Exactly two decades ago, on this day, I decided to install unregistered Fraps, load up the beginning of Half-Life 2's Ravenholm chapter, and open Windows Movie Maker for the first time as a 6th grader. Those choices ultimately changed the entire trajectory of my life. The pillars of inspiration were already being established for years through several media: my father's colorful video-game and music collections, both MTV and Internet music videos, Garry's Mod and its first-gen machinimas, and my love for the Half-Life series. While that night's result was a shoddy Ravenholm montage paced to the riffs and vocals of "Down With The Sickness", I nonetheless loved it and uploaded it to Google Video later that night. From there, I gradually mastered my craft and eventually inspired thousands (if not millions) with my various videos and series, whether they were early Gmod sketches like UnKnown Moments, parodic gameplays like Half-Serious, or more-abstract videos like Dream Mesa, Tunnel, and Grave Shift.

What has made it all worth the occasional efforts is the reciprocated love and inspiration that I've received from friends and fans alike, especially from those who've remained loyal throughout my highs and lows. Although it's taken this long for me to admit this: I've always produced videos out of mutual love for them, not for myself.

Alas, a new Half-Life machinima (my first one in 4K) and a companion for "Dream Mesa", too!

For years now, I've considered delving more into green-screen production but barely had a spark of passion to get me going. As usual, the motivation hit me in a random moment.

While exploring house classics for another Purple Waves volume that I've just released, I came across Miss Kittin & The Hacker's gem of a track, "1982", in a random compilation album. It didn't make the cut for screwing, but its ear-worm beat made a home in my mind for the next couple of weeks. Didn't take long for me to boot up the ol' Gmod during a March weeknight and clear most of the production based off of a hazy vision. Using Half-Life's alpha models helped make it feel more interesting and abstract for me. Recording retro visuals straight from Windows Media Player sealed the 1998 vibe, and they synthesized perfectly with The Hacker's electroclash sound.

So, yeah, I've been pretty quiet for the past year or so.

Last November, when I streamed Half-Life for its 25th anniversary, a reoccurring question from viewers was: "What you've been up to?" Well, it's about time to answer more fully:

I've been going on other ventures to follow my current interests.

While I still hold the Half-Life series near and dear to my heart, I've lost most of my interest in it and its mods/derivatives. The few times I've attempted to materialize an idea on Half-Life or (even) Gmod, the projects quickly fell short because of that.

Outside of two sketches, the few videos that I have finished in the past year are simple gameplay highlights that I share with close friends. While I thought about sharing them publicly, most outside viewers wouldn't care for them, and the content would harm my main channel more than grow it. Perhaps I'll release some future ones on my 2nd YouTube channel.

On the creative side, I'm still mainly "screwing" music and have released four volumes so far, and I'm currently working on another one to be released in the coming months. As simplistic as it is, something about creating a new vibe with pre-existing material (especially songs that I grew up with) currently has me obsessed. During this journey, I've unlocked memories of songs I haven't heard in 20+ years and exposed myself to classics that I've never heard before.

Speaking of current inspirations, not much related to the gaming world has inspired me. I momentarily ranted about this last year. The truth is that this is likely related to me simply losing interest in most gaming (especially Valve-related) content, since there (admittedly) has been good material around by other content creators. (Some of it can be seen in the "Likes" section of my Twitter account.) So, I've been shifting my attention to popular movies, shows, and even music videos for the meantime instead.

Given that today marks the 25th anniversary of Half-Life's official release, it's only right that I finally deep dive into how the series majorly changed the course of my life. As I touched upon in a previous entry into my roots, my father incidentally blessed me with Half-Life in 1999 by fault of his own interest. Though I was merely five years old, I endured its nightmare fuel for the immersive story-telling and interactive cinematics... and also the hilarious friendly-fire feature.

