The team behind the Jurassic Life mod for Half-Life 2 has announced that the Jurassic Park-themed adventure is transitioning to Source SDK 2013.
In practice, this means players no longer required Half-Life 2 to play the game. Jurassic Life will run with nothing more than the Source SDK 2013 engine branch, which is free to download via Steam.
In the latest update for the mod, the team shared as much, cooking up a thematically on-brand ‘Training’ video to mark the occasion and detail many of the features ushered in by this switch.
The mod has existed in some form for over a decade but was shelved back in 2014, only to re-emerge late last year as the team vowed to complete the project with a recruitment drive.
Since then, development has come on leaps and bounds, triggering this shift. In Jurassic Life, players take on the role of Robert Muldoon, a warden tasked with keeping things in order in the dinosaur park located on Isla Nublar.
Aside from growing the number of modders involved in the project, the team has drafted in a full cast of voice actors to bring to life familiar characters from the Jurassic Park world:
NeroScott as Robert Muldoon
Gary Scales as Ray Arnold
CaptainGeorgeVA as John Parker Hammond
DisruptiveGoat (J. Hart) as Gerry Harding
Martin “FeebTube” Brophy as Edward “Ed” Regis
Callum Jarvis-Jones as Daniel Atherton
Spenser Mehew as Dennis Nedry
As the mod creators note, Jurassic Life will remain a non-profit venture and, as such, will be free to play when it launches in earnest later this year. Openly drawing inspiration from the Universal Studios-owned franchise means Jurassic Life has to tread lightly, and the fan-made non-profit approach will hopefully avoid any pesky lawsuits that could ruin everyone’s fun.