Planetphillip is kicking off 2014 with a bang! The site is planning many mapping competitions over the course of the year and the first has just been announced : Assassinateville.

You have received a message from your “employer”. One particular person is proving “troublesome” and must be eliminated. You will not be told exactly who this is until you are sent to the area.

Use any method necessary to assassinate this person.

Specific instructions may given at the time of learning of the person.

The competition is running from today until 6am GMT on the 3rd of February so open that editor and start laying those brushes!

Full details about the competition including all the rules and regulations can be found over on PlanetPhillip.com

[UPDATE]: The mod is now available for download, containing three entries.

There is truly no time to rest in the world of Half-Life 2 custom maps at the moment. The first 3×10 mapping competition (Ambushville) yielded nine levels for your enjoyment, now Defendville ups that number to ten!

The theme was again simple but with plenty of room for interpretation. Create a level in 10 days where the player defends a location, with a short prep time before the assault begins. Enjoy!

Defendville can be downloaded from PlanetPhillip right now for the cost of 60.4 Earth megabytes.

Play testing and the process of gathering actionable feedback on game levels can be a tricky thing. Everyone plays games differently, and I’m sure we all know that guy / girl who gets stuck on the most basic puzzle sequence in a level. As level designers we try and limit these progress blockers as much as possible with clear and understandable designs but inevitably some will slip through. But wait, there is hope! A group of individuals exist whose purpose is to test, test, test until these wrinkles are no more. GladOS would be proud of the men and women of the Beta Testers Collective.

As many of you may be aware, PlanetPhillip.com recently held the first of three planned mapping competitions, which would require level designers to create a map in ten days and feature the player being ambushed by enemy forces as the main attraction. “Build a map in ten days? How hard can that really be?” I naively asked myself. As it turns out it’s pretty damn hard! Let me tell you a story…

G string is one of those mods that leaves a lasting impression after you play it. The world you are thrown into is so compelling and rich that at times I found myself just sort of standing there in an open street as the polluted acid rain slowly ate away at my health, just basking in this hopelessly depressing cyberpunk dystopia laid out before me. G string manages to take elements of cyberpunk from films such as Blade Runner and Ghost In The Shell and splice it with the feeling of abandonment and hopelessness I felt while playing Stalker : Shadow of Chernobyl. Together it is a very potent mix.

Power station 17 is quite an old map, 5 years old to be exact, but you wouldn’t notice it from playing. There is a level of polish in the visuals and sound that seems wise beyond it’s years and all said and done, it’s just an incredibly fun level to play.

Something that stood out for me during my time with this map is that the pacing is very well implemented. You start off in a very low intensity situation, fighting off zombies and exploring smaller scale environments and the action builds very naturally from this point until at the end you are fighting what feels like the entire Combine army!

To play the level simply head over to the download page at PlanetPhillip and download the level. Extract the contents of the downloaded file into your steam/steamapps/sourcemods directory in steam and you are ready to go (be sure to exit and then reopen steam for the level to appear in your games list!). The level only requires that Half-Life 2 is installed, you will not need episode 1 or 2!

Ever since developers got their hands on the Oculus Rift developer kits earlier this year there has been a steady stream of incredible videos appearing on the internet showing what this piece of technology can do for video games, it was only a matter of time before someone would start working on a Half-Life mod that utilised the new kit.

I’ve seen a couple of videos of people playing Half-Life 2 with the Rift but this latest show case by Nathan Andrews has some very important differences that really change the experience from simply playing Half-Life 2 with a Rift, to actually experiencing Rift VR in Half-Life 2.

We’re currently in the process of wrapping up the latest release of Half-Life VR, which will include HL2: episode 1 VR support. This video was made in a single playthrough with my oculus rift dev-kit and razer hydra, I cropped the video to make it easier to view for those who currently don’t have a rift so keep in mind that the vertical field of view is probably twice what is shown in the video when wearing the actual rift.

Interested in giving this a shot? Check out the official web page for the mod here.

Hello and welcome to the freshly relaunched LambdaGeneration.com! I am Darren “Daz” Weekes and I love talking about level design in games, so much so in fact that I’ve been doing it on my youtube channel for over a year now focusing on the Half-Life and Quake series of games. My videos aim to entertain and perhaps educate people on the design process behind game levels, so if you’ve ever had an urge to design your own level for a Half-Life title then hopefully I can provide that first stepping stone into the nebulous space that is game design. That’s quite enough about me because today I have something quite special to share with you…

It’s been a while since the last trio of “Ville” mapping competitions ended over at PlanetPhillip.com (Beginning, Middle and End Ville) and Phillip has been busy collecting feedback about the events and making changes to enhance future competitions. The competitions charge level designers with creating a single player Half-Life 2 level in a set time period which Phillip then packs up into a handy mod for everyone to download and play. The freshly announced 3×10 mapping competition, with three separate competitions running for ten days each, will start on the 11th October 2013. Details after the jump…