The Factory Heist (12 Sep 2020)

[thebigh]

I'm pleased to announce my first ever mission, The Factory Heist. If you're in the mood for a short but challenging and intricate mission I'm confident you'll have some fun with this.

 

Title: The Factory Heist

Short description: Workers at a factory have unearthed a buried building beneath. Sneak in, find a way down there, and loot it for antique treasure!

Filename: factoryheist.pk4, now also available on the in-game downloader

Author: thebigh

Date of Release: 12 September 2020

Version: 1.0

EAX: No

Dark Mod Version: 2.08

Content warning: No spiders, no undead, no rats, just one skeleton hand

Many thanks to my beta testers: Cambridge Spy, Vanished One, Wesp5, PranQster. Be sure to read the little book in Lukas Dunbar's office

 

Screenshot:

Spoiler

 

Help, I can't reach the loot goal:

Spoiler

•  There's more loot in the underground structure than you might think. Look carefully!
• A bit of climbing in a hard to reach corner will yield a hidden gemstone
• There's more in the crates on the factory floor than just levers
• Check the readables in the foyer thoroughly for directions to a very valuable piece

 

 

Edited September 13, 2020 by thebigh
add some clues for hard-to-find loot

[Bienie]

Congrats on the release! Looks promising! Will be looking in to this one very soon, probably tonight.

[grayman]

Congratulations!!

[Amadeus]

Congrats!! Looking forward to giving this a go

[Jedi_Wannabe]

Congrats on your first release!

[nbohr1more]

Congratulations!

This is now in the mission database and in-game downloader.

I also added a wiki entry.

[Bienie]

Just finished it. A good little mission you've made! The setting feels quite unique, and the factory, while small provides a lot of interest and challenge. Patrols were tight and brutal on Ghost difficulty, which is good though some of their routes bordered on unfair.

the area around the storeroom/bathroom since the guard will check every room thoroughly with no place to hide.

The loot goal was also very challenging. I only found 187 organically over my 30 minute playtime, and some of the pieces were incredibly hard to find. I suppose that's fair enough on the highest difficulty.

I enjoyed exploring the buried house area, though it seemed a bit too modern to really have been lost, forgotten and built over, but I guess who's to say how fast the architectural techniques change in the TDM universe. I also thought that some of the texture seams seemed a bit to harsh in the mission with flat surfaces and straight lines. Adding a few brushes to cover those hard transitions usually helps make it softer on the eye. In general I enjoyed the brush based geometry though!

[thebigh]

10 hours ago, Bienie said:

Just finished it. A good little mission you've made! The setting feels quite unique, and the factory, while small provides a lot of interest and challenge. Patrols were tight and brutal on Ghost difficulty, which is good though some of their routes bordered on unfair.

  Reveal hidden contents

the area around the storeroom/bathroom since the guard will check every room thoroughly with no place to hide.

The loot goal was also very challenging. I only found 187 organically over my 30 minute playtime, and some of the pieces were incredibly hard to find. I suppose that's fair enough on the highest difficulty.

  Reveal hidden contents

I enjoyed exploring the buried house area, though it seemed a bit too modern to really have been lost, forgotten and built over, but I guess who's to say how fast the architectural techniques change in the TDM universe. I also thought that some of the texture seams seemed a bit to harsh in the mission with flat surfaces and straight lines. Adding a few brushes to cover those hard transitions usually helps make it softer on the eye. In general I enjoyed the brush based geometry though!

 

Thanks for the encouraging feedback. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I agree with you about the stark lines of the factory and occasional mismatching seams- this is something I'm aiming to do better in my next mission.

The guard you mention is very thorough, but he also has a very long patrol route so the observant thief should be able to avoid getting cornered.

A few people have mentioned how hard the loot is to find so I'll put up a few hints in my OP.

[roygato]

Finished this one last night. Went with Ghost, despite the no-knockouts, since I figured it would be a very small mission. Which it was, but as mentioned, potentially quite tricky. I loved the verticality, and the fact that it was super easy to climb your way up to the top floor, and then drop back down. Especially since I ended up needing more running back and forth than I would've ever imagined, and I couldn't be bothered to be very sneaky about it.

As far as loot goes

Spoiler

I didn't find all of it, but enough to pass the objective. That said, the tiny lock-box atop the shelf was a pain in the ass. Clever that you had to carry something to stand on to reach it, but god damn if it didn't require some serious wiggling to find a position that would allow me to frob the loot. I even carried a second box for more reach, but that helped none. 

Other than that

Spoiler

It took far too long for me to find the damn key for the box in that one guy's office. Seriously, the first time I found it I thought it shot out from space and landed on the floor. I think a guard outside must've smacked it through the wall and made it bounce around the room. Afterwards I died and had to try and find it all over again, which I thankfully did.

Obviously not a long mission, but for a first effort it's a decent one. Considering the ease of movement, you could even make it actually require ghosting, so that people like me don't just make mockery out of stealth, but that's neither here nor there. Good job in any case.

[thebigh]

Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad you enjoyed it.

30 minutes ago, roygato said:

As far as loot goes

  Hide contents

I didn't find all of it, but enough to pass the objective. That said, the tiny lock-box atop the shelf was a pain in the ass. Clever that you had to carry something to stand on to reach it, but god damn if it didn't require some serious wiggling to find a position that would allow me to frob the loot. I even carried a second box for more reach, but that helped none. 

