SCREENSHOTS:

      

HOW IT HAPPENED:

It was a cold night Spring Semester 2003 at Georgia Tech Glenn Hall. A friday night, everyone (and I mean everyone) had gone home for the weekend except I. The movies, all stupid or seen already. With only the stoner's and the guy with the weird Bear Fetish as my company, I decided I needed to kill time.

I clicked the start menu, bored out of my mind, to figure out something to do. "Make a program in C? Perhaps C++? Finish that Java engine?" No, no, not fun at all.

Alas, there was Worldcraft! Or the Valve Hammer Editor as ye seem to want to be called now. But what to make? A strip club? Too common in Atlanta. A military base or alien world? Pfft, not challenging! So I stared at the roof with its glow in the dark stars (some sly dog put them up there before I got that room) thinking of what to do. It hit me, "Model your room you lazy bum! You can blow up that lofted bed you hate so much in full 3D with a few hand grenades!"

And so it began, a project that should have ended with my room.

But no! Friends saw it, "WOW! How did you make that!?", "Hey, are you going to make the whole building!?", "Wow, you must have been bored."

"No," said I, to no avail, "I don't want to finish the building!"

"Surely you jest!," said they, "a work of such bored ease should be finished!" (Ok, they didn't really say it like that).

So, it began, two weeks before finals, I worked on a map of the Dorm. When did I do most of the work? The week before finals. The week I was supposed to be studying! Level Design cannot wait! To Hell with Calculus and Physics! To Hell with Georgia!

Finally, the weekend before finals week, the level was completed! A prize of free friend Chicken Wings to any who could find the Easter Egg! Luckily, noone found it. Good thing too, I didn't have change!

FINAL DESIGN:

The map was completed in a rush and based around a real location. The floor depicted is Floor 1, the attic exists but looks nothing like what it is in the map. The attic in the map was added for gameplay reasons and balance in the case of CS. All of Floor 1 is reproduced identically with a few exeptions. First, the halls are slightly wider for gameplay reasons. Second, certain rooms, for polygons sake, are not drawn or are not drawn completely. The weapons were kind of just thrown in at random in HLDM, so certain weapons are rather..well..less feasible due to harder to find ammo. Certain mistakes were made in the level building that were never corrected due to time constraints and lack of care (as well as not much benefit from fixing).

Version Intricacies:

  1. Boxes are breakable in the CS version.
  2. Higher Quality Vents in the CS version.
  3. The Kitchen Closet Vent is climbable in the CS version.
  4. The Easter Egg won't teleport you to the bong room in the CS version, instead it places you right back near where you find the egg.

The choke points in the CS version are:

  1. The long hallway, Terrorists get there first and have the advantage in that choke point.
  2. The large room in the attic, Counter-Terrorists get there first and have the advantage in that choke point.

DISCLAIMER:

This map was made in the pursuit of pure fun, everyone in the dorm enjoyed it including the Peer Leaders who run the dorm for Georgia Tech. Any relation to past events or, God forbid, future events are purely coincidental. Placement of hostages, weapons, and other such features are purely for level design reasons. If anyone asks, its not Georgia Tech...its..uh...somewhere else... Georgia Tech had no part in this whatsoever. God knows if they even like the idea of a "game" level designed around one of their dorms. Since no Georgia Tech logos or copyrighted materials were used, I guess I'm ok. The dorm layouts are available from Georgia Tech Housing Website.

STOP STALLING DOWNLOAD NOW!

Instructions for download:

  1. All downloaded .ZIP files should be extracted to your Half-Life folder (usually C:\Sierra\Half-Life). Note that for Steam users, the directory to extract to will be STEAMFOLDER\SteamApps\YOURSTEAMEMAIL\Half-Life for the HLDM version and STEAMFOLDER\SteamApps\YOURSTEAMEMAIL\counter-strike for the CS version.
  2. If you want only the HLDM version, only download the HLDM version. If you want only CS, only download the CS version.
  3. However, you will need to download a texture file for either version. Extract this to your Half-Life folder as well.

Downloads:

  1. Download the HLDM version
  2. Download the CS version
  3. Download the textures!
  4. Download the original .rmf! (Remember this was made in a hurry, though ;))