As my signature would suggest, I am an independent game developer. I haven't tried anything with the source engine yet, other than mapping, but it's on my to-do list.
Basically, I'm the lead programmer of a small-time game developing clan called Clan Anticivilian, we've got about 10 members

I haven't been working on my portal maps as much lately coz we're less than 2 months off releasing our new game, called Facility B.
The game will be released in 3 parts, chapter's 1,2,3, but for now I thought I'd show you guys a little gameplay video - and if you're interested in a playtest give me a PM or something.

Anyways, here's a gameplay video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeUVksetSkI

Please tell me what you think![/url]

This is ADVERTSIING! THATS ILLEGAL! OMG U SUCK BIG TIME!

Oops, forget to turn [1337-Lock] off...

Anyway, though I'm not completely sure this kind of posts is allowed. Please forgive me for trying to play moderator (which I'm not), but maybe you should ask Msleeper or Duffedware if this is allowed.

Other than that, it looks kinda... square to me. Nice soundtrack, really creepy, but are your enemies intended to look so... abstract or are they simply in an early stage of modelling? I'm sorry, I haven't heard about this game before so I don't know that. It looks great, though, especially for an indie game!

The Description wrote:
Off Topic
Discussion not related to Portal or mapping. Introductions and other crap goes here. No spamming!

Since this has meaningful content and isn't just raising post counts, it's not spamming. Works for me.

So I'm not quite sure what your goals are with this game. That is, if you're developing with intent to sell the game or if you're going to distribute it for free. So I'll break down my response a bit...

If you're intending to freely distribute the game then that's awesome, keep up the good work.

If you're intending to sell it you've got a long way to go if you expect to have your game on the shelf alongside games like Unreal Tournament 3 etc. The game is neat and 7 years ago a customer might have picked it up and read the storyline but in all honesty in todays gaming market visuals are priority #1. I dunno, maybe if you're selling the game for like $10 and you fix it up quite a bit (see my following recommendations) it'd be worth it.

Whether you're distributing it freely or selling it I have a few general recommendations:

It looks kind of like a Doom-type game, which is badass! Look at my avatar for Chrissake. But there's a lot of minor things that can be done to make it a more fun game, even at low budget. Most importantly, level design. We don't necessarily need static meshes and particle effects to be happy but give us a more interesting level design. Think Doom, think Hexen, think Goldeneye. Not necessarily earth-shattering visuals but I still go back to those games all the time because they were fun, mainly because of the levels.

Also in a Doom-type game you gotta have more interesting monsters. Hordes of them. All shooting at you madly.

Granted, I only saw a 1 minute clip but this is just what I gather from that. Anyways, I'd be interested to see where you go with this.

Okay, the enemies currently have 'temp' models, and are untextured. The graphics is primarily what we're currently working on, so expect it to all look cooler in a few weeks.
This is Chapter One of the game, and is mostly corridors. We as a clan have already recognised this, but it is a little late in the design stage to start coding in platforms etc. The program I'm using doesn't support static mesh collisions or anything, the program is designed for making 2D games with. So, each platform with a different texture, or height, or shape has to be coded from scratch. However, I will soon start working on a system that will allow us to do that more easily. The level design of the game will be our main focus in Chapter Two. A last minute change we'll make to Chapter One is add more props, from potplants to couches to cool-looking wall-screens.
The game will be distributed for free for anybody to play. This was always our intention, we make games coz it's a great pass-time, and for me, programming is one of the things I'm actually good at. Programming in 3D with a 2D program is always a challenge, which is good fun.

The program we're using is called Game Maker, if anyone's heard of it. As the name suggests, it's a total noob program, but it's got a good interface and easy enough language to use, so I'll stick with it, until I start learning C++ in University.

YOU MADE DIS IN GAME MAKER????????!!!!!!

hmm, maybe I should start using it again.

Aww.. gamemaker. I still use the the engine (pro edition), and in fact was the main thing that concreted my desire to become a gamemaker. In fact, it's where my interent alias spawned.

I've found gamemaker a little limited, and are looking into another language. I'm going to (hopefully) go onto university and study computer science and then become a programmer. I'm hoping to learn to C++ in uni, as that's what most games seem to be made with nowadays.

Good luck with your game, however i've found that 3D games in Gamemaker is very limited and blocky. I'd reccomend something else for 3D games, but i've no idea what. Gamemaker is really designed for 2D games, and even then only a limited few are proffensial standard/are able to make money. Ark22 comes to mind, even though it's free

I've added you on steam, we seem to have a lot in common. Give us a shout if you want any help, and i'd love to hear how the project comes along.

The folks talking about learning C++ in a classroom for game programming: my recommendation is to stop waiting. There are two reasons here, from personal experience.

The first is that my university teaches in Java, which is the sort of industry standard. Write once, run anywhere, common libraries, and you can use it with Eclipse. Where do I sign up? And Java may be good for games, I don't know, never tried. I personally use Python whenever possible because it is so much quicker to write in. You take a performance penalty because it is a very high-level language, but for getting something running, I've not found anything faster.

C++ is great for doing really low-level optimizations, but it will also take longer. It is by no means a bad language, but be prepared for problems dealing with low-level stuff like memory management.

Secondly, computer science doesn't teach a whole lot about video games. There are some courses about games that I might be able to take as a junior or senior, but the meat and potatoes classes teach things like sorting algorithms and low-level data structures. These things are important to gaming, but they are by no means a complete education on the topic.

Sorry to derail this thread, but I'd really love to see you guys start producing good code now instead of later.

I'm at University at the moment - 8th week of my very first semester.
We're learning Java in CS, but it's way too easy, 2-hour practicals get done in like 45 minutes I think we start learning C++ in second year.
My degree isn't Computer Science - It's called Computer Graphics. It's a course specifically for the graphics and code in movies and games.

Quote:
YOU MADE DIS IN GAME MAKER????????!!!!!!

Yeah, it's kinda gonna blow the GM communities away because of it's awesomeness... It's been in development for more than 6 months now, which is a fairly long time for me to stick to any project.

Quote:
Gamemaker is really designed for 2D games, and even then only a limited few are proffensial standard/are able to make money. Ark22 comes to mind, even though it's free

As I said before, me and the clan have no intention of selling this game.

Um, there's a 3D dll extension for GM called Ultimate 3D 2.0 (it's up to 2.1b now, it was created by Christopher Peters) and that supports shaders, rendering camera images to textures.. well the list goes on and on. Because we can use this dll to render images from a camera to a texture, I naturally tried to create a Portal engine with it. It epic failed, I couldn't get the player to come out of the portal at the other side with the correct speed and direction. It's in a big pile of failed projects that contains code I might use at a later date.
Hmm, I also couldn't get the portal model to draw the texture correctly when it was round, so the portals were big squares...

EDIT: Oh and btw @appunxinator: Doom3 rawks, but only on the nightmare difficulty level

EDIT2: One more quick edit, I thought I'd post up a screenshot of that portal game I started baking: