I have an obsession with consistency (it literally drives me crazy), so things like consistent times, non-overlapping maps, and hard-facts are the absolute greatest things I could ever wish for. Unfortunately, Half-Life LOVES to ignore those. I’m glad Entropy: Zero 2 actually follows these things accurately, even though there’s inconsistent times on purpose because of [SPOILER], but that’s an actual lore reason at least.
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Hilariously ironic that if you connect all the Half-Life maps together, Surface Tension is directly below everything else lol.
(Agonizing Screams)
Allow me to ruin your day: The Arbeit 1 parking lot area in ez2_c2_3 and the same exact location in ez2_c4_1 probably do not line up with each other. We did switch it around a lot after ez2_c4_1 was rebuilt, so maybe we just barely got by in the release version. It was something I was painfully aware of when I first implemented the scene in ez2_c2_3. At least in that incarnation, the stairwell in c2_3 would have overlapped with some of the rooms in c4_1. Chapter 3 also loops back on itself. I can't remember if I tried to lay the whole thing end to end to see exactly where it ends up, but I do know that the position of the boss room glimpsed at the start of Chapter 3 is totally impossible. I would chalk that up to Aperture shenanigans though, they build their test chambers in a very disorienting way. I'm really glad that we managed to achieve some level of consistency and I'm happy you enjoyed it. But sometimes we consciously decided to ignore level consistency in favor of good pacing / foreshadowing. Ultimately the way the player experiences the levels is the most important thing - it's never going to look "real" from a top down view, because it's not real.
Yeah I kinda just ignored chapter 3 when writing this… but still, the rest works out well
Relatable
you well be surprised how Blue Shift have very well done it
Really? That’s cool