Talk:Cameo Era/Expansion

Concept art depicting Gordon, Alyx, Eli, Skitch and a rough D0g.

The Expansion cycle is the first of the two chronicled halves of the Cameo era, starting from:

• Early 2000 — adoption of a 'circular story' that sharpened and solidified the game's focus and areas;
• To late 2001 — when the Air Exchange, a hallmark of the game up since early '00, was cut — along with the conscripts and polluted atmosphere.

This period of Half-Life 2's development is popular among fans for its overall darker tone and stylised art, which had a heavy influence on the game's style by bringing a heightened feel to environments, particularly City 17. It heralded in the foundations of the Half-Life 2 we recognize today, albeit with a much larger scope that provided the team with a wealth of experience that would be brought forward to subsequent development.

Summary

The Expansion cycle began sometime in 2000 (June at the latest; the "proposal date" of the 'Timelapse Opening' script) with the adoption of a 'circular story' design philosophy, centering around a single area/region which the player exits then returns to over the course of the game: City 17. Many new concepts and areas were solidified during this era, including the Air Exchange, an opening train ride, gasmasked citizens and the return of the Black Mesa Science Team. Gordon's journey was marked by 'cameos' with ally characters for each major section, with a select few like Alyx and Captain Vance defining the broader plot — these cameos are articulated in Marc Laidlaw's per-chapter story vignettes, which detailed much of the game at this time. Prompted by these grim vignettes, the team's concept artists — Dhabih Eng and Viktor Antonov — created numerous pieces of concept art for the era, featuring an overall darker tone, more stylistic color choices, and somewhat exaggerated character designs.

Much is known about this time in development due to the large amount of work, aforementioned, done by the development team.

Development background

Cameos

A location map from this era, note the characters named for major areas.

A major reaffirmation of the team's intent to invest in characters, and the namesake of this era, came with the concept of the 'cameo' — dramatic interaction with a friendly, location-specific character, who would accompany them for either a short time or throughout a specific section. The concept fit perfectly with the design methods honed during the earlier production of Uplink (a demo released after Half-Life, made to streamline the 'cabal' system by sorting members into defined roles like level designer and animator), as in theory the new structure would allow each section cabal to create an NPC to define every major chapter. Although companion characters had been discussed at length up to this point as part of the overall thinking on characterisation, it's likely cameos fully materialised here as much of the documentation for the concept is from this one — such as the map on the left, which parallels Marc Laidlaw's vignettes for the era.

Cameos can be seen in action in retail, however only in a very limited form, with just two cameo characters — Odessa and Grigori — making the cut, as by 2004 there was simply not enough time to fully implement the feature .

Circular design philosophy

"The Citadel. Yes, it's a deliberate landmark that we want you to feel this relationship to. You go toward it, you go away from it, and you'll develop more and more understanding of it as the game goes on." — Marc Laidlaw

​

The Cameo Era continued the process of simplification and sharpening of focus that began in the Hyper era, taking the existing elements towards a more specific and focused design philosophy that borrowed from Valve's own individual map design principles: seeing your goal near the start of the level and working towards that. The team adopted this paradigm at a macro scale by creating a location which would be the main area of the game and the plot — City 17, an alien-occupied metropolis with the central player goal at its centre. This would serve to give the game a more unified feel from beginning to end, while solving one of the biggest problems they the team saw with the original Half-Life, the disconnect between Xen and the rest of the game.

The team was determined not to reproduce another Xen — the finale from the original game that was rushed due to time constraints — but no-one was to foresee that the development of Half-Life 2 would pose even more challenges than its predecessor.

"There was you and a bunch of other agents were like you. Your HEV suit would have become this weird, black leather stealth suit with all these devices latched on it. There was some kind of parasitic implant thing in his brain that would kill him if he went against orders." Gabe Newell took one look at it [and said]: "It's not Half-Life."

"He was right ... We had some really elaborate stuff going on with agents and counteragents. That was really convoluted. Gradually the process was to simplify things to make them directly related. So it gradually changed from this globe-spanning thing to, 'Let's do a city, or a region, an area where you go out and come back in,' you end up kind of where you began. It was our little local level design philosophy on a larger scale. You can see your goal, and you had to thwart a bunch of obstacles that get in your way, and at the end of the level when you get there." — Marc Laidlaw

Bun: these quotes are only here for posterity of info — I intend to move most of the first quote to the hyper era's development background section.

