Aug 22, 2020
Black Mesa - GTB79
Matt Young
Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Crowbar Collective.
Hi! I’m Matt, and I’m a 23 year old Environment Artist. I've been contracting with Crowbar Collective since 2017, but I recently came on as a full-time artist in 2020! I was one of the handfuls of people that helped create environment art for the Xen chapters. Recently, I’ve been touching up the outdoor environment art for Black Mesa's earth levels, as well as other things I’m not allowed to talk about yet! If you’d like to follow me on my art journey, my Twitter is @Matt_in_3D.
What was your first experience with Half-Life?
I found Half-Life before I even hit 10— I was lucky to get my own PC at such an early age. It was from a local university’s surplus exchange where they would liquidate old computers and other electronics, we got it for maybe $20. My family made a habit of going to this surplus every week to dig around for random cheap parts to collect, and one day I ran across a Soundblaster card still in its original box. I opened it to find the driver CD alongside a few demos, one being a Half-Life: Day One disc, so I took it home and tried them all out. Considering I don’t recall what the other demos were, I’d imagine you can guess which game stuck with me. I still have it!
When did your interest in game development begin?
I’ve definitely always had an interest in design. Looking back, I feel like it was accelerated by the games that shipped level editors alongside them. Younger me was so infatuated by these customized toolboxes that I could use to make my own stuff, just like the real developers. With existing assets and endless amounts of time, it was so easy to create new designs or rip apart and study the levels that the developers made. I spent as much time just experimenting in the editors for Starcraft, Trackmania, Pro Skater, Marble Blast, and Age of Empires just as much as I did playing the actual games. Eventually, I dipped into the larger editors like UE3 and Radiant, so it was only a matter of time before I stumbled across Half-Life 2 and Source SDK. I taught myself Hammer in middle school as my main hobby and eventually started making levels for Garry’s Mod in early highschool, which is what led me to meeting and joining the team at PixelTail Games to work on GMod Tower, a social party game for Garry’s Mod.
After a few more years of working on GMod Tower designing levels, around the time I finished high school, I realized that I was drawn more towards environment art over level design, and the only way forward was to learn how to model and texture assets for games. Towards the end of GMod Tower and starting development on its spiritual successor Tower Unite, I solidified my modeling skills and created levels inside Unreal 4 (including lots of minigolf courses).
How did you get involved with Black Mesa (If you joined later on)?
I joined at 19, so I’m the youngest on the team by a far mile. Before applying, I had played the mod as a fan just like everyone else and was totally blown away at what they had pulled off. I officially came on board at Crowbar Collective as an artist in 2017, but a few years prior, I actually tried to apply as a level designer in 2013 while I was still in high school. Although the team liked my designs, since I was 16, I was turned away because I legally couldn’t sign the non-disclosure agreements. However, they encouraged me to apply again later! After Black Mesa’s early access launch, Crowbar put out a call for artists to help work on Xen, and I knew it was the right time to apply again— I’m happy I did! The “young” puns never stop rolling, but the team has been extremely supportive of my environment art journey over the last few years. I can’t thank them enough for the opportunity I was given.
What do you enjoy the most about Black Mesa?
Around the time I joined, I started doing playtests for the Xen and Gonarch levels, which were still in Blockout and disconnected from one another. You’d load up the individual map in the console, play the design experiments, and at the end, you typically got met with a cat texture that shipped with HL2 to signal the ending. 
Even though I ran through the game a tiring amount of times, it was such a cool thing to watch the level design come together over time and see those rough concepts get developed into the final overarching flow. I definitely thrive on the energy of a team coming together to create something bigger than any one of us could create alone.
What software did you use for your work?
For Black Mesa, I work exclusively inside 3ds Max using Wallworm Model Tools. Rarely do I ever actually open up Hammer anymore! Most of our materials were authored in Substance Designer / Painter.How much does using Wallworm improve workflow in the Source engine?
The difference is staggering! It’s so easy to sculpt displacements, place foliage, paint blends, and I can create brush systems in a fraction of the time in comparison to Hammer. It sets you up to embrace iteration and get your ideas flowing, rather than getting worked into a corner with complicated brushwork! You can create entire level designs just by plotting down some splines and letting the walls construct themselves. Plus, Wallworm Pro is totally free to download now! Shawn has worked closely with us to make the Source art pipeline faster than it ever has been before.
What was the most difficult moment for you working on Black Mesa?
Even though Wallworm vastly improves how you can approach environment art, working in Source in the modern day when objectively better tech exists requires a special level of patience. At certain points, it can feel like getting things in-game is more difficult than creating the actual art itself. After 10+ years, I can confidently say I equally love and hate Source. “Breaking free” from Hammer and transitioning into 3ds Max was tough, as I had to throw out deep-rooted habits from my level design years that only really were pertinent for creating BSP, but in the long run was invaluable to developing better mentalities and approaches for creating art. In terms of the art itself, I think that each chapter of Xen presented its own unique challenges to tackle, but Interloper certainly was a larger one due to the demands of this otherworldly organic art inside an engine that’s tailored for the exact opposite circumstances. A lot of it combined fleshy, alien material and bones that were fused to metal parts that level designers created with BSP, so figuring out how to handle the transitions between the hard and fleshy shapes was a challenge for sure. It took a lot of good effort from everyone on the team.
What do you want to improve about Black Mesa?
I’ve enjoyed updating up the older outdoor earth sections with new art, so I’ll continue to do that until they cut me off! :)
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