#oxcjae.

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”. 

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.

To explain it short and sweet, this project arrives just barely over a year after playing around and experimenting in Half-Life one day, around the time I was being heavily inspired by cLOUDDEAD’s abstract, self-titled album. I noticed how many solid black, key-able holes that were in a lot of the maps and discovered the opportunity to create a scrolling effect by using a consistent speed in each scene.

Gradually, over the year, I figured out how I wanted to stitch the scenes together and, in the process, learned more about keying and masking in Adobe After Effects, which I spent most of the project’s development time doing.