alien debris. Gone were the bumbling scientists of Black Mesa. In their place were Combine henchmen who ruled over the destitute streets of City 17 with fear and force

— The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx

City 17 appeared in a much worse state compared to Half-Life 2. A lot of areas were overrun by flora and fauna of Xen. Such areas were blocked off by Combine walls or simple fences and were often raided by Combine soldiers in search of vortigaunts. The Combine uses civil workers and combine soldiers equipped with flamethrowers to burn the Xen infestation out.

city 17 stuff combine soldiers combine workers

Backstory

After the events of Half-Life 1 the Combine invades the Earth. Wallace Breen negotiates humanity's surrender and becomes the Earth's administator.

The story revolves around the Vault, a prison where the G-Man is being held. The prison was built inside the Quarantine Zone on the outskirts of City 17. To keep the G-Man inside, the Vault requires constant stream of Vortigaunt's power. The Combine has numerous substasions placed throughout the Quarantine Zone to extract the power of the Vortigaunts and transport it to the Vault. The task of capturing feral Vortigaunts is carried out by a special Combine class — Combine Captains, they have a distinct appeareance, their pauldrons feature a yellow insignia of the Vortigaunt's head. When paired with other soldiers, the Captain acts as the leader of the group, coordinating actions of every other class — Grunts, 'Heavy' soldiers, Suppressors, and Recons.

The Combine uses propaganda to subjagate citizens of City 17 blah blah blah

The main character of the story, Eli Vance, is kept inside his "manor" and is forced to record propaganda videos to subjagate humanity even further. His captor is Hahn, one of the Combine's henchmen, described to have her brain sucked out and replaced by the Combine. She is the main antagonist.

Alyx Vance, the main protagonist, hates to see her father sold out to the Combine and therefore her relationship with him is rough. She lives on the upmost floor of City 17's apartment building near Eli's manor. She appears to be highly respected by the citizens and the Combine workers.

Jozef is a family friend of the Vance family. Despite Eli's best efforts, Alyx often sneaks out of her hideout to meet Jozef. Jozef lives inside a small apartment that has a secret passage to his makeshift lab. His lab is located inside "Brassbound", one of many rundown sections of City 17. Jozef is pretty skilled when it comes to Combine technology. His skills and contents of his lab suggest that he might be a Combine worker. He has access to 6 cameras around City 17 and 2 inside the Quarantine Zone, one of which is placed near Gary's hideout.

?Did gary even have a name at that time?

Another relevant character is Gary. Gary is an injured vortigaunt who escaped the Combine's captivity and lives inside the quarantine zone. Gary sends Alyx messages about the Vault and the G-Man through her dreams. One of these dreams occurs at the very beginning of the game, which appears to be the single main motivator of Alyx's actions of pursuing the Vault.

Soldier classes

• Grunt
• Captain
• Heavy
• Suppressor
• Recon
• The grunt with a handmounted flamethrower - almost like the blind zombie but not blind and not a zombie.

Workers

Male

• Bob
• Hans
• Kondo
• Aleks

Female

• Fitz
• Galena

Citizens

• franky, garden cits, ?michael?, linda, etc
• a billion of different maps

Plot

Prologue/Chapter 0

The Dream

• the respirator
• the g-man room exploding
• the title of the game appears
• Music.IntroDreamTitleCrawl
• maps/a1_intro_world/chapter_title.vmap

Alyx's Hideout

• citadel vista
• portal inhibitor
• talk with eli

Laundry room

• uncle xen walk'n'talk ?? not too much left in the files
• the bakery
• the bicyclists

Eli's Manor

• the sfm scene

Greater City 17

• lots of stuff

• 

  The fire station.

Chapter 1

Jozef's Hideout/Brassbound

• maps/prefabs/chapter_titles/chapter_title_01.vmap
• a citizen digging through a trash can.
• workers evicting citizens
• the propaganda screen and wires

the lab

• cactus
• music
• autocannon from ep2
• disassembled scanner
• gravity gloves
• propaganda posters
• the train

Chapter 2

Quarantine entrance

• maps/prefabs/chapter_titles/chapter_title_02.vmap
• maps/personal/jasonb/a2_quarantine_entrance_jb_xenpass.vmap
• maps/personal/jim/a2_quarantine_entrance_test.vmap
• propaganda 01
• skybox new vs old

Chapter 3

Vort hideout

• maps/prefabs/chapter_titles/chapter_title_03.vmap
• maps/personal/a2_hideout_revision.vmap
• maps/personal/jim/a2_hideout_revision.vmap

Chapter 4

Metro station

• maps/prefabs/chapter_titles/chapter_title_04.vmap

Chapter 5

Hotel

• maps/prefabs/chapter_titles/chapter_title_05.vmap
• maps/personal/robbr/a3_hotel_lobby_basement_vertex_test.vmap
• the substation stuff
• propaganda 02 (combine recon is referenced)

Street+Tenements

• Tripmines?

Chapter 6

Processing Plant

• maps/prefabs/chapter_titles/chapter_title_06.vmap
• Worker Aleks and his shotgun. shotgun_intro.vmap
• The construction site puzzle+battle with a grunt and an ordinal
• propaganda 03?

