Post by Alex on Jul 5, 2005 16:57:01 GMT -5
Well, it's 10 days till the big release and i've decided that I want to give everyone an idea of what it has taken to create this mod, the personalities involved in it, and just how much sweat, blood and anxiety, and elation it has created for the people involved in it's creation.
***
On a day in May 2004, I was browsing the PlanetBattlefield headlines looking for information on the latest Battlefield vietnam mods. The game had just been released and me, being the rabid Battlefield fan I was, had decided to get it almost the day it came out.
It was a lot of fun, off the bat. It had slightly better graphics than its predecessor, and a great soundtrack. But it was missing flair. It felt rushed, and sloppy, as if Dice Canada was looking to cash in, and not to push the boundaries of the gameplay too far from what they knew was tried and true.
Accordingly, I was interested in finding mods I could install to improve the gameplay experience of my investment.
Scrolling down the page, one fledgling mod caught my eye. A battlefield mod called "Killing Floor" proposed to change the premise to a page out of the film 28 days later, and pit superhuman zombies against survivors.
www.killingfloor.cjb.net/ (the original site)
I had recently seen, and really loved the movie it was based on, and noticing that they were in need of a team, i decided to fire off an email and apply for a position as an artist.
I had been working that spring with 3d studio max, and my first low poly game models, which I was creating with the hope of being accepted by another Battlefield mod called "Galactic Conquest" based on star wars.
unfortunately, I was turned down , and more than a litle miffed. But that didnt stop me from discovering how to do things like "UV mapping" and texturing, which had up until that point, been things I didnt know outside of their name.
I got an email reply from a fellow named Jack. who was the leader of Killing Floor. he mentioned that they were in need of artists, and when I showed him some of the things I had been working on he was really elated.
For a while I was riding hubris as this impressive modeller who could create weapon models and skins from scratch and grab compliments from my team as well as the commentors on the PlanetBattlefield and FPSCentral (now ampednews) forums and news pages.
A month or so passed, and then it struck me that I would have to do more than create a shotgun and show off screenshots of a level I made for a leaked build of the Half Life 2 Source engine earlier that month (obviously in no way related to KF , but it looked like it COULD have been)
if the mod was going to be realized.
So I started gathering source imagery of London, England.
It's a place i've been before on vacation, and I had some fun making houses and shops and other items that could forseably be used to fill our expansive battlefields.
Everyone was impressed, as usual but I started feeling like I was the only one contributing anything to the project.
Matt was Jack's friend, and he was contributing web design. Jack was handling PR and whatnot.
But outside of that....I was the only artist on the team! We had no coders....no mappers. Nobody who could really get the mod rolling. Killing Floor was vaporware. I began seeing it as this exercise in posting renders on news sites, getting acclaim for my work, and then smashing the work of other mods.
It was going nowhere fast. And The more I began to work with the BAttlefield mapping program, and the awful character animation and code managment tools, I lost all hope that the mod would make it.
As august rolled around, I was really stressed out. I had just been used and fired in a Job for a Toronto TV post production studio without being paid a dime, I was running another job with a real estate consulting agency doing 2d photoshop work which was ebbing away at my sanity with it's monotony, and all I could think of was how GREAT a mod Killing Floor could have been if we had just had a team with the skills to back it.
In an act of (at the time it sure seemed like) frustration and insanity, I decided to scrap the Battlefield engine, and quit the mod.
Killing Floor, as a Battlefield mod ceased to exist in August, and most of the members quit. Matt was frustrated enough by my actions to launch something of an attack on the KF forums . (we sorted things out later) but tensions were pretty high, because most of the team saw that I was the one who was hauling the project.
And I didnt get excitement or elation out of that idea like I once had.
I still loved the idea of Killing Floor, I had this thing for zombie video games and film. It was the atmosphere, or the tension , or all three. I had just finished playing the latest resident evil title for Gamecube, and rather than leave Killing Floor in it's shallow grave, I decided to do the unthinkable
Resurrect it as a one man project on the Unreal Tournament engine.
I had been following a mod for Unreal Tournament called "Out of Hell" which had been able to achieve a similar thing. The visuals I saw on the out of Hell website were nothing short of inspirational. They were grimey, personal, morbid, and they had this pervasive artistic sensibility. As if the creator of the mod was LIVING in this world he was creating, not just making maps.
In short, it looked like the stuff of nightmares, and it was enough to give me hope that I could , using this new engine, achieve a similar thing for my mod.
I bought a copy of the recently released UT2004 in early august, with no intention of playing the core game. The over the top science fiction / gladiatorial gameplay didnt excite me at all, but it was the ENGINE that I saw as a potential powerhouse for bringing my vision to life.
I had fooled around with the powerful UnrealEd map editor / modding toolshop back in the days of Deus Ex, when I had learned the basics making maps for my own enjoyment.
This gave me the edge I needed to hit the ground running with this new project.
And I defintiely had alot of initial success. I imported staticmesh objects of houses from 3d studio max almost at once, in the the game and was able to walk around my creations in real-time. This was something TOTALLY amazing for me to experience, because with Battlefield everything had been renders, or conceptual stuff. Because of the terrible tools, i was unable to really experience was i was creating in the context of the game world.
This thrill managed to stay with me for several months, through a dehabilitating elective jaw surgery, a bad relationship, and my first couple months at the Ontario College of Art and design, and new school, with a whole different atmosphere to accept and acclimatize to.
By December of 2004, a HUGE amount of material was in-game and I was rolling forward with screenshots and promotional wallpapers. I got a new website up, and people started taking notice of the project once again, some of them , fans of the original Battlefield undertaking.
But all was not well...
I had a massive amount of stuff in-game, this was true. But the Unreal scripting language really frightened me. I was no coder, and without someone who could work some magic in this department, KF would stay vaporware, even with it's shiney new wrapping.
I reached a certain point of desperation where I was posing staticmesh zombies and taking artful screenshots of them in-game to trick people into thinking that what they were seeing was actual gameplay.
And, it worked! I got an email from a coder called "Slip" who really loved how KF looked, and joined my MSN circle to start working on the biggest problem I saw facing Killing Floor at the time , the fact that UT2004 did not innately support the reloading of weapons!
In a few short weeks, we had a working reload system for the guns, and all the weaponry had been modified by way of code to be more realistic, and differentiated from the UT weapons they were extended from (this is an unrealscript coding term which refers to building on existing hierarchies in a given codebase)
We were rolling all the way into the new year, and things were really looking up.
But then Slip had to go away on vacation. He said he's be a month ,and then would come right back to the mod. For those of you who've tried to keep up your own motivation levels for a solid month when you have no one else to bounce ideas off of, or work alongside you....you know it's hard. REALLY hard.
I went on the search for another coder. It was all I could do.
At first, I had no real success, but within a month of Slip's departure I got an email from a fellow who called himself "Slinks" and promised to offer assistance to the mod when and if he had free time to put into it.
At first, it was very arms-length. I would drop him an MSN message when something in the codebase stumped me (by this point I was a semi-competent coder myself) and he would give me a fix, or whatnot.
Eventually he started writing actual blocks of code for the mod, and I told him how his work fit into the game. He started taking real interest in Killing Floor not long after, and he worked a HUGE amount on all sorts of the issues Killing Floor had, and the features i envisioned for the release.
Within the space of a month, we had made REMARKABLE progress. Killing Floor had switched gametypes from being a Deathmatch game which pitted "zombie" players against armed humans (and wasnt too fun), to a spinoff of the Invasion gametype which shipped with UT2k4 and allowed a small team of players to fend off nearly endless waves of foes !
It wasn't exactly what I had forseen in the beginning, but it was undeniably good fun, and a real step up from the Unreal variant, because i managed to code in ragdoll physics for my zombies so that when you fragged them they would bounce around in a really satisfying way!
I got back from a party one night and logged onto MSN to ask Slinks how progress was going. We weren't talking long before he dropped the bomb. He strongly suggested that we should drop what we were doing and force a demo release as soon as possible to let people know just what Killing Floor REALLY was.
