Eli's Den

From the early days Half-Life 2 featured a sequence where the player met a man by the name of Eli in the wastelands outside City 17. The first depiction was in text form by writer Marc Laidlaw, which described his hideout inside a "scrapland" beyond the city walls. Eli was joined by a robot companion and provided a handy slideshow presentation to deliver exposition about the game's setting.

By the time this story concept was brought in-game, it was moved to a cave system deeper in the wasteland. Unlike in the final game, it was placed after the zombie-infested town location (later Ravenholm) instead of before, and featured no introduction of the Gravity Gun. One level of this second iteration was made, which depicts a typical cave environment of the era full of junk props and disassembled vehicles. I've always been fond of this level, it strikes a balance between the bleak desolation of the wasteland and the quaint hospitality of the refugee encampments that were explored further down the game's development cycle.

The highest priority for the makeover was to replace the blocky terrain with proper displacements. This allowed for more naturalistic and convincing rock formations. To ease transitions between surfaced I also created new blend textures. I also wanted to inject more colour through the lighting, as the original had only white lights against grey rock which looked quite flat.