Half-Life Games Infographics – A Call to Graphic Designers

24th April 2010

Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3

I love infographics. I hope to implement something like them in a future statistics project on this site. There is such a wealth of basic information with all the games that I have no doubt they could be used for some cool infographics. In fact if they are high enough quality they could easily be sold via Cafe Press. If my Photoshop skills were half as good as my imagination I would try and create something.

I collected a bunch of cool infographic images but decided it was probably better if you just Googled. Here are some good examples: Mozy.com and CoolInfographics.com

There seem so many possibilities. Relative numbers of enemies, NPCs, health and Enemies on each difficulty level, Number of melons, trains, breakable crates Vs Non-breakable crates, estimated distance travelled in the games and episodes, indoors Vs outdoors, total words spoken, words and appearances of the G-man, headcrab mountains, the list is almost endless.

The skill lies in being able to create the graphics and make it informative and interesting at the same time.

Is the Half-Life Community up to the challenge?

6 Comments

  1. I’m not quite sure I entirely understand what you’re looking for here. Something like “There are X number of headcrabs in the entire Official Half Life Series” and have a silhouette of a headcrab next to it or something?

    At first I thought you were talking about creating HUD icons to display different kinds of data.

    1. I am suggesting taking the data in the Half-Life games and presenting it in interesting ways. Have you followed the links? They provide some useful examples.

  2. Vaughn

    Hey Phillip,

    Was/is this the same project we were talking about a couple months ago?

    1. No, what I was talking about was part of a new feature set for the site, but you certainly have the skills to do this one too.

  3. This could be interesting ( if you were interested in such data ), but precise information would be a must, for whatever it’s intended application.

    1. Not only that, but it requires that the choices have concrete and specific numbers. For instance number of enemies in a half life game sounds great, but even Valve makes use of the endless spawn mechanic in few places, which would seriously mess up the ability to pin that down to a specific number.
      For some of the more fringe statistic type stuff, like the minimum number of steps needed to complete the entire half life series, you could say “Over the course of the entire Half Life storyline Gordon Freeman will take more than X number steps” but you’d still need to trawl through some HL speedruns and actually try to COUNT how many steps were taken through it.

      It certainly could be cool, but it will take a lot more than just creating a little graphic and putting some text with it.

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