David Zdinak

If you haven’t played Alien Swarm yet, you should, since it’s free. I’m actually impressed with the quality of this game, and the thing that really struct me for the first hour of playing it, I really couldn’t tell that it was one the Source Engine. Anyway on to the beef of it. I’m in love with the new SDK and the TileGen program that ships with the game.

TileGen is a stupid simple mapping program that they add to the game, which basically allows you to drop map pieces onto a grid and puts a map together for you, and exports the whole as a vmt so you can load it into hammer and tweak it some more or just compile it. The nice thing about this is the expansiveness of the system, as it allows for you to make your own tiles for this system, by designing rooms, hallways, corridors, entrances, exits, and choke holds in hammer on 256 unit grid segments. I’ve had a lot of fun working on this thus far.

Here’s where the amazing part begins. I haven’t gotten a lot of mapping done recently due to the work I have put into converting models from Dawn of War 2 for use in Garry’s Mod. However this has it’s advantage, my friend “fury_161″ has been able to rig the 40k Space Marine models onto the HL2 skeleton and make replacement player models for Alien Swarm. Because of this the desire for Space Hulk like maps by both myself and from the community after seeing the player model replacements. So that’s what I’ve been working on for the better part of this past week. For randomness here’s some screenshots of my quick Space Hulk theme test TileGen map.