The Steam group that has celebrated Planetfall since 2231!

Hi folks,

Long time no see!

This week the Alien Swarm Reactive Drop mod was released, and within it is the newest version of Tears for Tarnor Chapter 1.

This version includes a lot of asthetic changes and a couple of layout changes from the last public release, so you should all head over there and check it out.

Whilst you're over there, I would also recommend you check out all the other campaigns in the Reactive Drop library and the various updates and upgrades the Reactive Drop people have done to Alien Swarm to make it feel fresh again.



As for Tarnor itself, I feel nows is as good of a time and place to talk a little about the behind the scenes of it while I'm writing this announcement anyways.

Tarnor was originally meant to be a 10 map story, spread across 3 chapters in a 3,3,4 layout, to allow for it to be released in a modular format, allowing each part of the story to be released as it was ready for play.
Now, after releasing chapter 1 and around the time I was beginning on chapter 2, I was contacted by a member of Valve. He informed me that they were impressed with what I had done and that they'd like to discuss with me the purchasing of Tarnor (maps and IP) from me to add to the original Alien Swarm. I was understandably really keen for this (like, really really!), as the honour of being one of the few to have content purchased by Valve to put into one of their games back then was very rare (not to mention a nice ego boost to the then younger me, hoping to become a mapper in the industry). Indeed, I'd say I was rather starstruck when talking with the Valve employees, and looking back today I think it clearly showed in my communications with them (something I regret, likely made things harder for them to work with the younger me).
Following on from this, I interacted with Valve members and based on their feedback and advice went on to add more aesthetics to the levels (particularly the spaceport level) to bring up the quality to a Valve-level-standard.

Unfortunately, together with my uncertainty of what I could and couldn't do in regards to working with the Tarnor IP and the fact that it simply wasn't my IP anymore, I found I was slowly losing the passion/drive to continue working on chapter 2. Valve had made it clear to me that they were only interested in purchasing the 3 maps I had already released, but at the same time it appeared that any additional maps that I worked on for Tarnor would also immediately belong to them too, as they owned the IP. This was slightly different to modding/mapping for a game as a pure hobbyist as I had previously done, since I was also the 'progenitor' as it were of the Tarnor ideas, but as the IP was Valve's they had ownership on direction - if they chose to expand upon it, it'd make what I did 'non-canon' at best, and even if they didn't, they could tell me to not release something or take it down if i posted new Tarnor content online on map hosting sites.
In retrospect, I was most likely worrying over nothing, since Valve are generally pretty laid back and cool about things, but my younger self had never experienced someone come asking to buy creative content before and was all kinds of worried/cautious about not causing any issues or upsetting anyone.

So what happened with Alien Swarm, why didn't Tarnor end up packaged with it? In all honesty, I don't exactly know. My guess is that complications emerged on integrating/implementing some code changes for the update that dragged on and then a new bigger and shinier project came along and swept up the Valve members (I'm looking at CS:GO and DOTA2) as is supposedly quite common with Valve projects. Either way, the Alien Swarm update never happened and I fell out of contact with the folks at Valve (although, even at the best of times communications were tricky, with email threads spanning weeks or months between responses. - I just assumed that that's just how things go with the highly busy folks at Valve, and admittedly an update to a free game isn't exactly ever going to be a top priority in any company that wants to make money).



I still have a desire to one day come back and finish off the story, but what with one thing and another over these years and my life changing dramatically since that time all those years ago when I first popped open the Alien Swarm SDK and thought up the Tarnor story it's hard to say if or when this will happen.

So Tarnor is likely going to continue to be on hiatus for the forseeable future, but if anything changes, I'll be posting a message here to let people know.



If you have any questions about Tarnor things, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer them.

Until the next time, this is Ezekel signing off!