After a routine experiment goes catastrophically wrong, Dr. Gina Cross and Dr. Colette Green must fight to survive the aftermath of the Black Mesa Incident.
Peer Review is a reboot of Half-Life's third and final expansion, Half-Life: Decay. Return to the Black Mesa Research Facility and relive the chaos from the perspectives of Dr. Cross and Dr. Green. With all missions from the original game and fully functional co-op, Peer Review aims to give a fresh take on classic Half-Life that you can enjoy with a friend.
Hello hellos, yo yos, and how’s it goes?! As usual, we hope you lot have all been having a lovely little life since we last had a chat. We certainly have (for some definition of lovely), and it’s that time of the year again, so let’s jump into the update!
Last year we reached the exciting milestone of every mission being playable front-to-back, with the exceptions of Dual Access, and Rift. After a celebratory break, we’ve been hard at work at tackling major tasks since then, one of the most important of which is this mayonnaise:
Ideal spread for a grilled cheese.
In all seriousness, our focus for this year has been on Dual Access, the game’s opening mission. Way back in Peer Review’s early days we made the explicit decision to work on Dual Access last. This is actually pretty common for most organized development cycles. You can’t make a proper introduction or tutorial for something that doesn’t yet exist after all, now can you? Now that we’ve got the rest of the game to inform our design decision, we’re knocking it out.
The gameplay for the two-part mission is coming along quite nicely. In fact, one of those parts is actually in the home stretch! We’ve been testing and iterating and it’s almost there. Meanwhile, being more dialogue-heavy, the other part’s still in the planning and writing phase. Mooostly the writing phase. Good writing takes time, so tha writist girls r doin wat im doin write now accept better. We’re eager to show you when that’s ready!
While the design team's busy doing designer things, the art team is likewise arting up a storm, and sorting out how Sector C should look in Peer Review.
Science isn't all lasers and chemical tanks, though. Sometimes you need a space to store copious amounts of books, or store copious amounts of emails, or store copious amounts of copies.
And where do you store everything else? None other than the storage facilities over in Surface Call.
That's our update! As always, if you've got any questions, comments, concerns, cries of outrage, cries of inrage, or cries of another nature, you can get in touch with us pretty easily in the Peer Review Community Discord Server. We're always hanging about, so you can chat with us and do all the other Discord stuff that we don't need to explain. Pop in, say hi!
And if you really like us, and also happen to have some skills in that pretty little head of yours, you can assimilate! We can always use more 3D artists, character artists, programmers, the lot. Head over to the PSR Team Application Form and show us what you can do. Barring audio and writing positions, we've got space in all roles.
For the rest of the year we'll be chipping away at Dual Access before finally moving on to Rift. We're really excited to see everything coming together, and we hope you are, too. We'll have another check in with you towards the end of the year. Be safe and keep kind in the meantime!
Also hey check out this egg:
Yo yo yo, and ho ho ho, bros, non-bros and occasional bros! How’s it goes? Hopefully you lovelies have all been great, because holy whoa, have we. We...
We’ve made it through half of 2023, and all in all Peer Review has been doing pretty darn good throughout. Our levels are inching closer and closer...
We’ve somehow all survived yet another quarter, which means it’s time for you to hear about how great we’re doing!
How will playing together work? is it like Portal 2 where you just need to invite a friend or is there something else you need to do?
We have a P2P system implemented over the Steamworks API. We'll be talking a more about that a bit closer to release.
In addition to that, dedicated servers and LAN games will also work, the same way as they do in most Source games.
Thank you! Can't wait to play it!
A few questions:
1. Is he alive?
2. When will it be released?
3. Will it be on steam?
1. it is :) We post updates every 6 months and have an active community in discord! Sometimes we stream or post some of our work there, so feel free to join it! The invite should be... somewhere in this page, I believe.
2. We don't know yet. We're a small team of volunteers, so it will take a long time until the game is complete.
3. We don't know, it costs some money to put a game on Steam, and it has some legal stuff we would have to deal with. But I think everyone hopes we can get it on Steam some day. Anyway, we won't worry about it until the whole game is ready to be played :)
Will Peer Review have support for peer-to-peer connections?
We've had P2P working in a prototype state for a long time now. It remains to be seen whether we ship with it though.
Question, will the game/mod releases with SDK so anyone can create their own custom co-op campaign?
We will release the FGD so that anyone can make their own levels in Hammer.
We are still deciding whether we want to release the code.
Do you guys need more level designers?
We're always looking for people to join our team!
The only positions we're not currently recruiting for are Playtester, Writer, Voice Actor, Music Composer, and Sound Designer.
I am somewhat interested. I made a minicampaign called Combat Fatigue for Black Mesa on the Steam workshop, if you're interested in what I can do. I should tell you though that I have not played Decay, nor do I have experience working in a team developing games, so I don't know if I will be a good fit.
If you're interested, feel free to apply here: Forms.gle
Having previously played Decay is not a prerequisite for a position on the team. If it turns out you're not a good fit for the team, we have a process to determine whether that's the case during our recruitment process.
I've submitted my application. Looking forward to hearing back!