Spoiler

Heh, in the earliest version of the mission there were only two movable crates: one under the staircase on the shop floor, and a smaller one in the janitor room next to Snoad's office. Those two crates are the exact right size to let you reach the lockbox. But it turns out you don't need crates at all. It's possible to unlock and loot the box just by jumping and frobbing.

As for the key, I made it small because I figure it makes no sense for a little jewel box to be unlocked by a key the size of a ping pong racket.

 

[Cambridge Spy]

Here's my playthrough video of The Factory Heist:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SagaKf88nA

Edited September 15, 2020 by Cambridge Spy

[thebigh]

1 hour ago, Cambridge Spy said:

Here's my playthrough video of The Factory Heist:

That was cool. It was fun for me to watch a playthrough by someone with a completely different playstyle to my own.

[lowenz]

Straight from Thief 2 warehouse? All those red bricks!

Edited September 15, 2020 by lowenz

[joebarnin]

Nice mission! Played on Catburgler (middle). I didn't do any knockouts anyway. 283 loot.

Spoiler

 

Nice loot placement, it took a while to find many items. The jewelry box was a pain - hard but fair. The guards were just right - not too many of them, but with the lanterns they were tough. I manged to excite one of the guards enough so that he dropped the lantern, which was good because his future patrols were lantern-less. But, he put the lantern down in an awkward place that made the rest of the mission tough. Fair enough! I liked the layout of the factory, lots of verticality and noisy steps. A nice feature of the mission was that you had to get the generator started to accomplish the main objective, but that turned on lights and made getting around the factory tougher.

I loved the ruins, especially the tilt effect. I don't know how much work it was to build it, but I'd love a full-sized mission where much of it are ruins like that.

My only criticism is that the factory floor and some of the rooms were pretty 'generic'. Not a lot of stuff, or variety. A minor quibble.

 

Congratulations and good work!

[kingsal]

Congrats! Very much looking forward to playing this one.

[Spyrano]

Short, but sweet. The small quantity of mostly low value loot definitely brings me back to Thief 1, and the warehouse itself has Thief 2 vibes. Good first mission, thanks! 

[thebigh]

Spoiler

Quote

I loved the ruins, especially the tilt effect. I don't know how much work it was to build it,

The ruin was a massive pain to make, especially the cracked floor in the middle. The principle isn't complicated: just build the house grid aligned and then rotate it. But somehow this caused a LOT of leaking and I had to do a lot of ugly brush work to seal it. Connecting it to the rest of the level was annoying too; the clipper tool was hard to align and using CSG subtraction on tilted surfaces is disastrous.

 

Thanks for playing, and I'm glad you liked it.

[MrMunkeepants]

In the factory I had to use CambridgeSpy's walkthrough to find the lockbox key; I had to noclip to actually pull the prize out of it.

The tilted ruins are very nice! I hoped they would be more extensive. It would be nice to see older, T1-style architecture under the current City levels 

[thebigh]

3 hours ago, MrMunkeepants said:

In the factory I had to use CambridgeSpy's walkthrough to find the lockbox key; I had to noclip to actually pull the prize out of it.

You can stack crates, or even just jump & frob.

[Thiefette]

Congrats on the release of your first mission, finished it up yesterday. 

Spoiler

This was a bit tricky with all the guards and the lanterns but once I figured out their patrol pattern it got a bit easier. I had difficulty seeing some of the keys at first especially the one on the floor in the top office, ran right over it a few times before spotting it. And took me a few min. to notice the key for the generator but I think this was because I wasn't playing my usual way so was back and forth hiding a lot. lol And thanks for leaving one room that wasn't checked - needed a stash spot. I'm glad for the readable in the front office as I hadn't even noticed you could get up there. Managed to find everything so that was good. 

Thanks for all your hard work. 

[NeonsStyle]

Congratulations on the release.

Edited December 6, 2020 by NeonsStyle

[datiswous]

So I just finished this mission on medium difficulty:

Positive points:

• Short text pieces in briefing, to not get a text wall
• Some lighting in the mission is actually really nice
• Suburban house scene is quite well made.

Negative points:

• When the guards get into search mode, they stay in it very long.
• The guards constantly say the same things over and over again.
• The footsteps of the guards are quite loud on the metal floor which gets a bit annoying over time.
• No EFX

Edited April 19, 2022 by datiswous

[Skaruts]

I was curious about this mission for being just 1Mb. Had a bit of free time to play something today, so I went with this one.

Completed in Ghost, not full loot (though I ended up cheating to find JD's key, because I'm a blind dummy). 

 

On 9/12/2020 at 10:10 AM, thebigh said:

Content warning: No spiders, no undead, no rats, just one skeleton hand

That's a bit of a spoiler.  I wish I hadn't read it before I got down there.

The only two things that bothered me a bit were that the guards all have the same voice, and that there's too many loot coins. I'm lousy at noticing loot coins in random places.

The underground house is pretty damn cool. Very nicely crafted.

I nearly got caught at the beginning. I lockpicked JDs door and got in right as the guard turned the corner and commented on the open door. I somehow improvised in a room I had never seen before. I turned off the lamp and hurried behind the desk. Turns out it worked, his lantern didn't reach me there.  He never saw or heard me, so he just left and said "must've been rats".

Edited February 1, 2024 by Skaruts

[thebigh]

Thanks! Glad you liked it.