Admittedly, I wouldn't actually finish the game for years, but I didn't need to: It's impressions on me were very immediate. Every time I played with my maternal grandparents' sets of wooden blocks and toy soldiers, I recreated the hallways and labs of Black Mesa and reenacted the events, even destroyed parts of the layouts to mimic the resonance cascade. I also mocked the FPS-style of weapon-holding when I played finger-guns with siblings and friends. On the other hand, the scarier aspects of the game would creep into my childhood nightmares (usually those damn headcrabs.) By 2005, I was drawing comics with similar disaster stories and writing fan fiction told in the eyes of my own self-inserted character.

Yet, the most impressive impact about the first Half-Life wasn't the game itself but rather the mods that followed. While I briefly investigated the up-and-coming Counter-Strike while it was still in beta, it was Team Fortress Classic that stuck with me and kept my interest alive. By 2002, I was spending a lot of my free time on fun community servers with server-side mods. "Wild's Wild Server" is the oldest one that I can recall, followed by "Axl's TFC" in 2003, then "The Yaypit", "The Monastery" and the official "AdminOP" server in 2004. Their fun game modes, additional class abilities, and (most-importantly) building features all kept me captivated.

Of course, Half-Life 2 was its own story, inspiring me enough to fake sickness to stay home on the day of its release in 2004. (My dad probably knew what was up, and I'm sure he understood.) I couldn't had been happier with the sequel. The immersive graphics amplified the whole cinematic experience, and the extra dynamic of real-time physics was a whole new dimension. Ravenholm made me straight-up say "nope" and skip the entire chapter. My impressions with Half-Life 2 served as a seamless transition into Garry's Mod in 2005, when the creative potential with building scenes and posing ragdolls with Half-Life 2's assets felt infinite. By 2006, I was frequently submitting pictures for Planet Half-Life's ongoing "picture of the day" contest, even catching a few spotlight features on their homepage.

Still, I bounced between Gmod and the Monastery community, who then had their own popular building mod on Half-Life 2 Deathmatch. Because I mainly only used Gmod on singleplayer, most of my fondest memories were made with the HL2DM community, and I went on to actively play with them for over a decade, creating seemingly-endless memories from the thousands of hours spent. And I'd be wrong to not mention the Fortress Forever community, since their friendly players endured my abrasive teenage self yet still welcomed me to produce content with them (2007-2011).

Speaking of producing content, the greatest gift from the Half-Life series was being inspired to begin producing machinimas by mid-2006, when I was merely twelve years old. One video led to another, and once I was gaining traction on YouTube by 2008, I was ultimately inspired to create content as an adult.

Basically, it's truly a wonder where I'd be today if I hadn't played Half-Life in its heyday. I'm blessed to have touched millions of lives at this point with my videos, and it's heartwarming to know how many lives have played a part of mine over the years, whether we were messing around in-game or interacting in a comment section.

Thank you, Valve. And a HUGE thanks to the online friends and fans that I've met along the way while playing the series and its derivatives. Although I stay mostly to myself these days, you've all made an impact on me in some way or another, and that'll never be forgotten.

In recent months, I've been reflecting my past and longing to return to my uninhibited creative expression. In February, while finally exploring newer music artists, I happened to be listening to Playboi Carti's Die Lit album while unwinding with some good ol' cheesy Team Fortress 2 gameplay. When "Long Time" began playing, everything clicked. 

Those who remember my earlier years on YouTube (pre-2017) know that I used to produce content from a variety of other Valve-related games, such as Gmod, HL2DM, TF2, and even Fortress Forever. When I started producing more Half-Life 1 videos years ago (out of self-interest), I unintentionally shaped my YouTube channel around that content in the process. 

The result?: I put my creativity in a box by materializing only whatever could be done in GoldSource and ignoring everything else. While this proved to be a healthy challenge for any artist, the problem now is that I'm gradually finding myself no longer interested in pursuing just HL1 videos. Still, the pressure to feed those expectations remained for a long while, which put me at a creative standstill (to no fault but my own, of course). Simply put, for a while, I was making the same mistake as when I produced mostly Gmod videos from 2012 to 2016 (long after I had lost interest in Gmod), and a few HL projects failed because of that, including the continuation of “Halve Life”. 

