A nice big feature for you! It’s been a while since we heard anything from modders Cracked Glass and their Source project Tension. Set in a sci-fi dystopia in a future of global warming and cities half underwater, the standout gameplay mechanic is the way players can fling themselves from building to building with a versatile grappling hook.

The early footage promised the Bionic Commando remake done right, and when we pointed out to Cracked Glass we were very excited about what they were doing, they offered to do an interview with us if we wanted. It’s taken a little longer than everyone expected – the team having hit a bit of a rough spot – but from the sounds of this they’re ready to forge ahead once again. Fingers crossed.

UserCreated: Could you tell us exactly who your team members are?

Alex Soustek, Cracked Glass: Well the team just recently went through a little re-structuring. All the same we have myself, the coder and project lead; then we have a close friend of mine Spencer who is doing the music for the game as well as story composition, and for the longest time Cooper had the entire burden of graphics on his shoulders, but since he recently went away to school he’ll be contributing significantly less. Of course our latest team member Mikkel helps with that by taking the reins of the graphics of our world.

I work primarily on gameplay mechanics and backbone functionality of the game. Spencer works primarily with his MIDI and sits there perfecting an ambience that fits the theme. Cooper now does minor modeling work, but is is responsible for every graphic you see in the early footage. Mikkel goes pretty much insane with models – literally, the rate and quality this guy puts out work is nuts. He has been working for a few weeks now and has about 6 different models prepared with a ton of different skins.

UC: Have Cracked Glass worked on any other significant modding projects before, either individually or as part of a team?

AS: Haha, Cooper and I attempted a modding project like this a few years before and quite simply crashed and burned. Far too ambitious for a first project, and we simply were not up to it yet. Spencer has never worked on a mod before although Mikkel has been known to be pretty active in the modding community lending a hand to quite a few mods/games. So I guess that makes him the most experienced with modding.

UC: Your ModDB page makes it seem as if Tension’s narrative is significant to you, but how significant? Did the mod start as a story idea or a gameplay idea? Did you change the story at any point because of the gameplay, or vice versa?

AS: It actually started eerily close to ‘You know what would be cool? Grappling hooks’. I’m pretty sure the exact sentence was “Dude, how badass would it be if you could swing around a city on grappling hooks?”. So I would definitely have to say the game spawned from a gameplay mechanic – and there have definitely been changes to the story based on gameplay. For instance, water kills you – okay, how do we work that into a story so it’s believable, and other things like that. But as far as gameplay changing for story I’m pretty sure the answer would have to be not yet.

UC: Do you think of Tension as more of a fun experiment or are you trying to do something better than the competition?

AS: The answer would have to be both. It definitely started as an experiment and is still a lot of fun (trust me, development would not continue if it wasn’t) but we found out that we hold ourselves to a very high quality standard and plan to keep that up. Just because we aren’t part of a large company (or paid for that matter) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work hard. Bionic Commando was almost a nail in our coffin – when we heard about it our hearts dropped. We were like “Oh well, it’s been done. Back to the drawing board”. But upon researching it we realized it was too scripted and not focused on grappling nearly enough, and basically came to the conclusion we could do it better – and if it ended up we couldn’t, where was the harm in trying?

UC: Do you see Tension as more of an open-world game, a linear, scripted adventure, or a mix of both?

AS: Definitely a mix of both, because if it was just a free roam world we’d lose the opportunity to put a lot of design and unique locations in – because quite frankly why would we put that sort of design effort into a part of a level where there’s a chance that the player won’t even experience it? I would say the levels will be sort of an “hourglass” design. Starting free roaming, find your own path and eventually slimming down to a single path which houses a cool combo or puzzle and then widens back out again.

UC: Both open-world and linear games have their pitfalls. Have you thought about how to avoid these problems at all?

AS: The plan is to have a linear story path (e.g. not multiple missions to choose from at once) but different ways to complete each mission. Hope that makes sense. Haha, as far as Bionic Commando goes we can’t really have a boundless world – although by just extending level boundaries I think a new level of roaming will be found by the player.

