I got into Half-Life and Counter-Strike when they first came out. I immediately got into level design in Worldcraft and modeling in 3ds Max. I made several CS maps for my local gaming group over the years and moved to Hammer when Source came out. My desire to make some more artistic levels was hindered by the unfriendly tools in Source. Fixing what I felt to be a broken pipeline turned into a decade-long adventure of creating Wall Worm, becoming the technical artist on Black Mesa and Product Owner at Autodesk for 3ds Max.

I’m a family man who doesn’t really watch much TV or even play many different games. I have been playing the same set of multiplayer games for decades now (CS and Battlefield mostly, though recently Pubg too). The way I see it is that a game doesn’t get boring just because it’s old--just like basketball never gets old for me. I play CS with my family and close friends; if I’m not playing with people I actually know, my interest wanes quickly. When it comes to single-player games, I get more enjoyment from creating games than from playing them.

At Black Mesa, my role ranges from building pipeline tools between 3ds Max and Source to making some assets here and there, assisting other artists to complete their tasks and teaching teammates how to use various functions and workflows.



There are many things that I love about Black Mesa. For me, as cool as Black Mesa is, the game itself pales in comparison to the opportunities it gave me. Most importantly, I’ve made some great friends. Professionally, Black Mesa helped add a higher level of legitimacy to my work with Wall Worm in the eyes of a wider audience. Black Mesa gave me the opportunity to learn to work with others in a way I had not really done before; facing the challenges of working with a remote group of talented but wildly diverse personalities was a valuable experience for me.


One of the things I hoped to accomplish when I was hired in 2015 was to move the whole team to a 3ds Max pipeline that did not use Hammer. While I was well acquainted with the Source community’s deep attachment to Hammer, I naively expected it would be different on our team. As it turned out, I was never able to get our level designers to embrace 3ds Max. They saw the value in what the artists were doing with Max by sculpting the landscapes, but for one reason or another, the level designers did not want to make the leap.

So we settled on a hybrid pipeline of Hammer to Max to Hammer. The challenge for me was that I knew the file formats, capabilities, and limitations of both Hammer and Max better than anyone else--so knowing that the hybrid method of constantly round-tripping exported data was not ideal weighed on me all the time. Iteration was severely hampered because of this, in my opinion. This was probably the greatest frustration I had.

Eventually, I gave in to the reality that the setup we had was not going to change. It worked well enough for the rest of the team to be satisfied, and some of the conventions we developed did make it a little more smooth over time. Learning to accept that was a valuable lesson for me--you may believe you have the right way to do something, but there are always many ways to skin a cat. In the end, we were able to make a game that we all get to share pride in.

3ds Max.

No. I actually dropped out of high school. There are many paths to education. I don’t recommend that path for all people, but the only thing you really need for most fields is a willingness to learn and make yourself better. If you really want to learn and you set goals for yourself, you can learn what you need to succeed. Education should be seen as a lifelong journey.

Just do it. It seems cliche, but that’s my view on a great many things. You learn by doing things. That’s how I’ve always approached everything. It’s also what I’ve tried to instill in all of my children. My son wanted to be a fitness trainer… I’m glad he just decided to do it! The same principle certainly applies to games.


I started in 2015, so I didn’t have to wait as long as most of the other members. For the most part, I didn’t have to resist burnout. Even with a few frustrations, I felt lucky to be part of the Black Mesa adventure. Working with creative people invigorates me. And the guys became my friends. Below is a picture of Brian Dale and I visiting the Wright Patterson Airforce Museum together.

I’ve been with the team from the beginning. I’m the 2nd oldest (was the oldest until Craig joined). I originally started as a concept artist and that role changed many times over the years. I eventually moved to a 3d artist/ environmental artist.

Learning how to do new things and meeting a bunch of cool artists over the years.

My lack of personal time to work on things usually around the holidays due to my real job and having to shoehorn things into an outdated engine.

Photoshop, Substance Painter, Quixel suite, 3DS max, silo3d, World Machine, and blender.

The original game that came out in 1997.
Did you go to school for your respective parts of the project? No, I am in the medical field. I started working on the mod as a hobby.

Start using a 3d modeling program and practice, practice, practice. You should also learn to use a substance painter. Start small and work your way up to more complex things. Do your own mods of things and don’t expect to get paid or have success. Expect to fail a bunch and learn how to do something better because you learned what NOT to do. Also, learn to take CONSTRUCTIVE criticism and change your work.

I had to treat it like a job sometimes which was difficult when it was just a free mod. When it became a commercial project, I really had to treat it like a job (even though I have a full time plus job). I worked most of my vacations to get my stuff done. Sometimes you have to just walk away from the computer for a week or 2 and then go back and keep plugging away.

A game similar to BF 2142 and something along the lines of X-wing series. Would love to remake wing commander in the style of the box art from the original.

Hey, I'm Spence! I have been working off and on with the team since 2005 when the project was in its very early days as a Half-Life 2 mod. I had a small amount of experience making maps for Half-Life and initially joined the team as a level designer. My earlier work is found in Black Mesa Inbound, Surface Tension, and On A Rail where I built level geometry and re-imagined a few puzzles and gameplay spaces. In more recent years I've worked as an artist, supporting the team for the Surface Tension Uncut and Xen updates. Now, I continue to contribute as a principal artist for experimental and upcoming projects.

Outside of Black Mesa, I've contributed to two other games built on the Source engine, and as an independent developer, I've contributed to a handful of other game-related projects and teams. If you want to know more about my work or my contributions to Black Mesa you can check out my portfolio website at commonspence.com.

Aside from games and digital art, some of my other biggest interests and hobbies are photography, model-building, and traveling. I love new foods, different languages, and meeting all types of people from all over the world!

