Valve Says That Bonework Didn’t Influence Half-Life: Alyx

Shortly after the Half-Life: Alyx announcement a rumor was born that Valve canceled the show at The Game Awards 2019 because of the Bonewroks release. As it often happens, the story was just a fiction: Alyx programmer and designer Robin Walker told about it in his interview for VG24/7.

“The Boneworks thing is weird. Everyone seems to think that there’s a hidden story there. That’s very confusing to me. I don’t know where that came from. We showed up our game to a lot of people in the years we were working on it.

According to Walker, the strongest inspiration for Valve was not BONEWORKS, but Budget Cuts – it made the developers realize that moving teleports would not be as difficult as it seemed.

As Valve found out, players quickly got used to teleports. Any basic mechanics has a moment when the player focuses on how to do it. This is natural learning process.

But over the time, the player begins to use the action automatically thanks to the muscle memory. And instead of focusing on doing the action, the player focuses on what he is going to achieve with the action, Walker explains.

The teleports influence the way Alyx works but in a good way: Valve tried to fill the world with details so that the player would have an excuse to stop and look around after almost every teleportation. This is the reason why game is so filled up with the information around the player: potential danger, resource to be selected or an interesting piece of location – all of this was created exactly to occupy the gamer’s thoughts.