UC: The Source engine is still a popular choice for modders. Were there any particular reasons you picked it? Have its technical limitations affected anything you wanted to do?

AS: The main reason we picked it had to be because of how well we knew it, on top of its flexibility. It was great for rapid prototyping of gameplay due to the large amount of example code provided. Now the levels – if you were to ask me if they were limited, my answer would have to be a capslocked and resounding OH MY WORD YES! I have never experienced as many issues with level creation as I have seen in Hammer; we have had more bizarre errors and crashes of vrad.exe than I can even count. But we just keep on working at it, although how professional games are developed with this is beyond me.

UC: Can you say anything about the look you’re working on for the game?

AS: Well, the hard part about doing this is not emulating Mirror’s Edge, as it really did have an eye-popping scheme that would be immediately recognizable. Although I think as far as our scheme goes it will use a lot of contrast – not between bland and vibrant, but more like run down/high tech, sort of juxtaposing the grimy with the polished.

UC: What are your plans for long-term replay value?

AS: Originally we talked about both separate courses (released as some sort of DLC as and when we finish them) and the single play maps re-packaged. The single player mode may have a post-level screen scoring you on completeness, and we also plan on implementing collectibles (which are still changing too much to release any details) and hopefully some nice achievements (fastest fall, longest swing, etc.).

UC: An awful lot of promising mods never get off the ground, let alone reach any kind of finished state. You don’t have a release date on ModDB. How do you think the work is going? Do you just believe ‘It’s done when it’s done’, or do you have internal targets you’re trying to meet?

AS: Occasionally we set internal deadlines, and I expect to be doing that a lot more now my workload has gone down so much. But as a whole progress usually comes in bursts, and because of this we are definitely operating under “It’s done when it’s done”. To be quite honest, now it’s on to the graphics and design of the world, because the gameplay is very solid and refined. With the tweaks we get from our beta feedback the gameplay may be close to requiring use of the F-Word (“Final” that is, although it is “f$%#ing awesome” as well).

UC: Thanks for your time, and best of luck with getting Tension finished.

AS: Thank you so much for the support!

You can find the ModDB page for Tension here.

Earlier this week, I got a chance to sit down from two senior members from team GraviNULL, and chat to them about how it feels to be behind the best zero-gravity-slingshot-rollerball-deathmatch mod ever.  Also, giant balls of steel.  Oh, and the future of the mod, coincidentally.

Full interview after the jump!

UC: Quick introductions!  Who are you, where are you from, and what’s your background modding and gaming wise?

DuckSauce: My name is Yorg Kuijs, known as DuckSauce on the interwebs, I’m from the Netherlands and my first decent experience (that is with an internet connection capable of downloading something larger than 10 mb) with online games was Unreal Tournament 2004. Since then I’ve continued to like arcade style games like that and when I started modding my goals were set for unique and fun mods, keeping realism and common sense out in favor of being unique and fun! My first modding attempt was an overambitious project, also for Source, somewhere after followed by a would be small scale project called FragOut. About a year and a half year later, GraviNULL was born.

Bekey: I am Blaž “Bekey” Kosi, currently living in Slovenia. Even though I am a few years younger than DuckSauce, I am getting almost the same education as he did. So I might someday be as awesome as he is, follow his footsteps and bring GraviNULL to real-life using NASA technology in 2025. Ever since I got my first computer with an OS older than me, I was fascinated by the level-design of the 2D games I’ve played. I have spent the most time drawing 2D levels into books my father brought me from his job. Already at this age I couldn’t just play games, I had to use my creativity and make concepts for my own games. Years passed and I was still unable to learn how to mod, due to no internet. A year after I finally got sufficient internet connection, DuckSauce helped me start my way in the modding community. Started with beta-testing FragOut and it still continues now with GraviNULL.

UC: Okay, onto more serious topics: GraviNULL – whose idea was it, and how did you come up with such a mad idea?

DuckSauce: GraviNULL was an idea I came up with very shortly after the 0.6 release of one of my favorite SourceMods, JailBreak:Source. I was simply watching a video created by a player and an idea hit me.

I hit up fellow developer, friend and hellspawn Bekey on Steam, with whom I was previously developing a mini-mod called WarBall, which had the idea to use the rollermine from HL2 as a crazy weapon and objective at the same time. I layed out my idea to him and discussed a name and whether I could recycle his idea of using the rollermine into my own idea. He agreed and I started development that same day.

Bekey: The first idea which involved roller-mines used as weapons was WarBall, it would be a normal FPS with one big roller-mine used as a ball to attack enemies and pass it to allies. As always, DuckSauce had to use his saucy game-mastermind brains to get this extra-ordinary idea about hitting each other with balls, in zero-gravity.

UC: What do you do in the development process, and how’s the overall development been going?  You went from start to release of GraviNULL in five or so weeks… a bit hectic?

DuckSauce: Those five weeks have been quite a ride, but the whole process has been kept in check by me the whole time, being the end decider what should be in the first open alpha. Alot of ideas for other gamemodes have been flying forth and back and while good gamemodes are necessary to keep the player interested, keeping just deathmatch is by far the most preferable approach in releasing a mod.

This means you can get your gameplay worked out, instead of making your gamemode and then having to rebuild that because it doesn’t work with your gameplay.

Development for me went very smooth. By simply working my best on the mod and showcasing and pimping it I managed to get the attention of a variety of level designers. Team GraviNULL counts six level designers – it’s alot of people to manage, but it’s been smoothed out by using a program called DropBox, which worked great in sharing things accross the team. My previous experiences with Source have helped alot to get to this point and I also had some very valuable help from another programmer named Biohazard, who gradually also got involved in testing GraviNULL. Although he’s not a developer for GraviNULL since he has his own projects, his advice has certainly helped GraviNULL progress forward succesfully during those five weeks. You also better run when you see him join the server, because he’s probably one of the best GraviNULL players around right now. Also thanks should go to the Jailbreak Team, for sharing their work with the world and Wills for going as far as joining the team and supporting with alot of things, including making the kickass launch trailer, even though he’s bogged down with lots of other stuff to do.

Bekey: I am one of the many mappers GraviNULL has. The overall development goes very smoothly, this team just feels like home, every one of us has known each other for a very long time. For my part, I enjoyed mapping as never before, it was never hectic. Everything got finished up in time without setting deadlines. 

UC: You’re currently working on the “Hazardous” update with Hazard and Puzzle mode – How’s that going? What do we have to look forward to?

DuckSauce: Hazard was going quite well and is 99.999% likely to appear as a new gamemode. Puzzle mode is an experimental singleplayer mode, whether it will make it remains to be seen, it’s not gonna be likely to release with more than 1 map at first. Should the gamemode make it in and be liked, there are plans for co-op as well, potentially with the chance to betray your partner(s), but that’s on a whole new complicated level. The singleplayer mode would have you flying around with your favorite companion ball, to be used as your means of transportation and to solve puzzles with. Maybe you’ll pick up some more ball shaped friends along the way as well.

Hazard mode would be singleplayer and multiplayer, alone you could play in time trial, trying to beat your best times(with Desura support maybe even online stats to compare to your friends) while in the online mode, just getting to the finish first to score the most points is going to be more important, regardless of the time you take getting there.

Bekey: That’s correct, already before the open-alpha release, I have made a proof of concept map. Basically, a straight course with a lot of lethal barriers. All over the map are scattered anchors, which you can grapple and use to maneuver yourself to the finish as fast as possible, while dodging the deadly barriers. The other Hazard map I am currently working on, is much more crooked and changes direction and simultaneously height, too. We’ll see how it works out.

UC: How are you finding the feedback you’ve gotten for GraviNULL so far?  Is there anything that’s really stood out in terms of what people have liked or disliked?

DuckSauce: The feedback has been great. What stood out the most is how easily people seem to be giving up, it’s a whole new gameplay style and getting shot in the face repeatedly by developers probably isn’t helping either. However when we’re playing, we’re more than happy to provide people with some useful tips. The other reason for quitting is boredom, I guess. Deathmatch just doesn’t interest people for too long nowadays and the people that do find no one in the servers and stop trying to find someone to play with. That’s why the new gamemodes will be supporting singleplayer as well, so you can have fun even if the servers are completely dried up.

Bekey: We definitely got a lot of feedback from day one of release. A lot of people have added me on Steam and discussed their suggestions, and as well in-game too, even though it’s too hectic to type. Unfortunately, some were suggesting things which the Source Engine is not capable of, coding wise.

UC: What do you have in mind for the future of GraviNULL?  How far would you like to go with the mod?

DuckSauce: I said “was going quite well” before because I’ve currently put the team on a one week “break”, during that time I’m experimenting with the UDK and trying to see how far I can get gameplay of GraviNULL working with that, it’s been somewhat frustrating digging into this new engine, but I do have some high hopes that I can make it work, by coming Sunday(14 March 2010) I will likely have made a decision.

Whatever is to come in the feature, it’s more going to be focused on the real unique aspect of the mod, the zero gravity and grapple only movement, rather than moving towards objective based modes that can easily turn into a second deathmatch. The movement is for me what’s the most fun and that’s what updates will be focusing on. The puzzle mode is also promising great things, but it’s no small thing so that’ll hopefully develop succesfully slowly over the coming months, taking feedback to improve it and weeding out everything bad before also creating as ambitious as the co-op mode for it.

There are alot more gamemode idea’s and I think eventually some of these may be processed into a “mini-games” type gamemode where you’re in a server with people where you randomly get presented with mini-games you have to clear, since alot of the gamemodes suggested would in my opinion work better in smaller versions thrown at you randomly.

Bekey: Both me and DuckSauce learned how modding works the hard way. Now we are following the basic rules, “Release small, release often!” We may implement every crazy gamemode we can dream off. You never know what a Duck can come up with some day, trust me.You are asking how far I would go with the mod? Real-Life NASA alternate sports game in 2025. That’s all I have to say.

UC: If you had to pick one reason why people should try out GraviNULL, what would it be?

DuckSauce: Because shooting balls at people while grappling around in zero gravity is just something every human should have done once in his/her life! Also not to forget… it has balls of steel!

Bekey: It’s something completely new, and it’s changing gaming, according to Wills. The more people will try it out and play it, the more the game will evolve. And the more it evolves, the more it changes gaming.

UC: Okay, so, out of sheer curiousity, what are your favourite mods out there currently?  Other than GraviNULL :P

DuckSauce: I don’t really have any now, since I’m too busy working on GraviNULL and with school, from my past I’d say Pirates, Vikings and Knights II where ages ago I had crazy fun with alot of e-friends there, also Jailbreak: Source before 0.6, racing around bunny hopping killing everything was awesome, nowadays I spend more time in jail than fighting. Hoping for their new patch to improve the situation, or at least keep me entertained in jail with some mini-deathball. Also from ages ago: Ballmen. It’s dead now but it’s an awesome Source mod!

Bekey: Jailbreak of course, Pirates, Vikings and Knights 2, I tried it the first time at the previous release, it’s golden. And Outpost 16 has the best mapping I’ve seen. My all-time favorite however would be Research and Development.

UC: Any last words/crazy random statements?

DuckSauce: I’d like to thank the Jailbreak team for providing the mapping pack to the world, Biohazard for his awesome coding help and ModDB for their awesome service to mods, Desura is sure to rock even more with more developer control! Lastly, thanks Andrea for inviting me for the interview, it’s good to be able to blabber about the mod without starting the blabbering on my own out of nowwhere !