Working with the team over the years has been rewarding. Everyone has an infectious enthusiasm and I’m constantly able to learn new things and grow as a developer, which is one of the best aspects.
Also, all of the feedback from players and fans is incredibly motivating! So much work on Black Mesa was borne out of genuine love for Half-Life, and it’s an honor to have contributed in some small ways.

The pure volunteer nature of the project was a help and a hindrance at some points. In the early days, we were all working in our spare time and for the fun of it. That's not always sustainable, especially when it comes to fixing bugs, design revisions, or things that might not be as fun.

In more recent years, as an artist, it was difficult working with the Source engine while concurrently working on other projects in Unreal 4 or Unity. You become very conscious of the limitations and workflow differences between the engines and find yourself wishing for something that combines the best of all of them.

I've attended four different schools throughout my time working on Black Mesa - and only graduated from one of them, well after I began working on the project ;)
I never expected to go into a career doing creative things with computers, and the ways I spent my time and efforts in school reflect this.

After years of working on games and studying other things, I returned to university and graduated in 2016 with a BSc in Creative Technologies. It's only loosely related to the work I contributed to Black Mesa, but the course did better prepare me to take on other roles and think across different disciplines as an independent developer.

It's anyone's guess, but most likely working on other games or content for them. If I had pursued my earlier career ambitions, then I'd probably be flying or driving some kind of vehicle - or, alternatively, building physical things instead of digital things.

I have come and gone from the team on multiple occasions - I think anyone that works on a project over the course of ~15 years will feel like giving up or quitting at some point, especially considering the volunteer nature of the team for many years.

Leaving the team to work on other projects or develop new skills has allowed me to take on new challenges and roles on each return. While I think it's been beneficial (and necessary) from a personal perspective, I think that it's allowed me to make better contributions to the team as well.

It's safe to say that the art process for Xen would have been impossible if it wasn't for these tools. The Source engine is not particularly artist-friendly as it is - before switching over to the Wallworm tools, I was using a series of batch files and scripts to compile models and materials. There were a lot of points of failure and a lot of manual effort required to create art assets - not to mention an entire scene.
While the tools don't (and can't) solve all of the workflow issues with Source, they do offer a much smoother "pipeline" to work with. What used to be a lengthy process of preparing and compiling assets can now be done in a few clicks, greatly accelerating things - and also reducing frustration for artists, an important consideration :)

Creating and compiling models is only part of the process - one of the other strengths of the tools is the ability to work directly with map geometry and create entire levels through the modeling program. In this case, we did a lot of terrain sculpting and object placement in 3dsmax, which is far easier than it would have been in Hammer editor.

We were also able to take clusters of props, merge them, and perform boolean operations to remove the parts that would be occluded by geometry or otherwise “hidden” in-game. These kinds of workflow improvements allowed us to create levels that were more detailed (and performant) than anything that we could have created with Hammer alone.

All of this allowed us to spend more time with the "fun" (or at least, more creative) parts of starting up the level, and I think that's the most important workflow improvement.

Are all the classics (Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, and Day of Defeat) still counted as "mods" these days? :)
I've played a lot of single-player mods for Half-Life...Azure Sheep, They Hunger, Point of View, Poke646 were some of my all-time favorites. I played the heck out of Natural Selection and Science and Industry, too!

Probably some type of simulation/construction/management game. I've always wanted to make something like Sim Tower (or more recently, Project Highrise) but in an isometric style, like The Sims. Of course, I don't have unlimited time, money, or help, but I still work on this project from time to time as a way to improve and expand my programming knowledge. There are a lot of challenges to solve when it comes to things like pathfinding and AI, and I still have a lot to learn and many prototypes to build...
More recently, I've been developing some ideas for simulation games based on the industrial revolution, or exploring the lifecycle of coal over 100 or 200 years, through periods of increasing industrialization before an extensive decline. I don't think I'm a particularly skilled designer, but it is fun to build out game ideas drawing on history or the world(s) around us.

- Yes, I accept it. Especially if there is bacon or ham on this pizza ^^

Chon Kemp

My name's Chon, I'm 28 years old and I'm from London. I’m the Lead Level Designer at Crowbar Collective. I mostly make sure all the Level Designer’s (LD’s) cages are stocked with enough food and water to keep them alive and mapping!

Jokes aside, my role at Black Mesa is really split into two prongs here: the Level Designer aspect and the Lead aspect. My attention has been split roughly 50/50 between the two areas across my time in the role.

The first prong of my role is the Level Design side of things. All the LDs have contributed to our game in two overarching capacities. Firstly, each LD has their own set of maps that they realized the majority of the work on, making those maps their “babies” in a sense. My “babies” so-to-speak are Surface Tension maps G, H and I, Xen B1 (the Descent-inspired tree), the final map of Gonarch’s Lair, map A1 (Gargathon) and all 3 B maps in Interloper. Secondly, every LD has worked on every map in some meaningful way or another; be it design reworks, environment art and polish, scripting, bug fixes, feedback, etc. There wasn’t a map in all of Xen that I haven’t had some influence in or done some work on, and this is true for every LD on the project. I also played a very heavy hand in all the rebalancing and overhauls we did for the 1.0 release of Earthbound. Because of all these things together, us LDs are basically the “everymen” of the team.



The second prong of my role is the Lead side of things. In this capacity, my role is about defining specific tasks and milestones for the LDs/maps, and also making sure that every LD has what they need to get their current set of tasks done. Game development is a highly collaborative process, and Level Design is probably the most collaborative field within it. This is because we bring together everything made by all the other talented and amazing departments, while simultaneously designing the maps’ core gameplay and layouts. Thus, a lot of the time I wind up coordinating with the other department Leads (art, sound, animation, etc) or individuals within those departments, to make sure things get done properly based around what’s currently needed; simultaneously making sure that anything we do add serves our gameplay and design purposes.

