Kraken Base

Kraken Base is an example of Half-Life 2's highly eclectic development process. In theory it sounds engaging - a sinister laboratory environment hearkening back to the Questionable Ethics and Anomalous Materials chapters of the first game and featuring a female scientist who turns traitor and brings forth disaster much like Black Mesa East in the final game.

A fair amount of work was put into Kraken such as level layout sketches by designer John Grimm, several unique textures and sound effects and a whole story plan laid out on a whiteboard. However, when this was put into practice the results were less than stellar. From the handful of prototype levels seen in the 2003 leak of Half-Life 2 by John Guthrie, Kraken was a dull, mazelike collection of empty corridors and rooms lacking any sense of place, context or ambiance.

This project was an attempt to bring new life to the failed attempts. I built four levels - the first three being based on Grimm's plans and the fourth adapting one of Guthrie's efforts. For the sake of the final video the order of them was reshuffled, although Grimm's levels were only designed in isolation and lack any sense of connectivity or consideration for the overall physical space Kraken inhabits - thus the connections were required to be arbitrary in the face of any proper information about how these areas fit together.

As I lacked the time or resources to adapt the intended story or gameplay elements for Kraken I stuck to a simple environment art focus. Truthfully a thorough adaptation of Valve's plans would require an entire overhaul of the location - perhaps a layout akin to System Shock 2's Von Braun would work well?

I chose Goldsource as the basis for this as I believe the early HL2 material suits it better than the far more nuanced complexities of Source. Early HL2 owes much to the turn-of-the-millennium style that Goldsource embodies (level geometry used for almost everything, low-poly character models, compressed mono sound effects, etc) and often shows its age badly when depicted in modern Source. Many of the assets present were borrowed from other projects I had on hand, while the unique wall textures were based off of their "real" counterparts in the HL2 leak.