Behold, a return to form. Introducing the Halve Life series, something I’ve been cooking up for the past half year. I aimed to achieve the same expectations of “A Posing Farce“ and managed to shatter the ceiling, in my personal opinion.

But the real personal achievement is how I’ve finally evolved into tweaking GoldSource maps, specifically entities, which has really opened up the world of possibilities (as well as my imagination). By using a simple tool called BSPEdit, I’ve been able to implement NPCs, sequences, animations, and dialogues through what’s essentially a TXT format. I couldn’t have done it without the help of The Whole Half-Life’s very-useful entity guides, so huge thanks to those authors! Now, I’m able to parodize Half-Life 1 potentially better than ever and make my Half-Serious videos look like child’s play.

On the topic of audio, editing/mixing for Half-Life is a piece of work. For example, since the engine only supports 8-bit/11025-Hz sounds in-game, I have to insert 16-bit vocals in editing (for the sake of quality), which requires video-capturing a recorded demo at least twice to isolate and replace the vocals (by manually muting files). Basically, audio will take the majority of my time with this series, even with my amateur mixing skills, but the end quality makes it worthwhile.

Ten years ago, on this day, I released the final episode to my (relatively) famous series, UnKnown Moments. Personally, I consider its release a milestone in several ways. Not only did it coincide with the end of my high school years, but in hindsight, it also represented the beginning to the end of my Gmod videos. With that said, I think this is a good point to pause and reflect on the past 10 years of my creative and personal ventures.

  Shift of Focus (2012 - 2013)

After working on it for 2 years, releasing “UnKnown Moments 5″ was a huge relief for me, and not just because of how long it took. At that point, after 6 years, I lost most of my interest for Gmod and couldn’t see myself producing with it in the foreseeable future.

So what was I interested in? TF2, Minecraft and reality... but mostly reality.

See, I finished high school a semester early and recently turned 18, and with college still half a year away, I was ready to dip my toes into the real world. So, like most 18-year-olds, I spent most of my time working, socializing, and partying above all else. Gaming basically became irrelevant for me, and whenever I occasionally did, it was a joke.

Once fall arrived, college only shifted that focus further, especially since I lived relatively far from home. During that first year, whenever I wasn’t occupied with schoolwork or socializing, I was self-reflecting or using Minecraft as a creative outlet on my school laptop. In fact, if I weren’t so preoccupied, I probably would’ve materialized a satire LP that I frequently fantasized.

Looking back to those ages between 18-22, this shift was absolutely necessary for new inspirations and personal growth. In fact, those years built the foundation of the person I am today. My advice to anyone in that age range: get out of your comfort zone, else you will regret it.

  “Alien Days”: Gmod & Creative Futility (2013 - 2016)

After my first year of college, I transferred to a school closer to home to pursue a different degree. When I returned to my home city that summer, my open mind still sought to expand its experiences. To compensate, for the rest of the year, I delved into new... creative inspirations. And inspired I was, especially when I was accompanied by MGMT’s self-titled album and it’s first track “Alien Days”, which still brings me plenty of awe and joy to this day.

Naturally, after returning to my home city and being creatively revamped, I began playing with video ideas again while attending the fall semester at my new school, fantasizing of a potential new Gmod video like “UnKnown Moments”.

Once 2014 had arrived with its spring vibes, I was hit with inspiration on a perfect, sunny day and typed out most of what became the first script of “Alien Days”, a project that started off as a nostalgic revisit to the UnKnown Moments universe but with a linear story. In the following months, “The Dealer”, “The Terrorists”, and “The Diagnosis” were produced from this script, along with other (unreleased) sequences, and were meant to be eventually accompanied by the full video.

But, alas, the beginning of a new lesson was on the horizon: perfectionism and its futility. The script kept evolving to the point where I halted production to let it play out, expecting a personal masterpiece at the end of it. Problem is: it never fully grew, rather only kept changing form, its abstracts always stuck between versions to where the sequences never fully aligned into a comprehensive script.

