Garry's Mod

PCGamesN report that Garry Newman, creator of Garry’s Mod, has opened his open world zombie sandbox, Rust, for registrations. Garry’s Game is currently in alpha and while it would be easy to describe it as ZombieCraft, I’m better than that. I’m not even going to call it MineZ, despite its focus on hitting trees with axes, running away from zombies and collecting resources. It’s an attractive game and it contains shiny red cars. It’s early days and the eventual goal is to have a world built by players. Even the zombies are a temporary measure. “We also hate zombies and are going to replace them with other NPCs at some point.” You can see a video made by Youtuber MriPope below, in which we discover that night time is very dark.

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Craig send me the video below with the line “this is Garry’s Mod“. After looking at it for a bit, I realised I didn’t understand what that meant, because it looked a lot more like Eve Online. So I browsed my way over to Facepunch for an explanation: “Devinity has been in development for a long time, going through many massive updates and overhauls, so much that you would barely be able to tell the new and old versions used to be the same gamemode. It is a unique combination of gameplay elements from games such as EVE: online and Freelancer, but with many of our own elements added in, further enhancing the player experience.”

Okay! So that means…? Spaceships, space battles, planets, NPC missions, NPC space pirates, asteroid fields, all in a game mode for Garry’s Mod. Clever stuff. Videos below. (more…)

The amount of money a game/software developer makes shouldn’t really be the first thing you say about them, but sometimes you’ve got to make an exception. For instance, Garry’s Mod developer Garry Newman, who recently revealed that his physics-abusing, face-mutilating Half-Life 2 mod has brought in $22 million to date. It’s about time he and Notch had a riches-off, I think. While I don’t think anyone could claim he’s not in the Sickeningly Wealthy bracket, he does claim that the lion’s share of this doesn’t reach the Gmod team’s gold-lined pockets. (more…)

I probably need to leap back into Garry’s Mod. For about a year, it was one of my go-to games/game-like things. If I was feeling bored, I’d find the most elaborate ways possible to pit a single, pistol-armed human NPC against hundreds of languidly slithering legless zombies and cackle until my mental health was severely in question. Eventually, though, I squeezed all the grim carnage I could from even the juiciest of scenarios, so it stopped being my time-waster of choice. But now, it sounds like Garry’s wonderful toybox – in much the same fashion as an infinitely multiplying army of single-frightened-human-hungry Ant Lions – has expanded quite a lot. And more’s on the way. Kinect support, for instance, is right around the corner, and Garry’s released a video of how exactly it’ll work. Flail your arms wildly at the break until something happens. Or just click on it.

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Haha. Yeah, Garry knows what to do. I’ve posted videos of his Kinect experiments below, and you can see exactly why the infamously aberrant Half-Life 2 mod actually needs Kinect support by watching those. Readers with memories will recall that we talked to Garry about his plans for the mod earlier in the year.

The Kinect support will apparently arrive “this week or next”. (more…)

There are two versions of Garry’s Mod: the standard version that’s been in the same shape for a while now, and the beta. The beta, aka GMod 13, is a relatively recent arrival, built to allow Garry to overhaul the whole game without breaking the one everyone’s playing. It uncouples the development from the main fork, and that serves two purposes. Firstly, it gives Garry the opportunity to make big changes without constantly dealing with complaints that the game is broken, and secondly, it gives everyone a look at what’s being done to prepare for when the release arrives. The base game will be better, but other things will break.

I asked Garry to walk me through the most important future updates. (more…)

According to Garry’s Mod creator Garry Newman: “There’s so much stuff going on in GMod that it’s hard to pull out individual addons. I think the real great thing about GMod is that all these addons exist. It has a rich user contribution community. It keeps itself entertained.”

It really is impossible to cover everything that the GMod community has made. I tried and gave up, instead creating an inexhaustive list of amazing things that have tickled me over the years as an on-and-off GModder. So this list includes my choices with a couple of Garry’s mixed in. The upcoming GMod update might include modes that won’t function for much longer, but that’s okay. It’s about wonderful, ephemeral things, not a list of things you have to do right now. If there’s something I’ve missed you’re absolutely more than welcome to drop it in the comments. Just make sure it’s something that’s set your Face Poser to ‘stunned’. And remember: none of the below comes shipped with the game: it’s all community generated. (more…)

“It was never meant to be a big deal. I was just fucking about!” says Garry’s Mod creator Garry Newman. His innovative physics-based mod for Half-Life 2 turned out to be a remarkably big deal, not least by being a forerunner in iterative and community focused design, and a game that’s perennially in Steam’s top twenty game stats. It’s an exercise in giving gamers tools and no direction, one of the few games that makes just messing about a core goal. Its strength is a flexibility that makes it a platform for people to make things like comics, maps, weapons, even gamemodes. It might have grown by enabling sexually suggestive poses of Valve’s stoic game characters, but six years on there’s so more to GMod than just fucking about. Here’s how it got there. (more…)

There’s a moment in this video of a new Gmod feature where I start to feel sorry for Breen. He looks at the camera, just as Garry starts to pluck at his very bones, with such sad resignation. His dignity gone, debased for our entertainment. (more…)

Unfortunately-named news site Gamepron is reporting that Mr Garry Newman, creator of Garry’s Mod, has gone and done something clever: he introduced an error to his game, an error which only affects pirates. It was a trap! Said pirates even turned up on the G-Mod forums to discuss why their game didn’t work. Reporting the error even revealed their Steam id. Hilarity ensued.

More of this sort of thing, Internet. (Even if it is basically pretty sinister.)