"We wanted the end of the game to feed directly into the beginning. For example, if there had been time in the development of Half-Life to fix it somehow, you should have seen the Nihilanth [the final alien boss] twice before you get to the end of the game. We should have made sure there was something coming about Xen, and you're trained in jumping puzzle before you get there!" Marc grins: "So it didn't feel like it was laid on with a trowel. So, those were conscious things like, 'Let's do something circular,' where you can see the end of the game from the beginning and create this unity so that you don't have anything at the end that you don't have a relationship with already." — Marc Laidlaw

Continued floundering

Bun: introduce this concept in an earlier article like hyper or pre-pitch. Note that these problems became clearer in this era because of the more solid direction and larger amount of concept work done.

Unfortunately, while a vast amount of work was carried out, it was ultimately not building up to solid specs or goals. This was due to the parallel nature of development at the time, where programmers were still fundamentally working out the Source Engine; and so the concept side of the team tended to continuously iterate on different directions, rather than building a game around a set of solid technological limitations.

"There was a fair amount of spinning of wheels in terms of... 'Well, we can go in this direction or this direction,' and the people who could really answer the questions were like, 'Well, I'm still trying to get the shaders up and running,' so the people on the concept side tended to have to iterate a lot ... essentially we were trying to solve production problems when we were still in pre-production, which meant that they couldn't get a lot done, and it was also really frustrating. It's like you're trying to create an art direction when you still don't know what your polygon budgets are going to be, and you're still a year away from knowing exactly what sort of performance you can achieve in an area that's going to be critical to a set of artistic choices that you're going to make. So, there was a fair amount of thrashing." — Marc Laidlaw

Known Information

Plot

For an article documenting in-depth the evolution of this era's maps, see coming soon.

A vast amount of documentation exists covering the Cameo era's plot, with various contradicting story ideas and vague gaps intersecting or co-existing with one another across the era. It's also the era that represents the largest number of map files and assets in the 2003 leak, so extensive, detailed information is available for the various set pieces/locations which mappers created for each given area.

For the most part, the following outline is a critical synopsis based on the 'main' line of plot vignettes from Raising The Bar — following the geographical map above — as well as VMFs and assets: however the outline will also try to include a broad overview of each story point's proposed concepts and areas in supplements (if applicable and noteworthy).

Prologue

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In the same vein as the original game's introduction, this was to be a long section heavy on worldbuilding, introducing the player to the new world via exposition and visual storytelling. At the same time, this unfolding narrative would also provide a chance to demonstrate the capability of Valve's new Source Engine.

We have information on two main concepts for this era's prologue: Eli's slideshow and the combined G-Man briefing/train ride. Eli's slideshow seems to have been more a 'lore' document than a serious attempt at an introductory segment, and it was soon replaced by the latter two concepts, both of which survived to the retail game — albeit in a mutated form.

Eli's slideshow

Earlier concept

"I was really hoping that by describing these scenes, I could trick Dhabih Eng into painting them" — Marc Laidlaw

Contradictions

One summary in RTB:UC states that the slideshow was in fact demonstrated "around the time" that the three races were being discussed. The lack of specificity in this phrasing complicates any certainty sure around when this script came about. It could mean within a year, within six months, or at the exact same time — since Raising The Bar is a source that sacrifices complexity for readability, coupled with the fact that summaries in the Uncorrected Proof edition are known to be unreliable, we can't be completely sure of what exact era the slideshow is from.

However, the script mentions many concepts known to be later than the three-races eras, like the Combine — who properly came into focus in the late Hyper era — and specific enemies like Cremators and Striders. Additionally, as discussed, most sources describe the slideshow as specifically trying to solve the floundering issues which had become clear at the point of writing. So, the editors have made an educated guess that the script is the beginnings of this era, rather than pre-dating it.

