Half-Life 2 Interview

Computer & Video Games has a new Half-Life 2 interview up, as they got to chat with Valve Software's Doug Lombardi at the ECTS game show. Part one of this interview (part two goes up tomorrow) deals with the current state of the game, the change of setting for the sequel, the AI and scripting. Here's a bit on what they're doing right now

- What are you focusing on in the game then at the moment, in terms of development? Lombardi: Playtesting, playtesting, playtesting. - So you're at the fine-tuning stage, then? Lombardi: Yeah. In the prior generation of stuff, level designers were artists, in a sense, and what we've done is de-coupled the two processes and we've gone with the idea of an orange map, where we make a quite simple orange version of the level, and that's strictly for pathing and playtesting right off the bat. ...