Feedback and direction plays a huge role in this. Literally anyone can give feedback, but giving good, relevant, actionable feedback in a concise and easy to understand way is a significant obstacle, particularly across an online team. A major part of my role is ensuring that I give LDs good, clear feedback on their work that continues to advance the game and get it closer to being finished. I also wind up giving other departments lots of feedback too, as we work together so much. As part of that same process, it’s also my job to decide what feedback we choose to take from the community. You guys are absolutely chock full of brilliant suggestions and are constantly finding creative (or depressingly simple!) ways to completely break our game, and I serve as the LD’s way of sifting through it.



But that’s not to imply that LDs have no say in the matter! One of my great prides as the Lead LD on Black Mesa is that I think we’ve struck a perfect balance between direction/management and autonomy/freedom. Our LDs are free to alter the maps in any way that they see fit outside of the Lead’s feedback/directives as well, and we are always open to new and interesting ideas from anyone. But at the same time, I feel that I am able to provide a solid sense of direction and purpose to LDs, which helps keep the ball rolling. I’m really proud of it!



I started out among the modding community for Black Mesa all the way back in 2012, when Black Mesa itself was a mod. I ended up making 2 mods for it called Surface Tension Uncut and On a Rail Uncut, which aimed to restore map sections that the Black Mesa Team had cut out of their interpretations of those respective chapters.

At the time, I was an absolute mega-fan of Black Mesa. I must have played it all the way through AT LEAST 10 times or more, and evangelized it to ALL my friends! This stemmed from me being a huge fan of Half-Life in general and also of the Source modding community in general. My only previous experience in Level Design had been making crappy Counter-Strike maps to play with my friends, as well as some maps for another Source mod called The Hidden. Being such a huge fan of Black Mesa and having played it so much with the original for comparison, I had come to appreciate the brilliance of its Level Design and was fascinated by how they had re-interpreted this very basic old world!

I remember the idea of Surface Tension Uncut came to me one day when playing through Surface Tension in Half-Life. I got to a section that wasn’t in Black Mesa’s interpretation. It was an extremely blank and open section with no detail or real thought put into it, and it had a bounce pad going to the upper floor of this giant concrete structure. And I suddenly thought “hey, this bit would look really cool in Black Mesa as a destroyed car park”. As I continued to play through, I realized that none of these Surface Tension maps had made the cut and that their humans vs aliens scripted combat was something that Black Mesa had sorely been missing. I just couldn’t get the idea of that destroyed car park out of my head, so I just...fired up Hammer and started trying to make it.



I managed to put together the car park and some of its surrounding areas. I’ve always been very reserved (shocking for a game developer, I’m sure!), but at that moment I felt proud enough of myself to want to share what I’d done with others. So I just whacked together a thread on the Black Mesa Forums showcasing a couple of crappy Hammer screenshots of it, saying that it was part of my idea to bring back cut parts. The response was amazing and supportive! The people who replied had loads of interesting things to say, and I started to engage with the conversation, and I found myself getting totally sucked into it!

The rest is history! The community was vastly supportive and offered me so much fantastic feedback and conversation throughout development. I will always be appreciative of everything they did for me. That’s something which has continued to this day, as you guys have continued to support our entire team through thick and thin.

When I finished On a Rail Uncut towards the middle of 2013, I was approached by the Black Mesa team and asked to hop on board to help develop some maps for an upcoming multiplayer component. How could I ever have turned that down?! For a fanboy such as myself, there was no greater honor, and I remember feeling at the time as if they must have overlooked hundreds of far more talented Level Designers in favor of me, something which humbled me and made me strive to do the best I possibly could. After I joined the team, I was told that Black Mesa was actually now going to be sold as a retail product and that the team had some big plans in store. It was all just...so surreal and incredible. I don’t know where I got my immense luck from, but I’m thankful for it all!



I became the Lead Level Designer towards the end of 2018, in the thick of our insanely challenging Xen development. I helped see Xen through to the end, through what was a very tough time for the team. It remains (and likely always will) the single proudest achievement of my entire life. It’s not perfect, but it’s ours. And it’s wonderful.

I learned how to do Level Design by simply opening Hammer one day at the age of 15 and trying to make a map of my house for Counter-Strike: Source (which I was borderline addicted to at the time). As I hit obstacles that I couldn’t figure out myself, I consulted internet tutorials for my specific problems, often in the form of random YouTube videos or forum threads on Source modding forums. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of making the map, so I just kept trying to make better and better maps, and that was how I got into Level Design for real eventually, modding for Black Mesa.

Game design (like most forms of art) has so many different ways that you can approach it from a learning perspective. It really does come down entirely to who you are as a person and how best you learn. For me, “learning by doing” was the most effective approach, and is one I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who is capable of learning in this manner. I loved being able to take things at my own pace, not having to listen to long-winded explanations of basic things that I was able to puzzle out just by mucking around in the editor. I made my own mistakes and took my own lessons from them, forcing myself to stay honest along the way. Sometimes they might have been the wrong lessons, but that’s how life works sometimes!

There were some downsides to this approach, however. In the past, I mostly mapped by “feel” and by the seat of my pants, and I think it showed in a lot of my early work. Across my time in development, I learned to think a lot more like a proper designer: puzzling and planning things out better and with the bigger gameplay picture in mind. Being able to hone in better on the player direction and encounter design, knowing what works and doesn’t work. I think if I’d gone to a school to learn about the process of Level Design, I might have been able to get a head start on learning some of these basic principles a lot sooner. There’s an absolute ton of merit to learning Game Design in a school too, but that wasn’t the way that worked best for me, and I’m glad I took the route I did!

I almost exclusively use Hammer, which is typical for the Source engine, as it’s the only Level Design tool. As such, it is also pretty much the final vanguard of the old-school Level Design tools. It’s a vastly different workflow and toolset to what any modern game uses, such as those on the Unreal Engine or Unity. Hammer is heavily designer-driven compared to more modern workflows, which I would say are often more artist-driven now.



In an attempt to bridge the gap between the Absolutely Ancient Software™ and modern tools, most of the LDs (myself included) dabbled in a bit of 3DS Max and Wallworm. Wallworm is an amazing tool developed by our resident superstar Shawn Olson that allows 3DS Max to read and write to Hammer’s VMF format, among a million other amazing things. This allows us to use 3DS Max for Level Design and Environment Art, giving us the benefits of many different kinds of modern workflow despite our ancient engine.

Truth be told, I didn’t use Wallworm anything like as much as I should have. I mostly used it to import and subdivide displacements (the natural-looking geometry from which outdoor environments are built-in Source). It would take 18+ hours to run the subdivision process for an entire map in Hammer, but ~30 seconds in 3DS Max! The subdivision process was something we often had to re-run any time we made some kind of meaningful layout change, so this saved us vast amounts of time across the whole of development. I’m not exaggerating when I say we would not have finished Xen without this tool. Our artists made far, far greater use of it than the LDs did, too!



As a Lead, I also made pretty extensive use of Google Docs and Paint 3D to provide feedback and art/design direction to the Level Designers and other departments too. My drawing skills are absolutely horrendous, but luckily, I’ve always been able to make do with very ugly scribbles over screenshots, coupled with a lot of text. As this Q+A has probably already shown, I’m no stranger to writing a lot!

Please allow me to gush for a minute here. I think Black Mesa is the most fascinating and interesting remake of any video game ever, period. I felt this before I had even joined the team myself!

There aren’t many remakes that have the balls to drastically change things from the original and put their own spin on it. That’s because, typically, that’s not really what remakes are meant to do, and not why fans would play them. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all, either! But, Black Mesa is so unique because it is a fan reinterpretation of an absolutely beloved classic; one of the greatest shooters of all time, one which changed the genre forever. It would have been so much easier to play it safe(r) and just stick with a graphical remastering. Instead, it became its own beast, with its own identity and strengths and weaknesses, but still the distinct flavor of the original.

Sometimes we go quite close to the original. Sometimes we go completely wild and do something totally different (case in point: Xen). Sometimes it works, and perhaps sometimes it doesn’t. Everyone’s going to have a different opinion on that particular aspect! And that’s what’s so fun about it. I think anyone who plays our game has a list of things they preferred in our game over the original, and a list of things they preferred from the original. That facilitates some really interesting discussion. We don’t really aim to replace the original or “one-up” it. I view us as a companion piece to the original. They elevate each other. And that’s really awesome, in my view.



And the best part is, regardless of what you liked or didn’t like, there’s really no denying that this game is the truly ultimate fan labor of love. The team worked for free on this for more than 8 years before the prospect of money even became a discussion. It was never even on the cards until Valve approached us. Then, when the product actually did go retail, we poured our hearts and souls into making Xen this epic, huge experience; attempting to build an awesome, original piece of new Half-Life content. A real swan song to the Half-Life universe. At the time, we were not aware that Valve was going to make Half-Life: Alyx. We were trying to use Xen to honor that universe in our own special way.

On top of that, we even went back and revisited numerous parts of Earthbound, making continuous tweaks and bugfixes, ending up with a version of the game which is vastly improved over the mod version in so many ways that I think fans weren’t really expecting or even asking for. In an alternate world, we probably could have just made our own version of Xen relatively close to the original, released the mod version as-is coupled with Xen as the retail product on Steam, and still have been fine overall. But we didn’t do that. We chose the harder path. We worked on the game for 7 years after we had gone Early Access. And it was because we loved our game and we loved the Half-Life universe and wanted to do something special with this amazing opportunity we were given.

All games have had blood, sweat and tears poured into them by a developer team who loves what they’re doing. That isn’t something unique to Black Mesa, really. But I do think that Black Mesa is a particularly special and beautiful example of that!

When a project has gone on this long and been this challenging, burnout is really just an inevitability. We have all been through it, a lot. That is doubly true for those of us on the team who work full-time jobs in addition to Black Mesa, such as myself. Throughout the majority of Xen development, my daily routine on the team was to work 9 - 5 at my full-time job, and then come home and work on Black Mesa until ~1am, then repeat across the week, often with one day on the weekend thrown in too. I worked like this for literally years. It was even tougher during the crunch periods (leading up to releases), where I’d normally work the whole weekend too. It was really tough!

I think there’s one key factor that kept everyone on the team going despite these kinds of schedules. We have always loved what we are doing and believed in our game and believed in us as a team. I think anyone on the team will tell you the same thing. We are all driven by passion. That’s why Black Mesa even existed in the first place. Passion, and determination. It’s helped pull us out of some of those dark tunnels when the going has gotten tough. Which it has done on many occasions!

When even that passion wasn’t enough, my solution was usually to just take some time off until I felt I had the creative juices flowing well enough again to come back to it. This typically would happen when someone on the team shared something cool or asked for input, or a new task emerged that needed some help, which was never that far around the corner. Working on some of those new things would help ease me back into the flow again, and would help me overcome whatever I might have been stuck on.

The other massive thing which has always helped was the incredible support and response from the community. There have always been naysayers and mean/negative voices out there (and I have read them more than most on the team!), but they are mostly drowned out by those who have loved what we’ve done, and believed in us and our game. We can’t thank them enough.

All the time! Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it’s a beautiful experience. But it’s always necessary and important for us to learn as designers!