Eli's slideshow was an early script by Laidlaw, outlining a short scene in which Eli Maxwell directly explains to the player the intervening years between HL1 and HL2, talking over a series of retropsective photographs. The scene was likely the first concrete articulation of the Cameo era's story concepts, and, probably, the era's first proposal for HL2's introduction. However, it also holds some remnant of Valve's previous intent to make the game truly span the globe, as the script describes a scene of civilians falling into a pit to be replaced by the Citadel, a paragraph beside which someone has commented in pencil a short suggestion: "Tokyo?".

Whereas popular fan theory sometimes interprets this scene as taking place 'mid-game' at Maxwell's hideout, official sources don't hint at its placement in the in-game timeline, instead discussing it as an early concept piece that had a specific purpose for the team. Like most of the vignettes — and as the above quote suggests — the slideshow was intended to be a narrative guiding light, which would serve as inspiration for the concept side of the team.

Rather than a solid direction for the game's first moments like the next two concepts would prove to be, with the slideshow Laidlaw was trying to address the aforementioned 'thrashing' with an achievable direction — as opposed to the "spinning of the wheels" that had taken place over story development. In fact, he even refers to it as a 'spec' — industry terminology for an uncommissioned script that is more focused on delivering a story outline.

Chronology

However, all this does not rule out the possibility of the vignette being imagined as a prologue to the game. Several reasons suggest just that (which is why the slideshow is in the prologue section):

• The mysterious and abrupt ending, Eli cutting off plus the projector going dark, implying a change in scene;
• If it were in addition to the G-man briefing and train ride, it would simply be restating information the player could already gleam, only more bluntly;
• The descriptions of the script as trying to solve the issues also imply that it could have been trying to bridge a gap and create a 'fresh start' for the team to bounce off;
• And lastly, Laidlaw describes it as 'an unworkably clunky way of giving exposition' that he 'was happy to lose' — which begs the question, what, if any, replaced it as an exposition method?

Possibly, the next two entries.

G-Man briefing

An image of the earliest known version of the Half-Life 2 G-Man model.

An explanatory scene to bridge the gap between Half-Life' 1 and 2, two versions of which were proposed — each of which essentially boil down to the G-Man waking the player up from their imposed sleep, then subjecting them to a scene which alluded to (or directly demonstrated) the player's purpose and what had happened since the first game.

G-Man briefing →

Timelapse opening

Earlier concept

The timelapse opening was a script (proposed on July 6th, 2000) in which the G-Man subjects the player to a scene which would introduce the player to the state of the world by visually demonstrating the destructive events of the years between HL and HL2. At the same time, it was hoped that the scene would show off the full brunt of the (then-unfinished) Source Engine by making extensive use of Valve's new "terrain and shader effects". After the G-Man finishes his monologue, the player is led to the Wasteland Train, which creaks into life across the terrain the player has just seen desolated. Thereafter, the script ends with Samuel greeting the player, presumably leading into the train ride, although Samuel's line of dialogue has a hand-scribbled comment which reads "Or?" — which could mean either indecision of where to go next, or ambivalence over the name of the character of Samuel. This bridging scene, coupled with the fact that the script picks up right after the end of the first game, signaled Valve's intent to solidify a direct connection between Half-Life 2 and its predecessor after deprecating the loosely connected story concepts of the Pre-Pitch and Hyper eras.

But although this was the beginnings of what would become the retail game's introduction, none of the dialogue made its way into the final script (unlike the version below). Indeed, we can guess that this concept was earlier than the next version of the G-Man briefing only because some of the timelapse scene's lines made their way into the next iteration, in a refined and condensed form. There are two likely reasons this script was condensed, although a combination of both reasons is also possible:

• If the timelapse did lead into the opening train ride, the entire timelapses' purpose is made somewhat superflous, since the train ride served to visually and subtly communicate almost all of the plot details that were directly articulated to the player in this scene;
• Laidlaw realised the timelapse would be difficult to implement, which may have been a lingering fear for the team, given the experience during the first game's development of level designers saying they could implement Laidlaw's ambitious ending ideas — only for them to turn out to be impossible.

Regardless of reasoning, the next iteration of the G-Man briefing was far more succinct.