Bekey: I wish the whole UserCreated team best of luck. I always visit this site – very well written articles which are always easy to read! Thanks for the amusing interview. I’d like to thank everyone who tried or will soon try GraviNULL, you can’t imagine the feeling I had one hour before releasing. Also wish me best of luck for 2025, where I will hopefully defy gravity!

That’s it for now folks!  If you want to try out GraviNULL, you check check out the mod’s ModDB page or just download it.  We’ll see you online!

Oh, look! My feature on Desura has just gone up at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. You should probably go read that. In case you wanted more delightful quotes from the man behind the plan, Scott Reismanis, there were a few bits and bats from my interview that didn’t end up making the edit for the RPS piece. They’re posted below, with a bit of annotation where bits have been chopped about. Read on to find out about how the team are anxious, what the entry criteria for publishing a mod or game are, Scott’s thoughts on Steam and DRM, and how you pronounce the bally thing.

UserCreated: So. More than a year of stealth-working on the project. Excited to have finally unveiled it? Looking forward to launch?

Scott Reismanis: A mixture of excitement and anxiety is what the team of four people felt. On one hand, it was great to finally be able to talk about what we have been working on, and the overwhelmingly positive response from beta users has been fantastic. On the other hand I felt the entrepreneur mantra of “release early, release often” didn’t apply to us, since despite what we say and do, Desura will be compared to Steam, Direct2Drive and GamersGate. Launching an unpolished product wasn’t an option against such established competition, so we wanted to make our first impression last, which lead to the anxiety!

[Talk swings towards the comparisons with Steam. Scott likes Steam, and thinks it's done a great job, but has some reservations. He wants Desura to be more accessible to developers, he says. But will this mean a lack of quality control, I wonder?]

UC: What sort of criteria do you have in place for mods and games wishing to distribute via the service? Do you have the same sort of vetting process as your competitors?

SR: First and foremost, bugs, crashes and unfinished content will not be published. Beyond that our only real criteria is fun. If the game is enjoyable and we feel our community will respond to it, we shall list it. If not we endeavour to be as transparent as possible and help the developers understand what they need to do to get their game or mod on Desura.

[The conversation moves in the direction of Desura's ease of use - it's one-click install and installation wizard features, and so forth. Scott reckons they're both awesome. I reckon it might be even easier to get stuff working than it is through Steam. But I'm still curious as to what Scott's views are on where Desura sits in the market, and whether he thinks people will be accepting of a new digital distribution client.]

UC: Do you see Valve’s client as a direct competitor, or are you aiming at a different audience?  Similarly, do you think people will be happy to make the move from one to the other, or do you expect people will use both?

SR: All of the above, really. Valve is a competitor, and yet I believe there is room in the market for two services. Competition is good for consumers and we aim to provide a legitimate substitute for Steam. In the short term we are shooting for a totally different audience since we have a strong focus on mods and indies, but in the long run I believe we can provide a one-stop-shop for gamers. Desura can work hand-in-hand with Steam, so some users may use Steam to buy games and Desura to get mods and add-ons. That’s fine, we expect that but we also expect a lot to buy games on Desura once they know how easy and enjoyable it is to use. We’ve seen a lot of people complain about another “app” to run in their taskbar, but we have also seen a lot welcome our announcement with open arms. Growing will be slow but our differences definitely justify gamers’ attention.

[I then ask something that has nothing at all to do with mods, but which you might be interested in anyway.]

UC: What’s the deal with copy protection methods? Obviously that’s the big controversial topic at the moment. I assume it’s something on your minds…

SR: That really is up to the game publishers. We have various means available to developers, which they can build into their games to authenticate their Desura customers. The main difference between us and Steam is that Desura can run “silently” in the background and doesn’t need to be open. If they want more – a la DRM – which many of the larger publishers will enforce if we are to release their game, that is up to them to implement into their game and to discuss with us. Like gamers, though, we believe there have to be better solutions out there. After all, it’s the pirates that should be punished, and not the customers.