Often a player will get hopelessly stuck on a section of the game, and then I’ll watch them go down the wrong path, press use repeatedly on everything in sight except the thing they can actually use, completely miss the answer that’s right in front of them, and just entirely not understand something that we poured loads and loads of effort into carefully designing and refining. Without meaning to, sometimes I’ll even feel annoyed about it as I watch! But I always end up reminding myself: we made this game for the players. Half-Life style design is unique in that almost every single element of the gameplay is exclusively communicated through the environment. If a player struggles with something, that’s almost always on us. Room to improve!

On the flip side, there are also many times where I’m watching streams or videos of our game and a moment or section of the map just lands perfectly. The stars will line up, and a scene will unfold exactly as we designed it, to the letter. Or the player will give off a wonderful reaction of excitement or enjoyment, or just stop to marvel at the visuals, or will comment on something we spent ages working on; even really small obscure details. It’s seeing those moments play out for others and provide them with enjoyment/a good experience that makes me feel proud to be a game designer, and proud to have worked on this project. Ultimately, we just want others to have a fun and memorable experience!



It’s that mixed bag that makes this art! It is really valuable to have the ability to see which things worked and didn’t work for players, across such a wide spectrum of people. And this is only a relatively recent tool that has become available to us, I would say even within the last 10 years. So it’s a tool that we appreciate and use across the whole team. On the team, we are often sharing playthroughs and streams of our game, and discussing them among ourselves. Why someone got stuck here, what didn’t work here and why, and what we can do about it in a future update. This was particularly valuable for us during the early betas throughout Xen’s development. It helped make us better and helped us make a better game.

You know those escape rooms where you have to solve puzzles to get out of a room you’re trapped in, before the timer expires? I’d make one of those, but with the entire Black Mesa Research Facility. I’d pay thousands of skilled actors to portray the entire resonance cascade, and we’d build an entire Black Mesa experience in real life. The facility is just so bloody cool and Gordon’s journey across it is honestly my favorite of any video game ever. I’d love to just walk the length of it. We probably couldn’t do Xen, though, unfortunately...

Funny story that’s sort of tangentially related to this. Back when I first started working on Black Mesa, I needed to set up a business bank account so I could keep the money separate from my other income sources. I, therefore, had to do an interview with a business representative at the bank. She was really nice to me, but she seemed to know very little about computers in general and even less about video games. I really struggled to explain to her what Level Design was, as I couldn’t even get her to understand what 3D assets were! She interpreted my explanation (which I’m sure probably wasn’t very good!) to mean that I actually built locations from video games out into the real world. I showed her a picture of dm_gasworks, and she asked me how long it took to build that in real life! I’m sure it was no fault of hers, but that misinterpretation always stuck with me as being really funny! And thus, that was what inspired my stupid idea above.



Crying myself to sleep every night over how hollow and meaningless my life really is.

Actually, I guess it would be the same!
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My name is Chetan Jaggi. I am the Lead Programmer. I am from India. I joined the team in 2015. I love video games & anime. In the last couple of years, I have developed a new hobby of killing myself in the gym & I love it very much.

12th Grade.
I used to be an outdoor person. I used to play a lot of cricket, (& little bit soccer) and yea video games in the arcades.
During that time in India most of the science students would either pick a doctor or an engineering degree after school. I was always fascinated by physics. I used to watch all those afternoon shows about space and time on the Discovery Channel after school.
I liked programming as well, I enjoyed making small webpages in HTML and programs in c++. I was making small games in c++ like hangman, tic tac toe (it eventually evolved into a 10K+ lines monster), etc.

Before 12th grade in school, I always thought games like Street Fighter, Doom, Mario, etc were alien tech, aliens come in their little ships and drop them off on this planet for us to enjoy.
Even the internet was new for us in those times. I used to update Windows XP sp1/2/3 on a dialup connection (fun times). Eventually, in that year I came to know about Hammer/Steam and the fact that Half-Life 2 has been made in c++ and something called Directx9. Only then I realized the full potential of C++ or programming in general. I was already pretty comfortable with C++ and Half-life 2 sealed my fate.

I have already developed a fairly big text-based tic tac toe game in dos based turbo c++ 3.0 with an option to play against AI or 2nd player on the same pc. It was 10K + lines code written on pieces of paper and then typed into turbo c++ during many cybercafe sessions backed up over 10 times in 2 floppy disks. This was before my parents bought me a PC. It was exciting throughout the development and when I showed it to others & teachers my excitement was off the charts. So I had a little bit of experience of what I am getting myself into and seemed like the best option moving forward.

Although my initial interest and learning efforts were spent more in learning hammer making maps, etc but I was good at programming and there were almost 0 jobs for a level designer or game designer during those times so I focused more on programming later in the college.

I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science but I learned absolutely nothing in college that helped me either on Black Mesa or any other job/project.

During my early 20s, it was sorta necessary to have a degree to get a job at any decent company so like millions of other teenagers I also prepared for entrance exams for engineering college and enrolled in one of them. But by the end of 1st year, I came to a realization that I would be learning absolutely nothing that would help me with game development or becoming a better programmer in general. The Education system was not that great and I was a little bit selfish about how I wanted to spend my time.

So I bunked a lot of classes, spent some of that time trying to learn about game development and the rest of it playing CS/TF2, etc & calling everyone on the server noobs.

I tried to learn about game development as much as possible, whether making small maps in Half-Life 1 hammer or making small games in turbo c++ (dos based c++). I made sure my grades/marks were decent in both internal and external exams to secure a decent degree and keep teachers happy. Some of my teachers including the head of our dept were supportive/helpful even with bad attendance so that helped a lot as well.

I was initially more interested in level design and hammer things, I spent countless hours experimenting with maps, making face masks for HL NPC, photoshop, 3ds max, etc, but there was no job other there for a level designer or a game designer back then, there were very limited options even for a game programmer. So I focused more on programming later in college.

