Outcast

Released: January 23, 2015

Tags: Lua, Blender, Gamemode

As part of the MYP curriculum in the International Baccalaureate, we were required to spend a year working on and documenting the process of a personal project that had to be benefitial or educational in nature. As a big fan of the Lost in Blue franchise, I decided to write a gamemode for Garry's Mod which dealt with survival on a deserted island. As part of my reasearch, I read through survival guides such as the well regarded SAS Survival Handbook, and even consulted with experts in the field. Ultimately, it is gamified, but I do feel like there is educational value to be had in the gamemode.

This project was quite complicated, it had a crafting system, day night cycle, animal AI, base building mechanics, and immersive first-person hand animations (for things like eating, drinking, running, jumping, swimming, etc...). I spent a lot of time mapping, programming, modeling, and animating for this project, but a lot of art assets were taken from Far Cry 3 due to lack of time (I only had a year to put this together on top of having to deal with the IB, which is notoriously difficult). After the project finished, I hosted a beta server to continue working on it but I grew disinterested in the project due to a lot of techical debt and lack of motivation. For this same reason, I never ended up publicly posting the source code of it anywhere (only the assets for people to join the server), especially as Garry's Mod updates have likely broken things even more... But it would be a nice project to revisit sometime in the future!