LABCREW's Eulogy
- Jun 16
- 4 min read
For those who are not in the know, LABCREW was a short lived BONELAB/SLZ content creation group. It consisted of myself, and my friends Sam, Izzy and at one point Zander. It had a couple of goals. Fun videos with friends, High quality mod creation, and eventually I wanted to do modding tutorials with it but that never ended up happening. In honor of what could've been, I decided that I will be speaking about some of our projects, some released, others not. I already talked about SSB_Tetris at length in my portfolio section so if you wanna give that a peep be my guest.
Stress Gauge
Stress Gauge was our "News" series. Unfortunately, it is quite hard to do a news series based on a company that rarely ever puts out news updates unless they're releasing something. (And it's not like we can datamine BONEWORKS and BONELAB for updates on B-Side Valve style.) I tried to alleviate this issue by making it a Official News/Community News series, but I quickly found myself burnt out from that and the project died shortly after. The first episode was the only REAL episode, and honestly I loved making that. It was fun digging through Patch 5. The second was an interview with Nullnon and UrikaTractor, two modders who quickly became good friends of mine. I hosted an interview regarding their at the time recently resurrected mod project, Void Takeover. I like that one too, but in retrospect a long form interview was not the right path for this type of series. Still, it was a fun experience and I enjoyed doing it.
BONELAB Fusion Videos
These were by far the best and most prevalent videos on the channel. I can't tell you how many times I've played fusion with one of my friends and some stupid bullshit has happened. That is the essence of this series, it was meant to capture those moments in concise, yet entertaining videos. Some of the footage is REALLY old, I think the first one I did was 2 years ago. I had some real good fun doing these, and I honestly might continue the trend of fusion videos like this on my personal channel.
Playlist of all of the fusion videos we made.
8Track
Alright, here's where shit gets really interesting. 8Track was our first project. LABCREW was intended to have lore. Yes, we were self inserting ourselves into the SLZ lore at one point. We had custom models, materials, branding, pretty much everything set for it until one day development for the project just... stopped. I think it was because around that time, SLZ released the grid walls, and 8Track at the time was using ProBuilder. There isn't anything inherently bad about ProBuilder, but you have to know how to use it, and the way we were using it made 8Track very laggy and bad. Also for whatever reason Unity's default light baker did not want to touch the scene, so we used Bakery. It was... less than optimal, and often produced really weird artifacts in the bakes that we were unable to fix half of the time. Eventually I tried starting over from scratch, but that never ended up going as far as the original did. All in all, it was a good learning experience but it was scrapped.
This office entrance was inspired by Black Mesa. It was fun to make something like this. Those pillars on the sides were made by Izzy. She did most of the custom asset creation, including those and the LABCREW sign.
This is the opposite end of the same area. There was a clipboard with some lore on it that swapped multiple places during development. Also, that vending machine was added in a bit later on to replace the second couch
For 8Track, we wanted each member of the crew to have an office that allowed them to get as creative as possible. This was part of Sam's office.
This area is my office. Later on I had the idea of throwing a bunch of old BONEWORKS stuff in here, like a decommissioned Level Pillar and the Zone Tester gun. That never worked well though. I was horrible with porting over assets and none of them looked right at all.
Thinking With Marrow
This was supposed to be our big campaign. It started off as the idea of "Oh, what if we made Portal testing elements in BONELAB so people can use them in mods and stuff?" That quickly evolved into it's own Portal inspired campaign idea. There were many things we experimented with. Sam made some really nice Portal inspired wall panels, and Zander helped a bunch when it came to actual puzzle logic. We even had Evro, the creator of CustomCampaignTools, allow us to use the SDK for the project. I had made a few test maps and there was eventually a first chamber designed, but unfortunately around that time was when I got burned out from BONELAB entirely. Couple that with Zander being given the chance to work on Void Takeover, and our Plastic project no longer being paid for, and the project kinda fizzled out. It's a shame cause I really do think it COULD work. In a perfect world, I'd be able to gather some friends and an actually good chamber designer to pick it up again and do it for real, but that's wishful thinking.
This shows many things. CCT integration, a custom Main Menu, A Debug Scene menu whose logic was ripped from the door menus in the BONELAB Hub, and a simple Chamber Styling scene.
Here was my attempt at making a chamber involving "Light Bridges". It was basic, and there were multiple ways you could cheese it. Also, I forgot the colliders for the bridge. Nice.
Here's an early remake of the first chambers from Portal 1. The idea was that I could put this in a BONELAB Direct or something as a simple teaser thing before we had any actual story content finalized.
Conclusion
LABCREW was an incredible experience for me. It taught me a lot about collaboration and having fun with people while doing it. While itself might have bitten the dynamite a bit earlier than expected, it's spirit will live on beyond the project itself. Rest in Peanut, LABCREW. You were okay I guess.
Oh. You want more? Fine. Here's a playlist of unreleased or hidden footage. Go nuts!