First of all, play a lot of games of different types and genres. Spend enough time in each game to understand why it's good or bad. You should be able to explain in detail why you like or dislike a game. Try check reviews/general feedback of some of those games and try to understand what others like or dislike about it etc.


Learn at least one technical skill whether it’s programming, concepts in Photoshop, animation in a 3d software like max/Maya, etc Try to be as good as in it as possible. At the end of the day everyone on the development team will contribute as a designer but most of the time you will be hired based on your technical skills. So pick at least one and master it. It will take some time and a lot of hard work but you will get there eventually.
Try to get into modding, many games have a developer or modding SDKs. Pickup the SDK for your favorite game and start experimenting with it both for learning game design and developing technical skills. If you are interested in game design try modifying gameplay in some way whether its changing damage of guns in a competitive shooter or spells in Dota, just make changes as you see fit and share it with people. Gather feedback and earn what works & what does not.
Just make something whether it's a small game as programmer, concept arts, some animations, etc, whatever make something, put it up on a website, forums and maintain a blog or portfolio website. And with each project try to aim a little bit higher than the previous one to incrementally increase your skills and experience.
Also, don't be afraid to send out resumes or apply for job positions. Maybe follow some of the industry people in your field on Twitter/Linkedin many of them have open DMs sometimes for questions.

I was looking for the next job/project in 2015 so I sent a lot of emails including one to crowbar collective since they were looking for people. I got a reply back from the crowbar collective for a Skype interview and I got hired shortly after that.
I always wanted to work on something Half-Life since Half-Life/Doom/StreetFighter was one of the games that inspired me to get into game development. I have tried to get involved with black mesa at least once (if not twice) before and I am happy it all worked out this time. It will take some time and practice but you will learn it eventually. Don't be afraid to reach out but at the same time don't spam anyone either.

I think pineapple/chocolate or any sweet/fruit on a pizza is the most sinful sin you can ever commit.

Being limited by DirectX9 technology. There’s so much we could have done both in terms of visual quality and performance if we had DirectX 11 support.
We have an amazing art team. You give them 10% improvements in the technology and they would convert it into a 100% improvement in Game quality. There are a lot of small things that have become normal in any current-gen game but we couldn't do it because we were limited by DirectX 9 but in terms of visual quality and performance.

Ricochet. YES, I LIKED RICOCHET for all of 10 hrs or so I played it.
I played many mods for halflife 2 and I don’t even remember most of their names. One of the story based ones was Coastline to Atmosphere that I thought was pretty interesting.
There was one more mod called Synergy that allowed us to play HL2 in coop, it was janky but I played a couple of maps and it was enjoyable.

I hate bullet sponge bosses so I would say 100 headcrab sized Gargantua.
But if the question was IRL then I would select 1 Gargantua sized headcrab and just hide under the bed all the time ezpz.

In terms of technical challenges again we were limited by Dx9 and the engine itself. There were a lot of limitations & old tech, we tried to raise the limits and upgrade a few parts wherever we can but still, it was nowhere near current gen engines or tech.

In terms of game design, I was in charge of both the boss fights with animation lead Nate and we faced a lot of challenges with both Gonarch and Nihilanth.

Gonarch was the first boss battle we worked on and one of the first things we did was revamp the Long Jump mechanics. Ctrl + jump for a long jump only in the forward direction wasn’t that fun and it was very limiting in Gonarch. We wanted the player to always keep eyes on the Gonarch while moving around so we would know what he is doing next and the player can react accordingly. Even before Gonarch, we always wanted to improve long jump anyways and it felt like a good time to finally do it during the early phases of Gonarch development.

We changed it so that we have two different boosting mechanics one for horizontal long jump on double tap, in the direction of movement( in any direction), and second to act as a mini air break of sorts to either stop during horizontal long jump or prevent falling damage. Each consumes a certain amount of mana/charge from LongJump(LJ) meter which changes over time at a specific rate.

One of our main goals of the fights was to encourage movement as much as possible. During gonarch battle in both the arenas GonarchA & the final battle in the Lair, it was crucial to use long jump to dodge his attacks or reposition yourself. It was challenging to convey or remind players about the fact that they can Long jump in any direction. Even during our internal testing a lot of times people would forget about that when playing for the first few times. We tried to solve this by adding a long jump puzzle/tutorial in earlier xen levels (although it was a simple straight jump) , added hints on the loading screen and we added a reminder popup in gonarch A. We don't really like to spam cards or text/images on players face but this was one of those moments where it felt necessary.

Another challenge was to encourage players to use RPGs for more damage on gonarch so we spammed RPG ammo crates all over the place as a hint to the player or a subconscious scream “USE RPG”.

Nihilanth had its own challenges. In HL1 it was a big bullet sponge blob in the center of a room, you spam all your weapons and done. His attacks were very limited as well.
I think the only aspect of Nihilanth that everyone quickly agreed upon was skipping teleportation to different rooms attached or behavior, no one wanted to do that in our version of Nihilanth.

Otherwise, the team was so divided on this boss battle. We did a lot of experimentation and prototyped around 15+ attacks/variants, ranging from spawning waves of minions, 1000 different variations of energy balls, beams, etc Our goal was to make it feel a bit less bullet spongy, encourage movement and teach the player as the fight progresses. We also wanted to keep it a little bit towards the easier side for most of it. Well, it gets all sorts of crazy in phase 4 but it lasts for only 5-10 secs.

One of the biggest concerns was that we are adding a lot of new attacks or behaviors which have never been used in the game before this battle, so players had no idea what is going on whenever they see these new attacks for the first time. Eventually, after a lot of experimentation, we decided to limit the number of different attacks, we added a lot of visual/audio telegraphing and we kept the same attacks for all the phases, we just made them harder to dodge in later phases.

