Chapter 5: Focal Point - June 2023 Article news - Black Mesa: Blue Shift mod for Black Mesa

It's been a long time since our last media release, so, a few days before Half-Life: Blue Shift's birthday, we wanted to make your day a bit more colorful!

But before that, a few words about Captive Freight's release. It was a triumph for our team. We want to say thanks to all people who played it, made videos, and gave us feedback and helped with translation. We didn't expect that so many people would play and enjoy it! After taking care of the Caretaking Patch, our team took a short break, and now we are fully immersed in Focal Point's production.

Chapter 5, Focal Point, is even more challenging for us. It requires much more time for level design and art. A lot of thought needs to be put into level structure, and creating environments like Xen is really time-consuming and difficult! Those who are familiar with the Source Engine and displacements in Hammer will understand. Needless to say, we have only two level designers in the team who are doing so most of the work, along with assistant level designer.

So, let's start with maps and level design! Two shots of Xen environment, created by Faber:

Underground lake with a waterfall created by Cyv0:

As you can see in the screenshots, we are using pre-existing Black Mesa assets such as rocks, plants, and materials, in combination with our own new content — we're creating a huge amount of custom materials and props! You can see some of it in next screenshots — water-damaged rock and coral stone surfaces, as well as new mushrooms and glowing ceiling plants, have been made by our talented 3D-artist Rimas.

As for the man-made content, we have reworked the classic crates from Half-Life, which will be used in Xen survey base and in Power Struggle.

Some time ago, we revealed on Patreon that we will have baby barnacles growing near normal-sized ones. It's time this for this render to go public!

And last thing — Stalker Light. It's a plant that will have some cool lighting coming from its eye. It has tubular design like most of the Xen fauna in the original. It will have three variants: smol, mid and full-grown.

Starting from today, we will show not only screenshots of our maps and models, but also concept art. Recently, the very talented concept artist Skwallie joined the team and already created a lot of cool art that will come handy for creating Xen environment.