[We natter about Desura's community focus for a while, and the ways in which the service aims to bring together developers and fan-bases. It sounds rather exciting. We talk about the ways in which it's an evolution of ModDB, and how it synchronises with that website. But something's been bugging me all along...]

UC: Okay, confession time: I’ve no idea how it’s pronounced. De-SUR-a? DE-sura? DE-zura? Seriously, I have no idea.

SR: Three syllables each with a consonant and a vowel is how I pronounce it. So De-Su-Ra. Then again if I say it in a sentence I pronounce it Des-Ura. I’ll have to send you a voice recording.

[Scott has not, as yet, sent me a voice recording. Anyway, it's going to launch in April, but it might not be absolutely finished by that time, and they'll respond to user feedback to tweak and improve it as the months tick on. It's time to round up.]

UC: Anything else you’d like to talk about with regards to Desura?

SR: We welcome ideas and suggestions from gamers and press as well as developers and publishers, so if you want to participate in the beta we are available via support@desura.com any time.

With Off Topic Productions’ ever-persistent plugging-for-votes in this year’s ModDB Mod of the Year awards, I realised I’d never actually spoken to them about their exceptional Deus Ex project, The Nameless Mod.  First released ten months ago and reaching its final version in November, it’s a sprawling, dual-campaigned and completely mammoth piece of work that spawned from a piece of Internet fan fiction into a game that took seven years to complete.

Far from being just a huge mod, it’s also a highly intelligent one too.  It takes Deus Ex’s conspiracy soup and pours it into a big bowl of geek-culture, casting various real-life forum members as characters in the game world, who quip and bond and war like the members of just about every forum you might care to mention.

So, as the team begins its brave venture into the world of commercial game development, I caught up with producer Lawrence Laxdal and project director Jonas Wæver to talk about their work. Lots of words are below.

UC: So. Seven years. Christ. Have you recovered yet?

Lawrence Laxdal: Not really, and I doubt we ever will. After seven years, The Nameless Mod and Deus Ex are pretty well seared into our collective consciousness. We spent that time not only creating The Nameless Mod, but also building a community for Off Topic Productions, one that is now full to bursting with rabid Deus Ex fans. Of course, we’re rather happy having such a solid launching point into our future projects, so I suppose we don’t really want to recover!

Jonas Wæver: Yeah, we want to keep the mod and our community alive. After all this time, it would be a shame to just release the mod and then act like nothing happened. We still have things to do in terms of promoting or supporting the mod while we gear up for new projects.

UC: So it’s not a case of “The Nameless Mod is done, let’s crack on with something else,” then? Because I know you have a new project in the works…

Jonas: We’re definitely excited to work on something else, but we’re very proud of The Nameless Mod, so it’s not like we just wish we didn’t have to think about it ever again, no.

Lawrence: We are, however, done with patches at this point.  When The Nameless Mod released – what was it, ten months ago now? – we definitely weren’t happy with the state of it.  Four patches later we’re satisfied that it delivers the polished experience that we always wanted, and now we’re mostly focusing our energy on PR.

UC: I wasn’t around at the start of The Nameless Mod’s development. Well, I mean, I was alive. Just not around on that scene. So I don’t know all the details behind its conception, but I’m assuming it began as a quaint in-joke and just spiraled out of control?

Lawrence: That basically sums it up.  Although, technically, I guess it spiraled out of control, and then somewhere around the four-year mark we managed to make it spiral back into control, and eventually compress it down into the much more coherent, accessible thing it is today.

Jonas: It started as a single mission, but once the team grew from just Lawrence to around 20 people, the scope of the mod grew as well. I remember there was a point when we sort of stopped the brainstorm to ask if people would prefer a small mission created quickly or a large mod that would take a few years to finish, and most contributors and hangers-on preferred to see the concept used for something larger. I don’t think we disappointed them.