By 2015, between schooling and my social life, my occasional Gmod sessions had me wandering through it aimlessly, hoping that some interest or comedic inspiration would spark. Instead, I found myself in a creative wasteland, forcing my uninterested mind into producing empty videos. At that point, most of my momentum for “Alien Days” evaporated.

With these empty Gmod productions came the obvious realization that my creativity was longing for a new genre. Naturally, I followed my interests and began pursuing for more abstract and psychedelic videos, letting comedy take the backseat through easygoing parodic playthroughs, before ditching “Alien Days", which had mutated into an abstract project of personal self-reflection with an incomplete script after 2 years. Its last breath was in the form of a short video (produced March 2016):

In hindsight, “[]” is the perfect representation of the creative emptiness and futility that I felt when attempting to produce funny Gmod videos, which I had started doing 10 years ago at that point. What I took away from this creative crisis is to accept when your heart is no longer into something. Else, you’ll never evolve.

  GoldSource Transition (2016 onward)

The fact that I graduated from college in the same season that I basically moved on from Gmod is almost poetic, personally. My only regret is not listening to my creative intuition sooner. 

As spring 2016 arrived, I was already longing for a new creative medium to escape the emptiness that I felt with Gmod. I had recently played around in GoldSource for giggles with “Blew Shift”, so I decided to goof around some more, which resulted in the OG version of “A Posing Farce”, the foundation to the version that’ll become my highest-viewed video ever. The project also led me to a glitch that inspired “Dream Mesa” (2017), which only solidified my interest in pursuing GoldSource machinimas.

To say Half-Life was refreshing for me would be a massive understatement. Not only were Half-Life machinimas barely explored at that time, but the engine also served as an interesting creative challenge, given that its physics and NPC manipulations are relatively limited.

Yet, the creative potential for GoldSource doesn’t just stop at just comedy, as its features are more customizable than they appear. By playing with numerous in-game video settings, as demonstrated in my cinematography guide, I’ve been able to push Half-Life productions into psychedelic-levels of abstract, from changing the field of view to map lighting. Furthermore, NPCs’ voice lines can easily be changed with a simple file replacement, and map entities can be added or modified on the fly with a third-party program like BSPEdit, allowing you to insert NPCs, animations, dialogue, and entire sequences at will. And I learned all of this just by following my creative interests, project by project, and there’s still so much more for me to learn with GoldSource, from DemoEdit to the production-focused mod HLAE.

What I’ve taken away from producing HL1 videos is that growing is really just one step at a time, motivated through tangible challenges that you give yourself. To think I’ve learned as much as I have with HL1 just from occasionally playing with it over the years says a lot. Oh, and sometimes learning and growing comes in the form of failures.

Comforts me to know that I’m still able to amuse myself with Half-Life enough to release a new project. This time around, I tapped back into my creative side.

Basically, Grave Shift came about when I (recently) learned how customizable the game’s gamma and brightness settings are, as well as how dramatically they can change a map’s lighting. In some versions of Half-Life, the values are more restricted, but I found the 2013 (Steampipe) version allowed the widest range of values for both settings.

What I currently find the most interesting, aesthetically, is lowering the gamma to near-zero (ex: “0.25″) and keeping the brightness low, if not at zero. Visually, the singleplayer maps will appear mostly pitch-black, but their light sources will often give a colorful, high-keyed composition. Plus, adjusting these settings while on a map will affect only NPCs until the map is reloaded or changed, so that’s convenient if any NPCs appear too dark or bright.

I kept my OCD to a minimum with this project, and the results were refreshing. I simply recorded temporary DEMs and MP4s at the same time and collected the ones I wanted to keep and throw into the editor. Didn’t even label and organize the files (and don’t need to when there’s metadata). I also didn’t go through the trouble of recording lossless footage because that can wait until I’m able to remaster my HL1 videos in 4K. (Not sure how YouTube transcoded my upload so terribly, though.)