The Dawn of a New Setting

One of the problems with custom Left 4 Dead maps is that majority of them share the same look. They all use the same in game assets and create brothers and sisters for the No Mercy campaign. Now, there's nothing wrong with recreating the No Mercy city look, but players are often getting tired of this style.

Granted, zombies in a city really don't have any other type of defined style besides a rainy stormy night in a power deprived city. But still, players are getting tired of seeing No Mercy rehashes, or any rehash of any of the old campaigns. But this leaves map makers at a particular problem, all of the assets that we use were made for all those familiar tired settings in mind. What kind of new environment could you make that would be refreshing and interesting at the same time?

Well the obvious answer is to change the time of day. Infact, many players have suggested and some map makers have even started to create daylight themed environments. Even "The Parish", a new campaign in Left 4 Dead 2 makes use of the sun to create a relaxing sunny day of killing zombies.

So obviously, I wanted to create a different look for my campaign that will draw some interest and won't draw people away. Rather than stick with sunlight, I wanted to blend the lighting setup in the rural Blood Harvest campaign and mix it with the city environment of No Mercy to get this:

Setting the environment in a windy dawn setting gives the map a moody look that is cold and creepy. The current idea is to mix orange/red lighting on top of the blue ambient to create a visually appealing atmosphere.