Simplicity
Left 4 Dead 2 Campaign
Simplicity is a 5-map campaign that I made for Valve's Left 4 Dead 2. It is playable in campaign mode. I came into this a few years after working on Prototype Mk 3, in
which I made extensive use of custom glowing textures, and in an attempt to work out some issues I was having with misbehaving glow textures I had experimented with using
unlit textures instead of self-illuminating textures. Going even further back, in an unpublished first edition of Prototype, which led to the confusing naming of "Prototype Mk 3"
(Mk 2 being a campaign published for the first Left 4 Dead), I had experimented with forcibly spawning extremely large hordes of zombies, like 10 times more zombies than normal.
It sort of worked, but as soon as you tried to network it the entire thing would crash every time. So I wondered how much computation-budget you could save by basically
discarding all lighting information and dropping the texture budget down to effective non-existence.
I came up with this crazy idea to use this hyperminimalist
aesthetic that would allow me to effectively use just 2 16x16 pixel textures on everything. For comparison's sake, a typical L4D2 texture uses 512x512 pixels, or
262,144 pixels per texture, as opposed to my 256. By using unlit textures I was able to dispense with the lighting budget as well, and with no lights in the world, all of the players
and zombies were rendered into living shadows against the bright, white walls. I used a short-cutting fog as well to really pull down the draw distance and make it look like the whole
world was being sketched into existence as you walked along. Most commentators have said they found it obnoxious. Nevertheless, I'm proud of it, and I think it has an aesthetic
replicated by nobody else in the Left 4 Dead modding scene. Ultimately, I did scale the zombie spawning back for the sake of balance and playability, just like I did
with Prototype Mk 2 and 3, but to the best of my memory this campaign has never received a complaint about lag.