It’s been six weeks since the infection began; the Survivors have made their way to California and are enroute to an extraction point when their bus crashes at the beginning of an expansive bridge. The quartet are forced to continue on foot without knowing they are heading to a dead-end and ultimately their doom. How long can they hold out?

The Cold Springs Bridge, a survival map available at L4Dmaps.com, has been released. Simply click “Download” and open the containing ZIP file. Once downloaded, installation is as easy as double-clicking the VPK file or dragging it to your left4dead/addons folder.

I’m very happy with the way this has turned out and look forward to building more survival maps in the future. There are many I’d like to thank, most notably: Mobilla, Luigi30, thedaian, Irish Taxi Driver, Rectus, Blazing Ownager, everyone on the Valve SDK forum and everyone in the SDK thread at Something Awful.

Valve has, most unexpectedly, released the official SDK this week, officially titled Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools. The SDK is still in beta, but we had a lot of fun tearing it open and playing with all the goodies inside nonetheless.

The updated version of Hammer still feels like the same ol’ Hammer we know and love. It has been redesigned, though, specifically for Left 4 Dead campaings, versus, and survival map editing. One of my favorite new features is that, once the model files are loaded, they stay loaded during a session. The SDK also comes with tons of example files to help newbies (such as us) get started. Read more

It’s hard to tell, but work behind-the-scenes continues at a rapid pace. The first level, entitled The Suburbs and which takes place amongst the sprawling McMansions of modern suburbia, is making some decent headway. The layout of the house is complete, though exterior detailing needs to be finished up. The interior is missing a few textures in doorways and windows, but it is otherwise finished. Read more