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.

The year is 1998. A previously unknown group of game developers known as Valve Software has just released Half-Life. Of course it becomes an instant hit, entertaining a generation of gamers worldwide. But beyond that, buried away on the CD-ROM inside that ridiculously big cardboard game box is a program called “Worldcraft”. According to a note at the back of the instruction manual (remember those?) this program would allow fans to “create a replica of their garage or a fantastic alien world”. And create they did. With this tool, now known as Hammer, at their disposal, the possibilities have been almost endless. From Counter-Strike to Ricochet, from Black Mesa to deep space to World War II France, the community created a tidal wave of new adventures, far beyond what anyone might have anticipated. Fifteen years later, we show no sign of stopping.

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…

Isn’t it always the way – you have no Half-Life 2 maps to play and then nine come along all at once!

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!

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…

Hello! Welcome to the Modding and Development section, where we hope to bring you more news, reviews and discussion about the latest maps and mods than you can shake a Hammer at.

I’m MisterAddy, one of the new editors at LambdaGeneration. You may recognise me as a regular at PlanetPhillip.com and this very site, as well as being a long-time lurker on the Steam Forums. I am mostly a single-player gamer so I love everything Half-Life and Portal, and will help keep you up to date with community content to help ease the SP drought.

And I, hscsguy – co-editor of Modding and Development here at Lambda Generation – am assisting in the development of this monster of an article. Like MisterAddy, I too am a fan of single player games and mods alike with a fascination of Half Life 2 multiplayer mods on the side. I am pretty active over at the forums on Steam and avidly watch over the Source modding community to an embarrassing degree. And without further ado, I leave you with that exceedingly cliché phrase as we move on to the news you came here to read.

Back on June 27, Phillip Marlowe wrote an article thanking William McMahon for all his work on Podcast 17 and in the Half-Life community. He spoke of his dedication and love for the game and the people who play it , and it was an extremely thoughtful thing for Phillip to do.

Phillip runs his own website, PlanetPhillip, where he reviews mods and maps for the Half-Life and Portal games along with providing download mirrors and forums. He doesn’t plaster his sites with ads nor demand attention to himself, something that we here at Lambda Generation love to do.

IF YOU ARE READING THIS AND YOU HAVE NOT RECEIVED THIS ITEM FROM A PERSON YOU KNOW, PUT THIS DOWN IMMEDIATELY AND CONTINUE WALKING AWAY.

Hello and welcome to the Resistance Bulletin. I’m your same old news editor and part-time refugee, Vic, reporting from the inside of an abandoned coastal house just outside of City 17, in mortal fear of a Combine patrol which has stopped nearby.

Excuse if my writing is poor, but I have been forced to drink from the polluted seawater nearby, and some discarded cans of Private Reserve. I can feel my brain cells slowly dying.