Where to start?

[Khyrpa]

There's this one great thing Your Computer is doing:
http://www.frictionalgames.com/forum/thread-10798.html

Then if you want to make great stuff with the level editor, here are some good ones:
http://wiki.frictionalgames.com/hpl2/tut...tutorial_1
http://wiki.frictionalgames.com/hpl2/tut...tutorial_2


Also some tips for level editing:
1. Try to create interesting rooms with the limited amount of props you have (unless you can model more yourself). Use different wall models i.e. broken ones to mix up the repetitiveness of defaults and avoid extremely illogical layouts (its hard to notice that stuff in games though so its not that important).

2. Rotate, move and scale objects randomly to give a natural feeling (examine the room you are in, most likely everything is placed randomly around, not in like a grid formation).

3. Add just lots of different stuff! There are several folders in which there are some random props that you can place around, both in static objects and entities, from debris to furniture and cobwebs (cobwebs shine in dark and look dumb without lighting btw).

4. Pay attention to lighting and read the wiki lighting tutorial! Use different sources of light in maps to break repetitive use one light color. If frictional wouldn't have had various lighting, but only had brown dungeons with torchlight, the atmosphere would have suffered a lot!

5. Particles give something great to areas. They give movement and that can make an area feel living. Don't overdo particles though, keep performance in mind! Always tweak the color (alpha sets the transparency), position and FadeDistance to your liking. Particle Fog's glitch kind of if they are too close to the ground and the player can clearly see that they are an 2D image spinning in the players view. In real life you can't see dust/fog without light, and the color of the light that illuminates the dust sets the dust color, keep that in mind.

6. Break repetitive patterns of floor planes and what not with decals. Decals work weird sometimes, not going into a wall how you'd like them to. A way to overcome that is to place them somewhere where they work, rotate them properly and move to the place where you want them to be. Then when you start to examine them in more detail, you will notice that tweaking the Y- Scale in General options can reduce the amount of triangles they have and give more precision to their placement. Again use different color values and sizes to make interesting decals.

7. Test your areas out inside the game! If you want to give players your best; polish things out and make sure you like what you see. If you put your time to it, there is no reason why your story couldn't look as polished as the dark descent itself.

8. Billboards... They're there just so that you can spend a lot of time tweaking minor things!

Or in short:
1. plan out your area with gameplay (or just wing it)
2. create the layout
3. decorate
4. box light
5. preferably 1 spot light with shadow
6. rest of the lighting
7. particles
(7.5. billboards)
8. decals
9. sounds
10. test and tweak

Spoiler below!

Then some self advertising and a timelapse of how I did one area. The whole thing is uploaded on 4 parts and the scripting done is only for when player lits a lamp (unnecessary stuff):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oKHaJZXPEo

As for the scripting... I think moody levels are more important than scripts


God damn this became a long ass wall of text! Well, I hope someone may find this somewhat useful. There are a lot of custom stories that mess up lighting, have white fogs and dismiss decals completely.