The Halo PC Engine

**TM_updates** · August 31st, 2011 10:19 AM

TM would like to introduce 343industries to our custom single player series of levels, which is the result of a great team-effort and goes by the name of Project Lumoria.

Project Lumoria is a 2 map episodic series of Halo Custom Edition single player levels set in an exciting new environment at the start of the war between Humans and Covenant.
The goal of this project is to go back to the roots of the original Halo 1 gameplay and offer an enjoyable experience that feels like something that could stand right alongside the original campaign.
That said we do include some custom assets, but we do our best to make them feel like they could fit in the default tagset. We also tweak existing default tags to better suit our needs for our intended gameplay experience.

One example of one of our custom additions is the inclusion of the Halo e3-2000 shield wielding elite:

And another example is the inclusion of the e3-2000 Covenant Shadow vehicle, illustrated below:

-PROJECT LUMORIA: EPISODE ONE-

Description: At the start of the Human-Covenant war, a scientific expedition into the outer regions of human space stumbled upon a previously unknown planet, later to be named Lumoria. The planet was home to various new species of fauna and flora, and several mysterious structures appeared to be dotted across it's lush environments. They would later realize that Lumoria was in fact an artificially constructed planet, carved into what it is now by the "Forerunners". Shortly after the planet's discovery however, the Covenant made landfall and disabled the expedition's ship. Most of the crew was killed or captured, though some managed to stay hidden and set up a beacon. Several days later the UNSC would pick up the distress signal.

Now The Endless Horizon, a frigate class ship, is sent in to execute a low-profile search and rescue operation.
On board is May, a female Spartan II supersoldier. Bred for combat, built for war.
Along her side are a hardy group of higly trained ODST's, lead by Gunnery Sergeant Brandon Keiffer.

Here you can see the official (but now outdated) trailer for the first release of Project Lumoria: Episode One

And here you can see a small gameplay preview we did for episode one when it still was in an early development stage

Here are some screenshots of Lumoria: Episode One, along with a handy .zip file for those who want to download them to their pc

And here's the rest of them:

The .zip file containing the 25 screenshots:
http://www23.zippyshare.com/v/63077802/file.html

More Media can be found at the bottom of this post, including several Vidocs we have done during our development process.

Project Lumoria: Episode 1 was released last year and updated a bit later. But after more user feedback we decided to work on another update, which will be released alongside Episode 2 when it is completed.

Project Lumoria was very well received amongst players, totaling over 20 000 downloads from various hosting websites.
It averaged a user rating of 9.2/10 on hce.halomaps.org and an average rating of 9.1 on www.modDB.com, making it the highest rated customly crafted single player level for Halo CE to date.

An example of how we approach our level design is detailed below:
http://www.modacity.net/forums/showt...Player-Mapping

The initially updated version of Episode 1 can be found here:
http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=5909

A detailed and honest review of the initial release can be found here:
http://halosource.forums.gs/t156-dev...s-reviews#1519

Devil Mingy sums up his review with these inspirational and motivating words:

"I know what you're saying. It's too harsh to judge a fan-made mod like this. I shouldn't be comparing it on the same scale as Bungie's work. However, for as negative as the review has been, the scale that I'm grading it on is the best compliment I can give it. This map is so good that is deserves to be judged on the same level; the first custom level I have ever played for Halo: CE that feels like it could've been made by Bungie. It may not try to stray from Bungie's established encounter structure, but the fact that it can match and, at times, surpass it is a triumph. Anybody who owns Halo PC should try this map out. "

-PROJECT LUMORIA: EPISODE TWO-

Currently TM is working on Project Lumoria: Episode Two, which will conclude the story-ark that you embarked upon in the first episode.
For episode two we have further improved upon our level design, taking all our experiences and user feedback from our first episode into consideration.

So far we are about halfway in the development process of Episode Two.

We have shown off one of our new encounters in the Halo CE3 event, shown here:

Below are some screenshots showing off Lumoria: Episode Two at an early stage of development:

And here's the rest of them: