The Team

Urbanebula

DEMONIC PUPPY GAMES FOUNDER

Urbanebula has worked on several aspects of modification for the original Half-Life game since a year after its release in 1998. His main focus in the Half-Life development world is mapping after he discovered his love for using the Duke Nukem Editior and eventually moving onto Valve's Hammer. However, when presented with the new posibilities of the Source Engine 6 years later, he hit a fork in the road. He could either start over and learn the basics for Source mapping, or stick with his love for GoldSource and carry on with his projects. He went for the latter option, leaving Source for the new generation of modders.

Two years on Urb stumbled by the Black Mesa Source mod and immeadiatly applied for a mapping position. With his limited knowledge of Source mapping turned down by the team he began looking into the creation of Source Materials (VTF files), starting with basic examples of redesigning the original GoldSource textures into higher quality VTFs. After posting a few examples of his work on a forum he was immeadiatly given the offer to work on a new mod currently in its concept stages called Half-Life: Event Horizon. Being the open minded type Urb took on the challange and acted as Event Horizon's Lead Texture Artist. After the team's slow and painful demise he founded Demonic Puppy Games and began working on OIFH.

The Hunter

TEXTURE ARTIST AND MAPPING ASSISSTANT

James “Hunter” Archibald was born and bred a PC game fanatic. At as young an age as 3, he was on his Dad’s lap “playing” ‘Elite’ for the old BBC computer. Having really only one direction to travel in from there, he first became interested in games development at the age of 12, where he discovered Age of Empire’s built-in 2D level editor. After really discovering the potential of PC gaming from this game, he sought out more epic games, and came across the wonder that is Half-Life. It was love at first sight for the first-person genre, the mere enjoyment gained from playing RTS was not even comparable to the immersion which Half-Life offered. It was a year after first playing the game that Hunter first attempted to create a Half-Life level, appropriately as a gift for the uncle who had introduced him to the game. Instantly he found himself taken aback by this crazy 3rd dimension, having previously only encountered 2D editors, but a stick-to-it attitude and much help from the mapping community TWHL has resulted in Half-Life modification being Hunter’s most enjoyed hobby.

Further experimentation with the FPS genre resulted in the playing of Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, which became Hunter’s first online multiplayer experience.

Naturally he had to make levels for that too.

From there he was hooked. The source engine came along, and he was making Half-Life 2 levels before he even completed the game.

During his time making levels for Half-Life, Hunter came up with a story and basic outline for a full game modification, months later titled Half-Life: Hostage Situation. A team of 6 was quickly recruited, and despite some bumps in the road, this mod is still slowly, but steadily, making progress. Hunter’s hopes are for Demonic Puppy Games’ involvement to finally set the mod going fast down the finishing straight.

Hunter’s most popular Half-Life modification was a 3-level mini-series titled “The 5 Ways to Die Trilogy.” Baffled by the warm welcome these maps received, Hunter was noted to have commented on how “blatantly appalling these, my early attempts at mapping, actually are.”

Outside the modding world, James’ interests include Melodic Metal music, Team Fortress 2, Bill Bailey & Simon Pegg and getting lost in books. He also considers himself to be quite the film critic, and is interested in journalism.

Daubster

CODING

Ever since his first games played back in '97, or so - Daubster has always been really interested in game development. Of course, back then - he had no idea how it was done or what skills he needed, etc. He used to explore the folders of games, opening config/image/sound files, edit them, etc.

However the big breakthrough came with Half-Life. After he borrowed the title from a friend in late 1999, from the first minute of Black-Mesa Inbound right up to the final defeat of Nihilanth, he was simply stunned by the immense beauty and the amazing gameplay. The first thing he did after finishing the singleplayer part was explore the game folder, as usual. That's when he discovered WorldCraft.

It took Daubster a while to understand the interface and even longer to find out, how to create objects. Though that's where it ended. He managed to create a few objects, even a hallway, although he had no idea what entities were. He also didn't understand Hammers file system and eventually, after failing to see his early creations ingame, he gave up on mapping.

After some time, He discovered programming. His first programs were written in Super Logo, as projects of computer class in the 4th-5th grade. Then he moved on to Pascal and managed to create some of his first Hello World apps.

It was only in 2004 that Daubster regained his faith in Half-Life and opened WorldCraft again, wondering if there was a website which would help him learn the basics. He used Google to search for "worldcraft tutorials" and was introduced to the TWHL Community Site. During his time there he finally learned how to map and found a friendly and helpful community to help with his problems. Mapping pretty much brought him to Photoshop too, as he wanted to make his own textures ever since his first few releases. After uploading his first maps, he got pretty interested in modding and fortunatly he discovered that Half-Life was written in C++ and started learning it.

In the past he has made maps for Sudden-Strike 2 and even attempted mapping for Unreal, although never managed to create anything worth presenting.

Graffiti was also one of his many interests despite not having drawn anything for more than 3 years.

His hope for the future is to find a career in Games Developement as either a coder or designer.