It was a small scale mod for Half-Life 2 that some associates and I were working on. The plan was to replicate the Survival multiplayer gameplay mode from AVP2; every survivor team member killed resurrects as an alien and vice versa. This gamepaly type was great for drawing a team together on the survivor side and gameplay tended toward barricades and bottlenecks.

The initial launch was going to be just USCM and aliens on two maps: a larger, more accurate leadworks from Alien 3 and a cargo ship map from one of the Dark Horse Aliens comics. Both maps were very fun to work on in their way; the leadworks as an exercise in exacting reproduction and gothic grimyness, the American (cargo ship) as a tight mechanical battleground with lots of Aliens vibe.

I’d planned out traps on each map that could be used to score extra points for your team; the lead mould, piston and fan vent from Alien 3, as well as an airlock trap on the American. I was pretty proud of that last trap because it was potentially super lethal, but the players would want to go into it because we’d planned to make EVA suits part of that map.

An alien could activate a trigger once they were sealed in and space them before the suit-up timer had elapsed, or vice versa if an alien player got stuck in (explosive forces launching them out and away from the map to a kill zone perimeter). We had hopes that the players would be able to take the fight into zero-g and hole up round back at the engines or something. Of course the aliens would be able to follow them out from other strategic exit points and have no need of air. This thinking led us to other cool sabotage ideas for the ship like the aliens disabling the gravity and lights — because tilting the balance in favor of the aliens seemed to lead to more ‘in-character’ gameplay: sneaking, cinematic kills, etc.

Eventually technical, legal and real life hurdles groud progress to a halt and we abandoned the project in that form. We’ve not come back to it since, but with engines like CryENGINE 3 or UDK being so widely used with such rich development options, we might go back to it again… or mod Colonial Marines if such a thing is allowed by the devs.