Suicide Survival

Anyone remember that good old Half-Life 2 mod? Nobody?

Suicide Survival is one of my all-time favourite Half-Life mods and it’s a shame no-one really plays this any more.

Suicide Survival was released back in 2008 and it was pretty popular for a while. People played it pretty much every day for a few months and then the mod started to fade away into the distance. Even I quit after a while not knowing that I would miss it later.

In Suicide Survival you either play as a gardener who is dressed up like a pilot or you would play as a shrub. The gardeners would throw gardening books at the shrubs to get rid of them and the shrubs would try to get close to a gardener to blow up shortly after arriving at his feet. Yes, the shrubs are explosive.

The mod was pretty much just a Team Deathmatch game featuring books on gardening by Barbara Bush and suicidal shrubberies mixed with audio clips from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Now in 2011 with barely any updates on the Suicide Survival website, I came up with the idea to port some of the Suicide Survival maps over to Garry’s Mod.

Garry’s Mod is a sandbox mod that you actually have to pay for. Which might sound a bit weird but it’s the one mod that is actually being sold on Steam. Of course it took it a while to get there but that’s not the point right now. In Garry’s Mod you can either mess around in the so called ‘sandbox’ game mode or play another game mode created by the players of the game.

There is one game mode called ‘Fretta’. This game mode is developed by Garry (the creator of Garry’s Mod) himself.

Fretta basically allows players to create a bunch of mini-games and let players vote which one to play next. Then the game mode loads up a level associated with the mini-game (or people vote for a level) and then the players play a few rounds of that mini-game.

One of these mini-games is called ‘Suicide Barrels’ and it is very similar to Suicide Survival. It lacks a bunch of my favourite Suicide Survival features but it will suffice.

I’ve been porting one of the Suicide Survival levels or maps as they are referred to in the Source Engine, to the Suicide Barrels mini-game. I have also been thinking about coding a mini-game version of Suicide Survival itself but I will most likely not go ahead with that.

The first map I ported over to Garry’s Mod was ss_garden2. It is the level featured at the top of this post.

This map has quite a few flaws though. It’s brush geometry (also known as building blocks) are pretty messy. When designing levels in the Source Engine it is always recommended to keep your levels neat and clean without any overlapping brush geometry but in this Suicide Survival map and most likely also in the other map files there are a lot of overlapping brushes. The level also allows the ‘survivors’ to hide in the garden house in such a way that it makes it nearly impossible for the shrubs to get to them before they get shot.

I’m currently modifying the map and I hope to release a more balanced version soon.
The maps will be hosted on the JokerIce Fretta Mini-Game server for those who are interested.

Thanks for stopping by.