Chapter 7

Distillery

• maps/prefabs/chapter_titles/chapter_title_07.vmap
• maps/prefabs/entities/blind_zombie_freight_elevator.vmap
• maps/personal/brame/distillery_test01.vmap
• maps/personal/brame/distillery_test02.vmap
• A lot of stuff
• The fight between the blind zombie and antlions.

Chapter 8

Antlion tunnels

• maps/prefabs/chapter_titles/chapter_title_08.vmap
• maps/personal/jim/a4_c17_antlions.vmap
  • maps/personal/jasonb/a4_c17_antlions_intro_jbxenpass_v3.vmap
  • maps/personal/jasonb/a4_c17_antlions_intro_jbxenpass_v3_deadblendtest001.vmap
• maps/personal/jim/a4_c17_antlions_2.vmap
  • maps/personal/jasonb/a4_c17_antlions_courtyard_jbartpass.vmap
• Antlions jumping out of xen portals
  • maps/personal/bradk/c17/zoo_c17_antlion_portals.vmap
  • maps/prefabs/entities/xen_portal_vehicle.vmap
  • maps/prefabs/entities/xen_portal_antlion_combine_fight.vmap
• combine building eater ?

Parking garage

• unique strider animations
• unique antlion animations
• antlion eggs
• combine recon is referenced
• a few maps reference the model of the hd hl2 soldier.
• propaganda 04

Chapter 9

The Vault

• maps/prefabs/chapter_titles/chapter_title_09.vmap
• maps
  • maps/a5_vault/manor_ending.vmap
  • maps/a5_vault/manor_ending_choreo.vmap
  • maps/a5_vault/refuge.vmap
  • maps/a5_vault/hideout.vmap
  • maps/a5_vault/jozef.vmap
  • maps/a5_vault/lobby.vmap
  • maps/a5_vault/innervault.vmap ?
  • maps/a5_vault/outervault.vmap ?
• teleporting to different locations such as Alyx's hideout, Jozef's hideout, Gary's hideout, Eli's manor.
• kill 2 combine soldiers, destroy a combine scanner, kill Hahn, give Eli a card from G-Man. The End.

Aftermath

Throughout the summer and fall of 2018, the development team began testing the game in more depth with the hopes of getting it ready to ship in the first half of 2019 alongside the Valve Index headset. When December rolled around, the team prepared for the first company-wide playtest. When the holiday season started, every employee took home an in-development Index headset and had to submit their feedback on Half-Life: Alyx across four core pillars of the game: story, gameplay, aesthetics, and performance. Gameplay, aesthetics, and performance received high praises, but the story received negative feedback. Playtesters scored the story at lowest level of any game in Valve history.

The story ended up feeling a lot like a Zack Snyder DC film versus a Marvel movie. It was dark, serious, and laborious.

— Mike Morasky

I am so lonely playing this game.

— Matt Scott

They hired a writer [Rob Yescombe] at Valve, and he was working on story, and they had a whole game based around this story. I mean, it wasn't finished, but it was finished enough that you could play it. They started playtesting it with the whole company and the feedback was: "You know, all of this is great, but doesn't seem like the story is working".

— Erik Wolpaw

We all had pretty strong feelings about the story. Getting that feedback from the rest of the company was validating.

— Corey Peters

It was hard to feel confident about where the game was headed after the company-wide playtest results.

— Jason Mitchell

A lot of the story was loaded into the first two levels of the game back then.

— Bram Eulers

Half-Life had always been a little tongue-in-cheek with action moments offset by Star Wars-style humor. But Alyx was downright bleak, with themes of horror, dread, and torture, and long stretches of no narrative at all.

— The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx

The negative feedback came at a rough time for Valve. A month earlier, in November of 2018, Valve released Artifact, a card game set in Dota universe. The game received major backlash, many people were blaming Valve for releasing such a mediocre game instead of Episode 3 or Half-Life 3. It became obvious that if Valve was to release Half-Life: Alyx in its current state, it might not be received well.

Developers feared that after almost 3 years of work Half-Life: Alyx will not leave the Valve office, sharing the fate of many other projects.

On January 7, 2019 Robin Walker and Greg Coomer have convoked the entire Half-Life: Alyx team to discuss the state of the game and the results of the playtest.

Standing in front of the 80-person-strong group, Walker realizes how the project had grown from its roots as a 4-person prototype in February 2016. Alyx is now the largest team in the history of Valve — a risky proposition for a VR-only game that carrier the added weight of being the first Half-Life in over a decade.

Addressing the room, Walker says the response to the playtest has been incredible overall: the sense of immersion in City 17 is off the charts, as is the fun of the minute to minute gameplay. But there are problems, he says. Namely, the story and narrative just aren't working — and the company wide-playtest confrimed as much.

"We're going to ask these three guys to figure it out for us," Walker says, as he gestures over to writers Erik Wolpaw and Jay Pinkerton, known as two-thirds of the iconic writing trio on Portal 2, and Sean Vanaman, a writer who joined Valve in the Spring of 2018 when it acquired his company, Campo Santo.

— The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx

After this meeting it became clear that Valve will not cancel the game, but change major aspects of it. The game enters a new phase of development.

Sources

Previous section: Experimental Era

HLA - Eras

Next section: Pre-Retail Era