I see the future of Alien Swarm (AS) as being a single player game.
The problem with so many multiplayer based games is they require an active gaming community to survive.
As we are being so often reminded at the moment (Feb 2011), people are moving on from Alien Swarm and making silly comments about how its a complete failure. This isn't true of course but I do feel that this games reliance on multiplayer co-op will be its major undoing.
There is a huge section of the gaming community that prefer single player games to multiplayer (yes even and sometimes especially co-op play). Additionally most folks who enjoy a multiplayer session enjoy the Single Player experience.
Bearing in mind that Alien Swarm is a FREE game and available to everyone online, by creating single player maps we're providing free (hopefully high quality) content, that can be played and enjoyed immediately. That's a pretty darn attractive prospect to most players.
As a result I decided to focus on single player mapping. Unfortunatly, AS shipped without many of the SP features enabled. It's all there, it's just not switched on by default. Alien Swarm SP aims to address those issues.
I've based this mod on plaYer2k's Hud Mod and he was kind enough to add in some additional features for me.
Current Features:
- configurable automatic team selection allowing mapper to assign team spots for each map and force player to spawn in a specific marine (skips team roster screen and boots straight to map)
- all official maps and addons available to play in single player mode, through the Offline Practice option in the menu.
- can spawn bots elsewhere in map and bring them into and out of play when you wish (to be used as power-ups etc...)
- Weapon strip allowing more half-life style weapon discovery
- instant health and ammo pick-ups
All these element are optional and can be configured per map you create.
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