---
created_at: '2014-05-17T20:53:05.000Z'
title: Valve’s Design Process For Creating Half-Life (1999)
url: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3408/the_cabal_valves_design_process_.php
author: danso
points: 142
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---
 

![](https://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991210/half.gif) While
Half-Life has seen resounding critical and financial success (winning
over 50 Game of the Year awards and selling more than a million copies
worldwide), few people realize that it didn’t start out a winner — in
fact, Valve’s first attempt at the game had to be scrapped. It was
mediocre at best, and suffered from the typical problems that plague far
too many games. This article is about the teamwork – or "Cabal process"
— that turned our initial, less than impressive version of Half-Life
into a groundbreaking success.

**Paving the Way with Good Intentions**

Our initial target release date was November 1997 — a year before the
game actually shipped. This date would have given Valve a year to
develop what was in essence a fancy Quake TC (Total Conversion — all new
artwork, all new levels). By late September 1997, nearing the end of our
original schedule, a whole lot of work had been done, but there was one
major problem — the game wasn’t any fun.

Yes, we had some cool monsters, but if you didn’t fight them exactly the
way we had planned they did really stupid things. We had some cool
levels, but they didn’t fit together well. We had some cool technology,
but for the most part it only showed up in one or two spots. So you
couldn’t play the game all the way through, none of the levels tied
together well, and there were serious technical problems with most of
the game. There were some really wonderful individual pieces, but as a
whole the game just wasn’t working.

The obvious answer was to work a few more months, gloss over the worst
of the problems and ship what we had. For companies who live and die at
the whim of their publishers, this is usually the route taken — with
predictable results. Since Valve is fairly independent, and since none
of us believed that we were getting any closer to making a game we could
all like, we couldn’t see how a month or two would make any significant
difference. At this point we had to make a very painful decision — we
decided to start over and rework every stage of the game.

![](https://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991210/birdwell_01.gif)

**Many of our scripted sequences were  
designed to give the player game-play clues as  
well as provide moments of sheer terror.**

Fortunately, the game had some things in it we liked. We set up a small
group of people to take every silly idea, every cool trick, everything
interesting that existed in any kind of working state somewhere in the
game and put them into a single prototype level. When the level started
to get fun, they added more variations of the fun things. If an idea
wasn’t fun, they cut it. When they needed a software feature, they
simplified it until it was something that could be written in a few
days. They all worked together on this one small level for a month while
the rest of us basically did nothing. When they were done, we all played
it. It was great. It was Die Hard meets Evil Dead. It was the vision. It
was going to be our game. It was huge and scary and going to take a lot
of work, but after seeing it we weren’t going to be satisfied with
anything less. All that we needed to do was to create about 100 more
levels that were just as fun. No problem.

**So, Tell Me About Your Childhood**

The second step in the pre-cabal process was to analyze what was fun
about our prototype level. The first theory we came up with was the
theory of "experiential density" — the amount of "things" that happen to
and are done by the player per unit of time and area of a map. Our goal
was that, once active, the player never had to wait too long before the
next stimulus, be it monster, special effect, plot point, action
sequence, and so on. Since we couldn’t really bring all these
experiences to the player (a relentless series of them would just get
tedious), all content is distance based, not time based, and no
activities are started outside the player’s control. If the players are
in the mood for more action, all they need to do is move forward and
within a few seconds something will happen.

![](https://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991210/birdwell_02.gif)

**Conceptual artwork for  
ceiling-mounted monster  
that was dangerous to both  
the player and the player's enemies**

The second theory we came up with is the theory of player
acknowledgment. This means that the game world must acknowledge players
every time they perform an action. For example, if they shoot their gun,
the world needs to acknowledge it with something more permanent than
just a sound — there should be some visual evidence that they’ve just
fired their gun. We would have liked to put a hole through the wall, but
for technical and game flow reasons we really couldn’t do it. Instead we
decided on "decals" — bullet nicks and explosion marks on all the
surfaces, which serve as permanent records of the action. This also
means that if the player pushes on something that should be pushable,
the object shouldn’t ignore them, it should move. If they whack on
something with their crowbar that looks like it should break, it had
better break. If they walk into a room with other characters, those
characters should acknowledge them by at least looking at them, if not
calling out their name. Our basic theory was that if the world ignores
the player, the player won’t care about the world.

A final theory was that the players should always blame themselves for
failure. If the game kills them off with no warning, then players blame
the game and start to dislike it. But if the game hints that danger is
imminent, show players a way out and they die anyway, then they’ll
consider it a failure on their part; they’ve let the game down and they
need to try a little harder. When they succeed, and the game rewards
them with a little treat — scripted sequence, special effect, and so on
— they’ll feel good about themselves and about the game.
