Get your Campaign On

June 19, 2009 - Yasser Malaika

We're pretty excited about this next Left 4 Dead update, and we hope you will be as well. Since the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools Beta was released several weeks ago, mod authors have been cooking with gas, so to speak. The ranks of dedicated community members working hard to create new content have been swelling, and a very hungry horde awaits...

We've long believed that Left 4 Dead should fully support community content, and we've been hard at work enhancing the UI and matchmaking systems to provide full support for your creations. The latest update, which will be available via Steam next week, is focused on custom campaigns. It introduces several key features:

Add-Ons
Third party campaigns are designed to be installed using a new Add-On framework. Content authors will be able to package up their new maps, along with new posters, models, and textures, into a single .VPK file. To install and activate this content in-game, players need simply download the .VPK and double click on it. Alternatively, they will be able to drop it into a new "addons" folder. The list of installed add-ons will be viewable from a new item on the 'Extras' main menu flyout.



Matchmaking
Because Left 4 Dead is all about sharing, we've re-tooled Left 4 Dead's matchmaking system to provide extensive support for custom add-on campaigns. When creating or searching for a lobby, a new option named "Add-on campaign" will let you select from among the add-on campaigns that you have installed. You can then find games or lobbies as well as create a lobby for that campaign. You can invite your friends, too. If they do not have the campaign installed, they will automatically be offered an option to download it.



We've also made it easier to create lobbies by adding a 'Create Lobby' option directly from the 'Play Online' menu. Once you're ready to go, the new matchmaking system will automatically try to find any dedicated servers nearby that have the custom add-on campaign installed, or you can make your own local server.

Authoring Tools
We're also officially releasing the Authoring tools/SDK. Thanks to all who provided feedback during the open beta, the authoring tools have been updated with a few fixes and several new additions, including:

• The tutorial_standards map has been expanded into a minimal example campaign add-on called 'Dead Line'
• A new command line utility for creating and extracting from .VPK files
• Source files for all the official campaign maps

Also, look for a new tutorial on how to package up your campaigns into add-ons on the Developer Community wiki.

Have fun!

Rules of Thumb

June 15, 2009 - L4D Team

When it came time to photograph the box art of L4D1, our art staff had three goals. One, there should be a hand in it somehow. Two, the hand should have a thumb bitten off, so customers would look at the four fingers remaining on the hand and think, "Hey, four." Three, under no circumstances would we use Photoshop. L4D is a visceral experience, and its box art deserved the same approach. Valve artist and L4D1 hand model Andrea Wicklund was more than happy to help.



Sadly, the ESRB got wind of this, and cited some fake-sounding legal loophole about it being illegal to take pictures of people biting off parts of their hands. So for L4D2, Andrea used state-of-the-art eye-tricking techniques (tucking two of her fingers behind her hand) to create the illusion that her fingers were missing:



We're sure you'll agree: Pretty convincing. Granted, it took lopping the fingers off two staff members' hands to get the lighting reference perfect, but since those didn't appear on the box, we think we're legally in the clear.

Announcing Left 4 Dead 2!

June 1, 2009 - L4D Team

We've just announced that Left 4 Dead 2 is coming later this year! It's a much larger game than the original, and features new co-op and versus campaigns, all-new Survivors, boss zombies, weapons, and items, as well as melee combat. Check out the teaser trailer, and watch this space for more news in the coming days.

Now Hiring!

May 19, 2009 - Zoid

It's been an interesting week for us here on the Left 4 Dead team. This Monday, for instance, somebody accidentally told Robin Walker he had the power to fire people. In other interesting news, the Left 4 Dead team has all been fired.

Lucky for me, Robin's fired everyone at alphabetical order, and doesn't seem to realize there's a letter after "Y". (Don't tell him.) . Since then it's been pretty quiet. Every hour or so Robin gets on a horse and chases some Greek kid around.

So for now I'm safe, and trying to reassemble the team. Without anyone else to help, I just have this crossword puzzle created by the fine folks at tf2maps.net. So this will have to work as a job application. If you can get this done, that probably means you can spell, which is a good start.

A Subtle Hint

May 19, 2009 - L4D Team

The 27th Annual Golden Joystick Awards are now accepting votes for your favorite game of the year. Now, we'd of course never for a second want to sway your vote and suggest you follow this link and vote for Left 4 Dead. We're above that sort of thing.