On April 23rd, Valve dropped a bombshell when they announced that community contributors on the Steam Workshop could now put a price tag on their mods. This announcement, however, came as a bit of a shock to much of the community, with many people being in disagreement with the new feature. In this article we take a look at how the community responded to the move.

The Half-Life series can be quite glum at times, especially with no resolution in sight for the series. Good thing we have the modding community to deliver us some light-heartedness. Here are fourteen off-the-wall mods hand-picked to help relieve those Episode 2 cliffhanger blues.

This tutorial will show you how to create custom textures for use in creating maps for the Source engine. The process is also the same for creating textures for models, sprays, mods and essentially any image data within any Source game.

Ignis Solus is a classic Team Fortress 2 machinima created by the (now inactive) Lit Fuse Films group. It is considered to be the first piece of fan-made TF2 machinima ever produced.

The selling of the popular title Minecraft has taken the internet by storm this week. While there has been mixed feelings about this, Garry’s Mod creator, Garry Newman, said he would have done the same thing.

My name is Jim Partridge and I’m a modder primarily for Half-Life 2. My previous work includes Half-Life 2: Deep Down, Half-Life 2: Daylight and numerous PlanetPhillip competition entries. I decided to join LambdaGeneration this year as a contributor for the site’s Modding & Development section. My primary interest is in level design with a focus on gameplay, I’m a gameplay nerd in fact… Join me in my nerdiness!

Earlier this summer, Garry Newman, founder of Facepunch Studios, responsible for games such as Garry’s Mod and Rust, tweeted a small tease of the production of a real-life Gmod Tool Gun prop.

Update 11th August: Thanks to everyone who emailed in!

If anyone is still interested, we are still looking for contributors to cover the following specific topics:

• Garry’s Mod – Modding news, playthoughs, gamemode/map reviews, comics! etc.
• Portal Series – Modding news, mod/map reviews, community creativity eg.fan-films, artwork etc.
• Left4Dead Series – Official news, modding news, map reviews, community creativity eg.fan-films
• DOTA 2 – Official news, events coverage, community projects

We are also appealing to anyone who is interested in producing video content, such as playthroughs, mod/map/gamemode reviews and video tutorials.

Also, if you are someone who is interested in producing very occasional articles for the site, we are always interested in publishing ‘guest articles’ as opposed to dedicating yourself as a contributor.

Welcome to the first article of the ‘Cinematic Spotlight’ series, a new feature being introduced to the film/multimedia section on LambdaGeneration.

Half-Life is now fifteen. Ok we already known that by now, right?

Throughout these 15 years the game has attracted quite a vast array of artists throughout many forms of artistic efforts. Half-Life has a very creativity community. As a result, there has been an overload of Half-Life fan-art and creations that has and is still being produced after all these years. Don’t believe us?

We wanted to share with you some of the amazing artwork and creativity from around the community that caught our eye over the past fifteen years. Like in all of our other compilations from our 15 Years of Half-Life celebration, we cannot cover everything under the sun and we have very likely forgotten or have not seen many other amazing things too. Please feel free however to remind us!