Some time ago, I posted to say things were still happening behind the scenes and well, that was true at the time. Obviously things have moved on a little and well, here we are, 12 years later. The team are all working proper jobs that pay mortgages or rent and all that boring adult stuff and so the odds of this appearing back from the grave are pretty slim.

I (Ging) went into academia and I ended up running a games development degree because if you can’t do, teach. The Duke-Cox twins are working at their own studio, currently developing The Siege and the Sandfox. Gusdor abandoned games and became a proper software developer. John Roberts produced art for indie hit Gunpoint, following that up with Heat Signature and he’s now working on Tactical Breach Wizards. Ricky C joined and stayed in the games industry, including a stint working on the MotoGP series.

If it ever does reappear, it won’t be a mod and it won’t be on Source and that’s a huge if, so don’t get any hopes up.

Obviously, there have been some clones that have popped up over the years since we last released an update. Some of those are in the spirit of the mod and might just take an element of two of our gameplay. Others have been a little more blatant and gone ahead and taken basically everything (one in particular just went ahead and lifted everything including our name).

We’ve never given permission to anyone to remake the game directly – if folk want to make a game that’s similar, go for it, just add your own spin to it and make it your own, but don’t lift our lore, levels or just boringly clone our mechanics (definitely don’t use our name, please). We’ll continue to deny permission to remake the mod exactly, if you think you want to do that, don’t – use the energy to produce something shiny and new instead!

So we’ve had a sudden influx of players (hello, welcome, please join the forum and play nicely) because of appearing on youtube thanks to some guys that people know. This has also meant that I’ve gotten another flood of messages / comments / carrier pigeon dispatches about the fact that the mod is dead.

Let me clear that up now – it’s not dead, at worst it’s been in a hibernation as the team have had to go off and get rent paying jobs and re-adjust our focus now that we’re not students any more. That means that we can’t spend 8 hours a day working on the hidden and that sometimes, just sometimes, other stuff comes first. Sorry if that upsets you, but that’s just how it is. We’ll be more public about what we’re doing when we’re ready, there’s nothing worse than us saying “next week” and it actually taking 3 months for what ever it is we want to show you to be ready (we don’t have the cachet to get away with “Valve Time” style timelines after all).

We understand you want updates and fancy new stuff, but we don’t want to give you something that’s more broken than what you’re currently playing – as it’s been several years since our last release, we’re also working hard on overhauling lots of the visuals and getting that right takes time too. We’ll get there when we get there, we want to get new things in your hands almost as much as you want it after all!

In other news, the guys over at Hidden Cow are running another mapping competition, so if you’re handy with Hammer head over to this here forum post and take a look. There’s a $15 steam voucher up for grabs for the winner and it’s got an amusing requirement for map entries.

If you want to get more regular stuff from us, the best place to go is the forum, it’s much more likely that we’ll comment about what we’re up to in there than on the front page – though I will try and keep this more up to date in an attempt to stave off the “it’s dead, let me have everything you’ve made!” comments.

Initial turn out wasn’t spectacular (only 2 maps hit the finish line!) but the entries are well worth a look. The competition has now ended and voting has taken place, with the winner being decided in a relatively close vote.

So congratulations to Onikage for producing the winning hdn_kindergarten and commiserations to Dark Soul, who produced hdn_eminence. I’d hope to see both maps become regular appearances on a server near you soon!

To make my life easier I’ve moved us over to wordpress as a backend for the front page – the old CMS didn’t deal with spam very well and we lost all our comments due to it spacking out.

This should work better and I prefer the admin section – it just works more smoothly. Back to coding I go!

Wenchy, who runs the Hidden Cow server is running his very own mapping contest. Starting on June 10th, prospective mappers have until Friday July 10th to put in some hard graft and make an entry.

All that hard work is made worthwhile with the prize of $20 worth of games from Steam – so head on over and show your interest by entering at the compo thread!