Early Source Engine Work
My earliest game-dev efforts were spent making mods for HL2. This started with a short series of HL2 levels with action, traps, puzzles, and uniquely challenging gameplay about trying to safeguard a delicate piece of computer equipment.World building
I focused on atmosphere in the levels and started things off slow to ground the player before ramping up the action.
Traps
I enjoyed tricking players into all kinds of nasty situations, in the spirit of Half-Life. My favorites were a bait-and-switch which had the player drive into a pit full of zombies, and a huge gunfight in a room where explosive barrels could destroy catwalks and send you tumbling to your death.
Variety
This project was only a few maps long, but players were exposed to several gameplay styles in that short time, including exploration, action, stealth and puzzles.
Unique Gameplay: the Data Module
The final section of this mod had the player carrying a hard drive around a lab gathering data from various terminals. This might have been a boring fetch-quest -- but there was a twist! The data module was very fragile. If it got shot it would break. If it got dropped carelessly it would break. If it touched water it would break.
It was hilarious watching play-testers scramble to find a safe place to set down their precious module while bullets whizzed past their heads... not to mention accidentally discovering all the other nefarious ways the thing could be broken. Most of the players laughed too.
EctoMod
EctoMod was a more ambitious attempt at altering HL2's fundamental gameplay into a game about an alien possessing scientists. I wanted to make something that didn't play like HL2. Breaking real ground here meant learning some C++ and start messing with the game's source code.Sequence from the beginning of EctoMod
The Takeaway
These projects gave me a better understanding of Hammer's limitations -- I experimented with a number of admittedly bizarre ideas which did not map well to the Half-Life foundation. Source's difficulty curve was brutal for a novice programmer, but the ideas initially concepted here fueled me creatively for another couple of years of prototyping in Unity and Unreal. This eventually grew into the stand-alone "Foothold" project.