Half-Life: Alyx, Valve’s flagship VR title, came out a time when much of the world was shutting down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike many other games, though, Alyx’s ship date wasn’t impacted. However, a new interview reveals that the Alyx development team only got everything done just in time before they transitioned to working from home.
In an interview recorded back in April, as part of the Game Maker’s Notebook podcast, Robin Walker from the Half-Life: Alyx team at Valve talked about how COVID-19 almost had a ‘scary’ effect on Alyx’s March 23rd ship date. Although the game did end up coming out as scheduled, Walker notes that this was mainly because the team coincidentally shifted from content production to final tweaks and touches a week before stay-at-home orders started to come into effect.
Here’s the full quote:
“We [at Valve] have always tried to be flexible with how people want to work… and working from home, or at work, is an obvious extension of that. And today, so much of what we do is in the cloud and all that sort of jazz, so it’s not a huge deal.
Obviously there’s parts of the project… you know, on the Alyx team, the week we started working from home we realized if we had had to start working from home one week, maybe two weeks, earlier it would have had a really scary effect on our ship date.
Because we just happened to coincide our content lockdown (when we said “alright we’re done making anything, now let’s just fix what we have and ship”), if I remember right, just about a week or two before stay at home orders came.
Actually I guess the stay at home orders actually came a little later. It was a week or two before [that] at Valve people started to say ‘you know, I’m not comfortable coming to work.’ There were a fair few people who started doing that before the actual stay at home orders came about.”
It seems like fans got very lucky that Half-Life: Alyx was scheduled for release on March 23 and not a couple of weeks later.
If you want to hear more about how Valve adapted to working from home and insights into the development of Half-Life: Alyx, you can check out the full interview between Robin Walker and Ted Price, the CEO and Founder of Insomniac Games, on the the Game Maker’s Notebook podcast.
