It's extremely unlike most game development ship periods I've experienced previously." The calmness with which, as each discipline moves off and the people from that discipline move into testing and looking for major issues, has happened in such a bizarrely calm way. " stepped process where each discipline gets successfully closed down. "This has been the calmest closing out of a game development cycle I've ever experienced, by far," says Remo. Remo says that while it's all hands on deck for bug-catchers, it felt far calmer in comparison to the launches he's experienced in the past, even with a pandemic brewing in the background. In the lead up to release, most of the Alyx team and other Valve employees were playing through the game, trying to catch any game-breaking bugs. For Wolpaw, though, working from home is sort of the norm, and a few days prior to our call, he tweeted about completing a full playthrough of Alyx. The coronavirus pandemic forced a change of plans. The video call is actually a workaround, as USgamer and other websites were initially invited to send staff out to Valve's offices for a review event and interview opportunities.
"I come down to Valve every five weeks or so for ten days to two weeks-but not in the last few weeks, because of the apocalypse and whatnot." "I've been working on Alyx, it's been basically full-time," Wolpaw explains. On Skype, Wolpaw calls in from his office in Cleveland, Ohio while Remo connects from Valve's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. Wolpaw came back to Valve to help give Half-Life: Alyx a story to fit the rough progression of levels Valve had worked out, but he's still a contractor who mostly works from home. In this installment, we talk broadly about coming back to Half-Life, designing for VR, and the fate of other projects like Double Fine's Psychonauts 2 (which Wolpaw wrote for) and Campo Santo's on-hiatus In the Valley of Gods. In the past year, Remo says Half-Life: Alyx has become "almost a whole new game." USgamer had the opportunity to chat with Remo and Wolpaw ahead of Alyx's release. Wolpaw, Jay Pinkerton, and Campo Santo's Sean Vanaman worked out Alyx's story together. Half-Life: Alyx is Remo's first Half-Life game as a developer, and it's the first time a team has taken over from Laidlaw, who announced his retirement from Valve in 2016. Remo, a designer and programmer on Alyx, remembers playing the original Half-Life games as a fan Wolpaw helped out on the Half-Life 2 Episodes, but those were still mainly the domain of original series writer Marc Laidlaw (Wolpaw also, of course, wrote for Portal and Left 4 Dead). Wolpaw then came back to Valve as a contractor later that year. Remo and his comrades from Campo Santo-the developers of Firewatch-all joined Valve in 2018, when Alyx was well into production. Wolpaw, who joined Valve as a writer in the mid-2000s, left the company shortly after the earliest VR experiments that led to Half-Life's return got under way.
Half-Life: Alyx was in development at Valve for about four years, during which Erik Wolpaw and Chris Remo were only around for about half of the time. It's also the chance for some longtime Valve employees to take on a more significant role in Half-Life. This being Valve's first full-length single-player game in close to a decade, on top of being a Half-Life title, means this is the first time that some relatively recent hires have had a chance to make their mark. Today marks the release of Half-Life: Alyx, a virtual reality-exclusive title and the series' first installment in over 12 years.