Another thing that took me few attempts to figure out was portals, I wanted to use variations of portals tech for Spawning minion ( so they would walk inside the area through portals instead of usual appearing out of thin air), for spawning those props that are thrown at the player and yea i was considering dropping the moon. But there were a lot of technical challenges and not a lot of time since Nihilanth was one of the last things we worked on before release. But I am happy that after a few prototypes I was on the right path. I got portals for spawning props working without much instability or impact on perf so we shipped that. Also a shoutout to Oleksandr Palamar who did some physics magic during the final hours to polish the actual projectiles logic to make them feel so great.
In the end, it all worked after 1000+ rounds of testing & iterations and we are pretty happy with what we shipped.

Chris Horn

I’ve been a level designer for Crowbar Collective since the very early days, first starting as an early tester for a friend on the project in late 2005 before joining the team in the middle of 2006 just after the Alpha 5 leak, about 6 months or so into development. Originally it was to add a helping hand in remaking everything again from scratch post leak, but also as I had some interesting tech I thought could be useful for skybox development, and my old modification was winding down at the time. I delayed joining earlier as I was at the time working on a Christmas release Counter Strike Source map CS Xmas. My primary task was to plan and build Questionable Ethics from scratch as it was one of the few chapters that had no development at all on it bar a single concept drawing and some early textures. This later grew into work on Blast Pit, Surface Tension, and various small bits here and there. In mid 2012 to late 2018 I took over as Lead Level Designer in order to design the primary development plans and layouts for Xen, based on earlier prototypes I’d been working on, and focused primarily on Gonarchs Lair, Xen and Nihilanth and also drive Multiplayer forward, with Crossfire as my primary DM map. I’m currently Xen lead and Senior Developer with a specialization in planning and environmental storytelling. I also designed one of the largest in-game easter eggs I think exists, with the Pizza Code Mystery ARG.

Development started on the initial prototyping of Xen way back in 2008, where a few of the team, myself included, started to create some baseline prototypes and map concepts, using my earlier work in Questionable Ethics as a basis. The earliest works included a test map and various prototype props that made it into the mod version of the game.


(the earliest map of Xen c2008 - by me :3)

The planning process for Xen took approx 6 months, which I completed whilst we started to convert the game into a retail project, and took on the task of starting Multiplayer maps and gameplay. The Process for which was a complicated comparison look at the original, beta Xen maps from Valves perforce server and collated old references and original concepts from various wikis and fan sites. I then designed each and every area of Xen to Nihilanth with a focus on progression, links to the original in key areas; maintaining a flow of gameplay towards an end goal, providing an ideo locator in the form of the great tower (a mirror to the Citadel in the Half Life 2 game) and including some of the original cut content, but in a more logical and story driven way (the swamps). The full process and all the reasoning behind every plan detail is far too long to include here, but I will provide a collated plan from my originals to show that the entire section was designed to not overlap and lead linearly from start to finish.

Eventually, we moved on to blocking out the chapters, which at first was a direct overlay conversion from my original drawings, using the numerical notes as a guide.

This was then refined over the next few years as we tested gameplay, cut and redesigned areas based on feedback, before pushing into a full art pass and polish phase at the end.



The primary games over the years I’ve taken inspiration from include titles like Farcry (the original 2006 game), Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat (for Blast Pit), Rainbow 6 Vegas for the ST Dam map and various mixes of labs for Questionable Ethics from games like Quake 2 and 4, Farcry. I have a very large collection of films, but oddly didn’t really use any for reference (Apart from Indiana Jones and the Last Cruscade to complete an easter egg a friend came up with in the pub one night). Other references for things came from Kew Gardens and The Eden Project for plant references and my own urban exploration adventures for alot of the early Blast Pit style guides (Tunnels 300ft under the cliffs of Dover and lost napoleonic forts)


(Southforeland Deep Shelter - by Me)

ARGs are interesting things when they spread out from the original intent, originally the ARG was set to be in 3 component parts, the initial beginner puzzles to ease people into it, followed by a single harder puzzle that would unlock an interactive and far harder section, which in turn would then complement the release of Xen with an even harder and more complex section of puzzles. However work constraints and timings as well as the non-continuation of the storyline tie into Multiplayer (which was originally planned to have a storyline built into the environments - you can see the only real public part of that storyline in the multiplayer trailer mock commercial we did).

The ARG itself is now gigantic and very multilayered, as to how far it goes is entirely secret, the complexity may increase or decrease depending on the participants and the future is not entirely set, whilst being both complete and not. It is important to remember that not every mystery can be entirely solved and nor should it, or it ceases to be a mystery. I can say that I already started to plan the final phases of the ARG storyline and that of the Dr Horn character, and it may or may not lead to something big (or even small with big ears). Is there a conclusion - probably. Have we reached it yet - not yet. Is it solvable - for that people will need to construct more than just where Dr Horn has gone, what he has become and how pizza’s tie into it, the conclusion will not be the solution but the beginning of an end that starts a new chapter. It’s just not that linear and probably full of bugs...

:3*58[-(1.††3065321(*50]-9)1(]8;.3[5-5¢†($4153†8360¶];¢32¶(2?9[6¶08[†638255[:904::†0[8279-†68$]1$‡10(-9*)60$353‡$8-*96.87¶]¢35)

As the world's leading and only authority on Pizza I can confidently answer this question in detail, the conclusion you should all in future refer to as fact. (this is not a democracy, proof is not needed)

Firstly, Pineapple rated in the top 10 pizza toppings according to Huffington Post, now admittedly it was 9th just above Spinach… but I digress. More importantly, we have to take into account the use of Pineapple as a foil to flavour, combinations of raw pineapple with cheap ham squares is usually the reason people hate pineapple on pizza. Should you, however, roast the chunks and lightly smash them in order to glaze and release more juices, whilst dulling the acidic edge it can really work well with pulled pork or even pepperoni, as it cuts through the fat without being overwhelming. In short, most of you haven’t had Pineapple on pizza done well. (This is also an argument that can be made with Marmite, but that is beyond the scope of this factoid).

