Anyway, the idea came from a Japanese urbex site I found years ago, which had a gallery of a derelict cablecar station, which I found out was on Mt Kumotori, so I googled photos of that place and just got more and more references, and I decided to make it into a L4D campaign. The plan so far is for these 5 maps:
1 - tourist centre. The players start at the bottom of the mountain, and move up into a tourist centre, which will have a museum, cafes, shops etc, which leads into a hiking trail. There'll be a few cabins along the way, otherwise the 2nd half is mostly just woodland, before a road leading to...
2 - the temple complex. Not much to say other than there'll be temples. Survivors just follow the paths, with a few shops or other enterable buildings along the way. When they get to the main shine (the huge temple in the screenshots), I want a crescendo event but can't think of anything yet. After that, they go into the woods and find a tunnel leading to a cablecar station, and take the cable car up the mountain, but it breaks down near a maintenance station, which doubles as a saferoom.
3 - The power has cut out, so someone needs to go down the lift and through the dark tunnels to get to the generator room, while the other 3 stay and defend against a hoard of zombies (if I put the saferoom after this, then that can be map #2's crescendo event). I'm also not sure if this would work if bots are on your team (they seem to teleport over to you if you get too far away), and the lone-player might get swarmed, so I might have to have all 4 go down the lift.
Anyway, once the power's back on, they carry on up to the top ropeway station, and after more woodland, they come to a small mining village (also in the screens) which has been derelict for a few decades. Humans have to go through a school, and then into a few mine buildings/shacks. I might include another crescendo event here where the survivors go into the mine itself, and alert the zombies by calling the lift back to the surface.
4 - Once out of the mine, the survivors follow a road to a decaying spa/hotel. This is more closed-quarters, with narrow corridors, bars, hotel rooms, baths etc, but some bigger areas like halls and dining areas.
5 - I'm not sure yet what the finale will be. It'll either be the roof of the hotel, where the survivors finally get above the trees and have to hold off until they're rescued, or a construction site that was abandoned years ago and has the empty foundations of another hotel. I'll decided which one I go with when the map is closer to being finished.
So that's the plan I've got so far, and I have parts of all the maps done, but I need the SDK to get the maps playing properly ingame before I can put everything together and see how the map plays. Here's some screens of what I have got so far:
Map 3, the village and top ropeway:
Map 2, the temple complex (very WIP, lighting is just so it's not fullbright):
So that's the campaign. I've got no idea about the name or tagline, if anybody has any suggestions, I've just been calling it l4d_yama so far. Hopefully the SDK isn't too far off and I can get this released by around February, so I can start on my next campaign.
Update
I've spent the last 2 days working on the village some more, the layout is done, I've got most of the school done, and a couple more props and textures made, as well as spending hours and hours sorting through which content works in L4D and extracting GCFs and copying files all over the place. Next up will be the mine, which I haven't started yet, but will be the final part of map 3.
This is my favourite part, hearing the zombies feet on the roof and not knowing where they're going to come from, I might force a horde to spawn here as the cable car comes up:
08/02/09 Update
I've been working on the final part of the 3rd map the last few weeks, a mine in the village which should lead to the safe room for this map, and I've also finished the school. Once that's all finished, I just need to connect the parts I've got together and the 3rd map will be finished. The colour is still too green in these, but I can't get the colour correction options up in L4D, so that will have to wait until the SDK is released.
The School:
The Mine:
h34r:
