Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Day Three: Knock knock, it's Valve

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

Today, my boss started to wonder why I look so tired when I'm at work. Sure it's a really intense thing to do marketing and communication stuff. I slept 6 hours since monday, replying to your messages all night long. Sorry if I can't follow every website that newsed us anymore, we were astonished with the speed at which it spread up. Google results for "portal prelude" quadrupled since yesterday. I had a talk with Marc yesterday, and I can't even count how many times we said "mon dieu" (Oh my god) and "je flippe à mort" (I'm so f*cking scared).

Yesterday, we got our first contact with the french community manager of Valve. Yes, Valve. The marvellous company that brought Portal and so much more to us for years. Don't take me wrong, I'm not trying to seduce anyone, but believe me, it was huge. I was so happy and so scared at the same time. For your information, they don't seem to bother about us doing a prequel for Portal. They're even sending us their congratulations and they seem to enjoy what we're doing. So, please guys, stop saying everywhere that Valve is going to murder us, or something.

From now on, we have more and more translation propositions coming along. So far we got translators for portuguese (Silvio 'moidsch' Ribeiro), dutch (Mart), spanish (Francisco J. Galdo), german (SirDregan), italian (comatrix), finnish (Mischa Sildén) and russian (HL-Inside.ru Team). That's another good surprise for us. We're not planning on releasing the translations at the same time as the game though. We'll release a package/patch with every translation later on (a week or two maybe).

On a more formal tone, we are currently discussing with staff from FilePlanet, ModDB, Vossey, Total Gaming Network and a few other sites that are REALLY friendly and honest with us. Another good surprise.

To conclude, please stop bitching about the Half-Life 2 Citizens, we're not going to replace their face with original ones, that's pointless. We did a skin with a white shirt and black trousers, and we know the screenshots are not up to date, but that's it.
And as a matter of anecdote, did you know that each time we need to compile the game, we need to waste almost 30 hours ? 25 hours of level compilation and 5 hours of cubemap generation (for the reflections), sure that's a long time to wait...