Terrainmorph

The 'main' version of the briefing closely resembles retail in its shorter length

Train ride

City 17

---

Train station

Industrial

Terminal

First a part of the industrial map, then a separate, large area.

Manhack arcade

Kleiner's lab

Escape

BUN: Very unsure if only the bus ride or the teleport too were from this era. Investigate!

Outflow

Wasteland

---

Scrapland

Outer wastes

Air Exchange

Arctic

---

The Borealis

Kraken Base

Weather Control

City 17 Uprising

---

Vertigo

Streetwars

Citadel

OLD NOTES—

Blah blah talk about the BETAA STORY:

• Gman intro
• Long train ride
• Long C17 intro (trainstation, industrial, manhack arcade)
• Meet Barney/Kleiner
• - Bus chase
• - Later teleporter shenanigans
• Canals/sewers
• Scrapland w/ Eli/Dog
• Doin some train ridin', meet w/ Alyx
• Airex w/ Vance
• Owen/Odell on Borealis
• Dr Mossman in Kraken
• Arctic + Weather Control
• - AC-130/Osprey back to C17
• Vertigo
• Streetwars
• Citadel confrontation w/ Consul, Alyx n Mossman

Kids in factories

Captain Vance, the Conscripts and Younger alyx design

Manhack arcade

Gargantua train sequence, with the train ride being much longer

Wasteland

• - Eli Maxwell Scrapyard
• o Catch train, after a bit need to move on foot for some reason (todo, was this implied by the maps?)
• Airex

Depot

• Originally a prison
• Gunship construction
• Catch train to air ex
• o Antlions attack with you but against you too

Citadel shit

Story Vignettes

Quarry town with monk, traps and mines (vignettes)

• o Went into scurry mine field then encountered some antlions (talk about scurry mine art and map)
• o Next place is a safe camp run by Captain Vance or eli

Antlion caves

• o Much larger open spaces after eli den, planned to be even larger than the Antlion caves introduced with grub extract
• o Antlion grubs were partially used but never fully as their purpose was still being figured out, left until episode 2 to be refined

i've always thought the antlion cave vignette was much later than the others, is it even from this era?? i have my doubts - bun

Bus chase (in story vignette?)

Manhack arcade

Npcs

Trench coat metro cop older icon stunstick

Cremators

Slightly updated Bullsquid, higher res than hl1 but still cartoony

Man hack from this era only has textures and sounds

• Possible outline in graphics card wallpaper (https://valvearchive.com/archive/Half-Life/Half-Life%202/Art/Wallpapers/ATI/wallpaper_06_1024.jpg) (Note (bun): ummm)
• in all the other wallpapers any images are of recognisable concept art, this outline is the only outlier with several shape features being similar to the textures

Early Dropship

Particle storm

• Only limited particle system remains
• Sounds for forming, dissipating, hovering and lightning strikes
• A node for “particle storm rock spawn”, possibilities include
•  Something for it to grab and throw
•  Something that is a consequence of it attacking, allowing you to attack it
•  Something for it to protect and for you to attack
•  Something for it to spawn from
• If not a proper enemy it is Possibly a method to keep the player within the playable area, like leeches or piranhas in the ocean, somewhat similar to the guardians in halo multiplayer maps

antlion guard

• No bug bait control, guard actually threw poisonous pods at the player
• model in the leak (https://combineoverwiki.net/images/f/f4/Spore_leak_1.png, https://combineoverwiki.net/images/e/ee/Spore_leak_2.png)
• texture from antlion guard sources https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/308781516606013442/575890300619325442/026a4f86a2fff3ef6fc7b54ad4d535f2.png
• the guard still has an animation for this

Sand Barnacle? texture is more realistic than this era

WAD textures

fprintf (f, "{\n\"classname\" \"worldspawn\"\n");

fprintf( f, "\"mapversion\" \"220\"\n\"sounds\" \"1\"\n\"MaxRange\" \"4096\"\n\"mapversion\" \"220\"\n\"wad\" \"vert.wad;dev.wad;generic.wad;spire.wad;urb.wad;cit.wad;water.wad\"\n" );

