Spud Gun Mod « Cale Dunlap

Half-Life Mod (2000 – 2001)

Overview

Spud Gun Mod was my first creation as a Half-Life modder. There is no serious point to it, it is mainly just slapstick humor. The main objective is similar to capture the flag gameplay. But instead of flags, there are dancing lawn gnomes.
This mod actually made it into a magazine–PC Gamer UK to be exact. It ranked up as one of the top 5 bizarre mods of all time in 2000. It was the only mod representing Half-Life. After that happened, it sort of inspired me to apply to showcase this mod at the MOD Expo. Below is the spiel I sent to the coordinator about the mod:

I started this mod about a year ago, mainly just to get my feet wet into mod making. I know it isn’t a very popular mod or anything, but I only hoped that it would bring diversity to HL mods. You always see more realistic based mods being made, and no sort of, slack off, joke around mods being made much anymore, only a handful.

This mod is a capture the flag type mod, except, they aren’t flags, they are lawn gnomes, which do the macarena when they idle, its kinda funny to watch. While all of this is going on, there are 2 teams of Blue and Red chefs trying to kill each other using some crazy weapons. Some of which are real, some which are fantasy. For example, Spud Gun, that’s real, it isn’t very realistic ingame, but the weapon does exist. A belt fed carrot machinegun, that’s fantasy, I dreamt that up one day. Then the list goes on to include: mountain dew launcher, lawn darts, spatulas, rolling pins, salad shooters, mini spudguns (handheld), pop cans, and pea sniper rifles.

There are also some perks about the mod, like teleporting, farting, or taunting. I made a video to show teleporting, everything about the teleport is done using the event system except for the green circle, unfortunately, that is a server-side TE. Farting, which is more of a comical thing, nothing serious, was just meant to make the mod even more unique. Each fart does 30 biohazard damage when touched. The ability to fart is controlled by the server if need be, using a CVAR. Taunting, isn’t much really, its a VGUI menu with 9 taunts or harassments on it. Some of which consist of: “Yo mamma was a snow blower!” or “Hi, Ho, Hi Ho, its off to hell you go!”, and the list goes on.

The HUD is what I’m most proud of, I included a screenshot and a separate TXT file explaining it. It is mostly VGUI, took me a long time to code, but I got it. Take a look at the TXT file and the screenshot, to see it for yourself.

In closing, this mod is one of the few non-serious mods in existence for Half-Life. I’m hoping that it shows how diverse HL modding can get. This mod is NOT for the serious, but more for the joke-around type of people, the kind who are into a sort of, slapstick humor.

Weapons

If you’re sick of playing capture the flag, you can simply run around attempting to kill your opponents (whom are very poorly drawn chefs) with various kitchen utensils. The full weapon list includes:

Metal Spatula
Wooden Rolling Pin
Presto(tm) Salad Shooter
Spud Pistol
Pea Shooting Sniper Rifle
Carrot Shooting Machine Gun
Lawn Darts
Soda Can Grenade Launcher
and of course… the Spud Gun

Oh, I almost forgot… you can fart on your opponents too. If they walk into the fart cloud, they instantly take biohazard damage and their screen turns green.

Technology

There were no serious ground-breaking technological advances in this mod, with the exception of the (near) all VGUI HUD. At the time the HUDs in Half-Life were drawn with nothing but sprites (8-bit color bitmaps). I took this a step further and used various panels (much like the Windows UI controls) to create a HUD that could be drawn with 32-bit color TGA files instead of 8-bit color bitmaps.

Downloads

Spud Gun Mod 1.2a Installer (*.exe) (16.8 MiB, 20 hits)

- Note this seems to only work with the old-style Half-Life install (DO NOT USE STEAM).

Spud Gun Mod Portfolio Video (*.wmv) (12.5 MiB, 22 hits)

Videos

Spud Gun Mod Ingame Video – This was shot for the sole purpose of being displayed on this page. There are no other players in the game but myself.