By bkuchera@arstechnica.com (Ben Kuchera), Ars Technica – July 19, 2010 at 01:10PM
Alien Swarm started life as an Unreal Tournament modification. Later, the team was hired at Valve to work on the Left 4 Dead series before moving onto Portal 2. Both Valve and the original team have put together a very nice present for fans: the game has been updated to take advantage of the Source engine, and will be made available today free of charge, including the SDK.
Alien Swarm is a top-down tactical shooter with up to four-player co-op, over 40 weapons, eight characters across four classes, and persistent items to unlock. This release also features full Steam Cloud support, 64 achievements, and a match-making system. In other words, this is an incredibly full-featured release for a very fun, if challenging, game. It’s also hard to argue with the price.
“In addition to the game, Valve will also release the complete code base for Alien Swarm. This includes updates to the Source engine SDK and full Steamworks integration,” Valve states. “If you’ve ever thought about developing a mod on the Source engine with Steamworks, this release provides more insight and examples for using Steamworks in game production.” This free release comes with the complete code base of the game, so you can really dig deep to see what makes everything tick.
This is a great bonus for fans as well as a good excuse to get some friends together for a quick session tonight. See you online!
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