UC: And, of course, that allowed you to really capitalize on the ideas of the setting. But you always seemed a little apologetic about it, and I fail to see why. It starts as that quaint in-joke, but expands into this proper, convincing place, using internet fan communities as a sort of metaphor for wider society. It’s clever stuff, y’know? Yet I’m sure I’ve seen you publically call it “lame”…

Jonas: We’ve always been very unsure of how The Nameless Mod would be received, because it was originally meant for a very small audience. And you have to understand it used to be much more exclusive than it ended up by the time we released – we really did a lot of work in the end to invite people into our setting and introduce our characters properly. Being in on it all along, we had no idea if we’d succeeded in opening it up to a broader audience, and though most people seem to settle into the mod pretty quickly, we’ve had a lot of negative responses as well, especially from people who haven’t played the mod and aren’t inclined to do it because they think our concept is stupid.

Lawrence: It’s also one of those things where you get so close to the project that it’s hard to see it from the outside.  We did try, but it was always hard to be sure.

Jonas: Personally, I think a lot of it is down to the stigma of community fan fiction. Many large Internet communities have these stories created by the members, for the members, and starring the members, and usually they’re really bad because they don’t have to be good – the appeal is the chance to be part of a narrative, even if it’s a terrible narrative. That’s what TNM started as, and it’s what we’re still associated with, though we’ve worked hard to break out of that.

UC: Modding for Deux Ex. Very few have touched it. It’s a bugger to work with, right?

Jonas: It can be quite a mess, yeah.

There are multiple reasons for that. One is that the game is very complicated, with many game systems interacting with each other, and that’s really difficult to juggle – to balance those systems correctly against each other. I think most Deus Ex modders want to make mods that resemble Deus Ex, otherwise it’s easier to start with a more straight-forward game like Half-Life so you can just build your own systems on top of those bare-bones FPS mechanics.

Lawrence: The tools are old and fairly buggy, which is a pain, but one that you learn to work with.  The bigger issue is that when you make something with the Deus Ex tools, people expect Deus Ex quality and freedom.  Most people realize that and either start projects that are too ambitious to complete, or end up getting frustrated by how much work it actually takes to create a Deus Ex style environment.

UC: Well, that’s what I was going to bounce into. Very few professional teams attempt anything like this, even. There’s Deus Ex, its sequel, Bloodlines, and… well, no, that’s it.

Jonas: I think that’s a large part of why some players do decide to give it a shot – because games like Deus Ex don’t come along very often, and if you’re part of a niche you feel is underserved, it makes sense to try and serve yourself, so to speak.

Lawrence: There are so few of these games because it’s not the easy money maker, I think.  Any time you create an open-world environment and enable huge amounts of freedom for the player, you’re going to have to spend an insane amount of time creating content that most players will never see.  Thankfully, we weren’t worried about overtime or project budgets!

Jonas: Having actually released something in this genre, I don’t blame professional studios for not making more games like this. It’s a ludicrous amount of work, and you’ll tend to spend so much effort designing and balancing all your complicated game systems that you won’t be able to deliver as polished a product as your competitors who make more directed experiences.

If you’re making a linear game, you know what the player should be doing, so you can spend your time making sure the player does that and that nothing breaks when the player does it. If you’re making a more open game, and especially if you’re trying to develop emergent gameplay, the amount of possible actions you have to predict and test and debug can become unmanageable very quickly.

UC: The Nameless Mod was announced as finished in November. You’ve obviously fixed a lot of things in the meantime, but if you had infinite time and resources, is there anything you’d go back and completely change?  Me?  I’d tweak the space station ending to be less shooty…

Lawrence: That would certainly be one of the things we’d change.

Jonas: I would redesign the Downtown and Corporate city hub levels to be significantly smaller.