Many argue from the position of authenticity, claiming that it's not Italian. This is clearly nonsense, as Pineapple existed in Italian cuisine before Pepperoni ever did, and things like Corn and Ranch dressings are hardly traditional. Also I had a delicious Ham and Pineapple pizza in a pizzeria restaurant at 1AM on a hot summer night in the port town of Salerno, stonebaked properly by an authentic Italian pizzaiolo, it was great. (I also had a pizza alla fiorentina, which has the spinach and egg but now I'm starting to reminisce about food... )

In short, it's not only fully acceptable, it's one of the more popular toppings that has sadly become a meme. If you don’t like it, don’t eat it, all the more for me.

I’m a big fan of role playing games like The Elder Scrolls or Zelda. Having played Breath of the Wild recently, and plenty of Skyrim I would love to combine the two gameplay styles with that of a puzzle game like Myst but potentially with a cute style and open quest design system. I’m also a big fan of the Silent Hill games, so a horror puzzle game mixed with the Amnesia style system perhaps in VR would be fun.

My biggest problem is scope, when I plan something I tend to plan very big and work down from there rather than expanding into feature creep, but with unlimited time and money the game would have everything, detailed character arcs for every NPC, every book would be readable and have relevance to quests and puzzle solving, there would be an entire library dedicated to helping the player solve some of the puzzles and a little professor living in his observatory to get advice about books and puzzles from. Immersion being the key focus, whilst combat wouldn’t be very important at all outside of specific stealth and or story components. The difficulty would be in how hard the puzzles were, and there would be multiple levels of this to choose from.

As with all vast highly detailed story worlds, a trilogy would likely be needed.

Who knows, perhaps this will one day be a thing.


Dr Horn ~ Out.

Matt Young

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.



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!



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).

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.

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.

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.

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.



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.

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! :)

I’m 35 years old and live in central New York. I started gaming on the original NES and got to grow up with the video game industry. I split my time between gaming and being active outdoors. Today I try to maintain that as a game developer and a volunteer firefighter.

I started on the team as an artist, became the art lead, then project lead, and now have the honor of owning the company. These days I manage the business, help manage the team, and provide direction for the games we make!

I’ve been really enjoying the new HECU combat we added with 1.0.

During the early years of the mod, a lot of us worked in bubbles, as we had not yet quite figured out working remotely around the world. To this day I am still impressed by the level of detail put into the environments, and how the team made the Black Mesa Research Facility come to life. I am still finding new things after over 14 years of being on the project.

I’ve had a few roles throughout my time on Black Mesa, each with their own unique challenges. I would have to say the hardest part has been maintaining a business and an international decentralized team. There are a lot of resources for learning art, there are some good resources for learning design, but business is like a black hole of information.

I pretty much live in Google Docs these days...

I was in college and our group heard about a remake of Half-Life being made by a mod team. We all figured it would be a great portfolio piece to get hired in the industry, so a lot of us applied. One of us got on the team as a level designer, and worked to get a bunch of us on the team!

It was difficult, especially being an all-remote team. At the end of the day, it was our love for the original game, and the crazy good work in progress posts by the team that kept us all going. You may be stalled, but seeing the fantastic progress made by others could motivate you out of it!

I love pineapple on pizza. Don’t @ me!

It actually started with watching how movies were made in middle school. I used to watch “Movie Magic” on the Discovery channel, and I loved to see how everything came together. After movies like Jurassic Park and The Matrix, I got more and more into 3D modeling, took CAD classes in high school, and started messing around with the Hammer Editor (called “World Craft” at the time). I applied to one college for “Game Art and Design” and got in.

The game we’re making now ;)

The MP5 is my crutch...

A lot of you have requested for Black Mesa to be on NVIDIA GeForce NOW. Your wait is finally over! We are excited to announce that Black Mesa is now available on NVIDIA's cloud gaming service.

See you in Xen, Scientists!

Greetings, Scientists!

We will be starting a new series called "Meet the Devs" where you will get a chance to meet the majority (not all) of the talent behind Black Mesa. For the next two weeks, we will release a daily series of questions and answers where the developers themselves answer several sets of questions—both personal and their experiences while they have gone through the years of development of Black Mesa. This is an opportunity for everyone to meet the team and get some behind the scene information. You can also expect answers to some frequently asked questions, answers about Hat Run discussions, and even an arg challenge embedded in the series.

The following will be the order they are shared with each dev interview coming out daily:

1. Adam Engels https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278596237856
2. Matt Young https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278585588818
3. Chris Horn https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278585609970
4. Chetan Jaggi https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278593542856
5. Chon Kemp https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278596554991
6. Spencer Rose https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278593424718
7. Brian Dale https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278593537288
8. Shawn Olson https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278586266756
9. Kevin Sisk https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278586227225
10. Craig Mirfin https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278593456386
11. Johnathan Welsh https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278593505759
12. Nathan Ayres https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278593584007
13. Anthony Stone https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278593440123
14. Ben Truman https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/4459080278593555014
15. Mike Hillard https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/2886199914073038906
16. Joel Nielsen https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/362890/view/2886199914076555541

We will begin this tomorrow (8/21) and end on September 3rd, so keep an eye out! If you have any follow up questions about any of the devs, feel free to comment under each announcement, and we will answer them.

Thanks, and we are excited to tell you all more about "the many faces" behind Black Mesa.