07.18.06
Resigned Fatalism
It’s kinda funny how you seem to develop a special brand of resigned fatalism after a few years of working with a major mod team. In theory, we have over 20 people on the team, but I’d estimate only about 8 of them actually do anything. Two of those are composers, one does nothing but quality-approve voice acting right now, and Trestkon mostly just tests the stuff the rest of us churn out and occasionally helps me find BSP errors.
We’ve been at it for a good few months over 4 years, and right from the beginning, people have been vanishing without a trace or explanation. Every time this happens, we just put out a call for somebody to replace them, and generally we’ve been successful thanks to the immensely self-indulgent nature of our mod, and later because we’re so big and experienced. It’s become more difficult for us to recruit new members lately, however, but that’s where the fatalism comes in. We generally try to formulate tentative schedules and deadlines, but we know they’ll never be kept. Without fail, exams, homework, job opportunities, illness, or wives or girlfriends always come in the way and deadlines end up slipping two or three weeks.
But there’s nothing we can do about it. People have lives. Our only option is to shrug and expand the deadline.
Recently, I’ve also begun just taking over somebody’s job when people drop off our radar. Or increasing my own work load when a deadline gets pushed. Shane and I are without question the core of the team now, with Steve and Leo being our most active composers, Trestkon being what passes for our entire QA department, and Chris and Eric trying to finish their respective maps as fast as humanly possible. Of course there’s also the Voice Acting department, which consists of Gelo juggling everybody and their lines and Spaic approving or rejecting the lines we’re sent based on their recording quality.
I have never in the life of TNM been as busy as I am right now. But neither have I had quite so much fun. Sure, it was fun to write the design doc. It was slightly less fun to re-write it twice upon realizing the UT engine couldn’t possibly support it, but it was fun to finally have a working document to distribute among our team (not that anybody ever read it, but still…). It was also fun to write the AI barks, although it became decreasingly fun the more of them I had to write (good God, they just wouldn’t end!!). Writing convos for 3 years was also a mixed pleasure, but editing other people’s maps was a lot of fun and a great learning experience.
But now I get to put everything together almost singlehandedly. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on our third mission, which has an insane amount of detail because the design requires it to respond to many of the choices the player made in the first mission, which takes place in the same locations. Additionally, I’ve been going completely crazy with the responsiveness of the mission itself. I enjoy nothing more than anticipating what the player might do and then making sure the game responds and adapts. Kill an important character? No problem, you’ll get a plan B. Kill the important character there as well? Alright then, plan C! Mess up plan C? Watch a hilarious little failure sequence and quickload.
The bulk of this work is just making sure the triggers in the level, the mission script, and the conversations work together to let you know the game is aware what you are doing. Most of the time, nothing really changes at all if you do things a little differently, but we’ll send you a different datalink message anyway, just to acknowledge your choices. It’s a great effect and very easy to achieve.
This process is really streamlined by me doing it alone. Let’s use a small example: Say there’s a map where you can find an ID card that will let you walk in the front door of a building you have to infiltrate. Picking up the card will make all guards in the building friendly, but if you’re seen attacking one of them, the clearance on your card will immediately be cancelled, and everybody goes hostile again. Since I’m doing all of this myself, all I have to do is place the ID card which is programmed to set a certain flag when picked up, add a function to the mission script that makes everybody friendly when that flag is set, use another function to make them hostile again if the player screws up, and make sure the tags of the guards match the tags used to identify them in the mission script. Then I realize it’d be best to inform the player what’s going on, so I write a couple of datalink messages and make the mission script play them when the player picks up the ID card and if he blows his cover, respectively. This takes a grand total of 20 minutes because I’m working by myself. If I had to ask Shane to do all the mission scripting and Phasmatis to implement it in the map itself while I wrote the conversations, it could easily take 10 hours including waiting for Shane to get online because he lives in Australia.
So that’s the best reason for me to put the levels together on my own. But more importantly, it’s just much more fun for me, knowing that although Phasmatis created the map in the first place and Shane set up the functions that I’m using in the mission script, I made it all come together and my work is what enables the game to respond to the actions of the player.
I can’t wait to do this stuff for a living.