- BUN: thanks to jaycie aka jackathan for finding this originally

Speculation

the Scanner designed for this era is only in concept art and sounds

• https://valvearchive.com/archive/Half-Life/Half-Life%202/Art/Levels/City%2017/city_wall_alt.jpg
• Sounds indicate charging stations and possible ability to fire energy balls, also a dive bombing behaviour and a poison gas attack that was implemented later
• Piranha like movement

(BUN: i always thought the combot model moved and looked like a piranha, not the anomalous concept scanners — and I would say based on the fact it's a monster_ NPC it existed this early in more than just concept form, plus it appeared at GYFTVs which imo almost certainly confirms it's the combot model which is what's referred to as piranha-like)

(BUN: additionally, the old combot model doesn't even have any lods — it's old alright)

Computer Chips plot element in spire/weather control

• Weather controlling related?
• Allowing use of combine weaponry? (this is Specifically alluded to in audio from skyscraper between combine units)
• if the above what they were for, it might have been explained at the start of the game in relation to the physics manipulator

(BUN: more likely just a McGuffin for the short vignettes?)

key dates

(Note (bun): oh yeah americans this is in dd/mm/yyyy deal with it 😎 - should change to yyyy-mm-dd in final article)

• 19/05/2000 tank plus diesel engine loop sounds
• 22/05/2000 first reference to trans.txt and 'v' (valve) tools as opposed to 'q' (quake), in gary/buildnew.bat

(Note (bun): keep in mind oldtrans.txt does reference lab_ textures (which are actually very similar to the earliest lab maps we have))

• 02/06/2000 timelapse opening vignette
• 15/06/2000 first combot sounds
• 21/06/2000 to 23/06/2000 sounds/c17/ wavs

(Note (bun): it occurs to me that these sounds could have been for siggraph/gyftvs)

• 23/06/2000 to 28/06/2000 siggraph 2000, private/closed-room valve tech demo
• 16/08/2000 to 17/08/2000 testlevel sounds
• 24/08/2000 to 29/08/2000 testcitadel sounds
• 09/10/2000 to 06/12/2000 sound/ambient/areas/borealis wavs
• 10/10/2000 sound/ambient/areas/sky_scraper (vertigo) sounds
•  01/11/2000 soldier vert lines (plus heli_way.wav)
• 16/10/2000 to 01/11/2000 airex sounds
• 11/10/2000 stalker sounds
• 17/10/2000 all headcrab bite sounds
• 23/10/2000 binocular signal sounds
• 28/10/2000 alyx voice lines (misc, cache, citadel and skyscraper

[14/11/2000 vert lines were re-recorded with a different voice actor]

• 29/10/2000 much more sounds for flying apc turret
• 21/11/2000 to 06/12/2000 kraken ambient sounds
• ricochet release date
•  idea for city logo from platform designs
•  possible reuse of content from tf2 development
• • heads from realistic tf2
• • armour is similar to space romans
•  slight possibility of late development aleph character model
• 8/11/2000 new bullsquid sounds
• 14/11/2000 first mention of town, phys town zombie town trap town
• 15/11/2000 to 14/12/2000 manhack sounds
• 17/11/2000 to 22/11/2000 ice axe sound
• 30/11/2000 soundscape_test sounds

(Note (bun): possible approx. soundscape implementation date?)

• 8/01/2001 first manhack test room
• 12/01/2001 to 16/01/2001 vortigaunt voice
• 23/01/2001 vort test map
• 9/03/2001 first wasteland scanner sound
• 19/03/2001 first haz (hazard course) voice lines
•  later, kleiner lines recorded (04/02/2002) and gman lines re-recorded (27/02/2000)
• 27/03/2001 alien assassin ball sounds for tripwire
• 30/03/2001 gunship sounds
• 30/05/2001 to 6/11/2001 roller and roller bull sounds
• 6/09/2001 roller mine sounds
• 21/09/2001 to 26/09/2001 Particle storm sounds
•  ??/11/2001 vampire: the masquerade -bloodlines starts development
• o barely updated the sdk once downloaded, forced into crunch so no time to deal with changes in how source worked
• o Old console variables for charged gravity gun
•  Sounds for this still exist

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HL2 - Eras

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HL2 - Eras

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