Steam Community Left 4 Dead Group
In case you have not seen the thread, Steam Community beta has launched and we have a Left 4 Dead Group that you can view here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/l4d
The day after the group was set up (on August 7th), Turtle Rock and Valve employees were kind enough to stop working, join in and talk with us for a few hours.
Not letting the chance go to waste, we bombarded them with questions and although they weren't really allowed to say much, we still managed to get some things out of them :D
Mike Booth answering questions
SPARTACVS has posted a log of the insanity in the forums. If you're too lazy to read all of it, we've scraped up all the questions and answers from Mike:
No Shelter: When the hunter attacks a survivor, are you going to have blood gush out everywhere when hes ripping the survivor apart?
MikeB: Yes, that's coming.
MikeB: Just haven't hook up the Hunter shredding effects yet.
MikeB: It should be grisly.
TheStrife: Is the Smoker's tounge going to stay as is? Or are you guys planning on making it look different?
MikeB: The Smoker tongue art is placeholder as well. It'll get some sort of facelift before we ship.
No Shelter: Will the footstep sounds be changed, not really a concern but they have been pretty over used.
MikeB: Footsteps sounds are placeholder and will be replaced before we ship.
squerl: What about survivor AI? We haven't heard anything about that.
MikeB: It's going well, squerl. It's one of the things I'm working on right now.
No Shelter: By yourself?
MikeB: That's my speciality, No Shelter. I do the AI programming for the studio.
SPARTACVS: I know you already answered one question about the director, but a bit of a follow up would be, does the director purposefully punish players with more zombies if they dont stick with their team and work together?
MikeB: Not exactly, Spartacvs. But the way the game is structured, players who run off on their own are at a serious disadvantage.
Jaime answering questions
Jaime is a mapper at Turtle Rock and was one of the Turtle Rock employees present at both QuakeCon and Showdown LAN. She answered some of our questions regarding the maps:
No Shelter: How similar are the two urban maps, do they look the same? Is one day time? or how did you get that to work?
Jaime: We're making all the scenarios have a different feel - it rains in the one urban mission but not in the other, they have different skyboxes and lighting, that sort of thing.
No Shelter: So for sure, at least one of the scenarios is at daytime?
Jaime: No middle of the day scenarios. Right now one is kind of early dawn looking, though. I can't say much about stuff we haven't released any info on :)
No Shelter: I know that one map is in LA. Are all maps in California? Or spread through USA?
Jaime: They're not any specific areas but they end up looking like California because that's where we are and what we can most easily get reference for, really.
squerl: Do you and the other mappers do a map each or do you work collaboratively?
Jaime: We tend to make passes through the environments - in the beginning they were all grey boxes just to get gameplay and we tend to pass them back and forth with a texture pass, then a more detailled pass and so on until we get them all fully fancied up.
The rest of the bunch
-Matt Campbell, programmer from TRS that handles gameplay and UI hinted at a new scoreboard (TAB key) that will show things like recent awards (in case you were too busy to catch who friendly fired you, for example). He also told us that it's possible to hand over grenades to your teammates just like medkits and pills if you don't trust yourself to handle them (himself claming to have the inability to avoid teammates with his molotovs).
-Some other developers that joined: Jerry "JohnnyFlash", systems admin/web dude; Chris "MacMan" Ashton, environmental artist; Phil Robb, art director (concept art, models, textures, animation, effects); Sean Keegan, 3D artist from TRS; and the mysterious "Kon", an artist that works on infected models, viewmodels, props and other things.
It was a great time, thanks to all the dev's for coming in and talking to us fans!