It was a hard balance for us to strike because we originally tried to make it a single level, but the engine couldn’t handle a level that large, so we split it into three maps. I think that may have been too much for the amount of content we managed to produce, however. There’s not enough empty space to be embarrassing, I think, but there’s just a lot of walking around involved. Maybe we would just have to redesign those maps so the locations you visit a lot (the faction headquarters, the bar, etc.) were closer to each other and to the metro stations.

I think the space station is fine though – it’s hard to handle it with stealth, but it should be possible, especially if you have the cloak aug – and at that point in the game, why wouldn’t you have the cloak aug if you’re going for a stealthy play style? The enemies in the space station have the same AI as everyone else. They just don’t speak their mind all the time.

But then I’m biased.

UC: I think my problem with the space station was that it was suddenly all-out action, and while you could play it stealthily, it was this huge, vast thing structurally, and I found that unless I was just ploughing through with a gun, I was getting lost. But that’s probably just me being terrible at games.

Jonas: Ah that’s interesting, I think that’s the first actual explanation I’ve read of why the space station is more shooty. I’ll take that up for consideration!

Oh, one more thing, actually. I would sit down and figure out exactly how the internal logic of the setting works. We never did that, and it really shows once in a while, there are some weird holes in the consistency.

Lawrence: Wizards did it.

UC: Where do you think modding’s at generally, across all games? A lot of people seem to be going for smaller-scale stuff, which is about as far away from where TNM is pitched as it’s possible to be.

Jonas: I think going for something smaller-scale is a supremely good idea.

Lawrence: The modding scene right now it absolutely on fire, and getting hotter all the time.  Most mods are indeed on a smaller scale than The Nameless Mod, but it’s the ideas that are being thrown about that make things so interesting.  I really love all the experimental mods we’re starting to see, and with the mainstream game media now giving top mods so much coverage it really encourages people to churn out their outside-the-box ideas.

Jonas: I get the impression a lot of modders these days are aspiring game designers and students who need portfolio pieces, whereas it seemed like there were more pure hobbyist modders back when we started – possibly because the learning curve was easier when the games were a bit less technologically advanced.

The Nameless Mod is a lot like a proper game, and its gameplay and aesthetics are pretty close to Deus Ex, but I think it’s more interesting, and better for your portfolio, to make something completely new – and you don’t need to create anything big to do that.

UC: And in terms of mods like your own, do you think there’s a future in that?   Deus Ex is a decade old now.  Soon it’ll feel like an engine that’s just not workable in the modern gaming climate.  Is that part of the reason you’re going into standalone development? Or do you just fancy a slice of the big bucks…?

Lawrence: We plan to be millionaires within six months, and own our own islands within the year. That’s how the indie gaming scene works, right?

Jonas: I must admit, it’s a bit of a bummer to release something as huge as The Nameless Mod and get all that great feedback and make a pretty good splash, and then to be completely unable to make money off of it.  It’s just as much a motivation to just move up to the next level creatively though, now that we’re accomplished modders, it’ll be a whole new challenge to make a game from scratch, something which is completely our own creation rather than piggy-backing on one of the great classics.

Lawrence: I do think there’s a future for mods like The Nameless Mod, but they’ll just be few and far between.  It requires an incredible amount of dedication from a lot of people.  Plus a lot of luck.

Jonas: Yeah, I don’t know about Deus Ex mods specifically. I don’t want to discourage Deus Ex modding too much, especially because I know of several that are still alive, and some even seem to be fairly close to complete, and I don’t want to sit here and tell them they should quit because Deus Ex’s time is up. I think we’re approaching the point where it doesn’t really pay off to start a new Deus Ex mod anymore though, because by the time you’re done, people will have to play your mod in an emulator and you’ll only get the players who are absolutely serious about being okay with ancient graphics.

There are other, newer games with better editing tools to work with, and if you have good enough programmers and enough time on your hands, you may be able to make something out of a straight FPS game that tickles the same bones as Deus Ex did.