With that song complete, I can replace all three songs in the music box by new loops from "three thousand years", "leaving hope academy" and "gray sea", and then carry on making new songs! (Five remaining.)
I connected the start area to the three intro maps of each halfquake part. For Sunrise, I made a "hallway" sort of transition that should fit with the rest of the third part.
For all three level changes, I had to add teleporters. For the first and third part, the teleporter was needed because the trigger_changelevel brushes were too large, so I injected a teleport.
For Amen, I had to add a teleporter that turns the player around, because, in directional terms, the player would enter the trigger_change facing east-ward, but the intro map for Amen wants the player to look west-ward.
After changing levels to the three individual parts, I noticed that the footstep sounds didn't get "refreshed", meaning it would keep playing the hq2 footstep sounds, even when changing to a hq3 map. This should hopefully be easy to fix. xD
I added a new life sound to all life cells and life platforms in HQA (around 20 occurrences), I think it sounds pretty fitting, but I'll let you all be the final judges. :D
I've been talking to AxelhacK and I got some more things I thought I should share:
1) "The Present" will not be included in this release for several reasons. First and foremost, of course, there's a ton of copyrighted material. Second, the maps were not created by me, but by TheAwake. I could probably replace all the music and stuff, but honestly, it was his vision and he built the maps around the music, so I just don't feel like it's necessary to include it.
2) I'm not promising to add achievements, but Valve has made them available, and other GoldSrc mods have achievements as well. I've looked into the example from the SDK and it looks alright, however, again, no promises. Besides, it's probably pretty easy to cheat those achievements by going into the debug console and fire up specific maps (and triggers), but anyway, it would be fun to have at least three achievements for defeating each version of Somos or something like that.
3) There will be no trading cards, since Valve stopped allowing trading cards for free-to-play games.
4) AxelhacK suggested that I should add a donation DLC option so that you can add HQ Trilogy to your steam account. It's kind of tricky because a LOT of people have contributed art to HQ in the past. I thought about adding individual donation DLC for every person that was involved, sort of as a funny way out, but I'm not sure I want to track 30 individual DLC stats and deal with the payout headaches and fees and what not. :D Anyway, I guess I could just add a 0,66 DLC that inserts a text file with a humongous evil smiley into every subfolder, that should do it. xD
This week I will probably continue working on the starting area (still need to connect the "tutorial" maps), keep thinking about the new logo (thanks to Djigallag for sending me a ton of inspiring sketches), and maybe even start with the next song.
Keep your fingers crossed :D
To be continued... (<