I am, by nature a perfectionist. And when he suggested this, I might have been appalled. BUt I was riding abit of the hubris that we had going from all the milestones we seemed to be skipping past since he joined, and probably more than a little drunk as well, so I agreed, and we set the date for the first public release of the mod.
When that day came, the reception was UNPRECIDENTED.
a small 64 mb demo with a SINGLE map, a couple of weapons, and not much in the way of variation in enemies....And it seemed like the people who were playing it, loved it!
We posted at Planetunreal, BeyondUnreal. and Moddb about it, and roped in a much larger crowd on the forums than i had EVER seen.
The former team leader, Jack moved into closer communication with me around this time, and it was an exciting moment for the mod and it's developers because of the great reception we found it getting across the board!
I got emails from Wired magazine proposing a feature , PC Gamer UK, moddb declared Killing Floor to be the "mod of the month" based only on it's demo release, and it was the featured file on File Frontier AND Fileplanet for a while.
IN retrospect, choosing to cut the demo loose was probably the best decision we ever made, and demo proposal was the greatest thing Slinks contributed to it .
And then tragedy....
Slinks went off the radar.
He had, up until then, been logging into MSN almost every day and keeping me up to date with what was going on. But his visits became more sporadic, and then not at all.
Total blackout, man....
a month later, i had to declare that our golden boy coder was out of the picture, and look at fiding someone new.
Now in this time, we had picked up two VERY talented mucicians, David and Zynthetic who had amassed a sizeable library of tracks to give the mod a truly unique feel and seal it as a true TOTAL conversion.
Fortunately, the momentum gained from all the features various news sites had run on us, and the press coverage we had recieved yielded a new coder, and an artist!
That coder was Gareth, and he has stuck with the mod since. Like Slinks, he began developing at arms length, by lookiing into problems with his free time, and making clear that while he was skilled in C++ related code, he wasn't very familiar with Unrealscript.
As time ran, he moved closer to the project, and struck achievement after coding achievement, which was not only remarkable from the standpoint that he was new to this form of coding, but that he had to salvage through alot of Slink's old (and very advanced) codework in order to do it!
Dietrich was our new artist, and struck me immediately as a vERY passionate guy. He seemed to really dig the mod, and had a vision for where it could go . I was at first a little reluctant to let another artist take on a role of creative authority with a project that had, almost since it's inception, been my artistic initiative, but he proved me wrong with a series of character models thjat later replaced the antiquated and slapdash zombie meshes of the demo release.
And that about brings us to now.......
We've all been working our ASSES of here to get this thing done, and im gonna go out and buy some fucking champaign the night before the release...You can bet.
It's been a real ride guys, and a real trip.
Thanks for everything!
Salvo
Dietrich
Slip
Slinks
Kritanta
Dave
Zynthetic
Gareth
Kannosis
Jack
Matt
Long Nguyen (ma MAN , CHICKEN PLUS RIBS COMBO!)
Josh
And anyone else i forgot, you know who you are!
;D
***
On a day in May 2004, I was browsing the PlanetBattlefield headlines looking for information on the latest Battlefield vietnam mods. The game had just been released and me, being the rabid Battlefield fan I was, had decided to get it almost the day it came out.
It was a lot of fun, off the bat. It had slightly better graphics than its predecessor, and a great soundtrack. But it was missing flair. It felt rushed, and sloppy, as if Dice Canada was looking to cash in, and not to push the boundaries of the gameplay too far from what they knew was tried and true.
Accordingly, I was interested in finding mods I could install to improve the gameplay experience of my investment.
Scrolling down the page, one fledgling mod caught my eye. A battlefield mod called "Killing Floor" proposed to change the premise to a page out of the film 28 days later, and pit superhuman zombies against survivors.
www.killingfloor.cjb.net/ (the original site)
I had recently seen, and really loved the movie it was based on, and noticing that they were in need of a team, i decided to fire off an email and apply for a position as an artist.
I had been working that spring with 3d studio max, and my first low poly game models, which I was creating with the hope of being accepted by another Battlefield mod called "Galactic Conquest" based on star wars.
unfortunately, I was turned down , and more than a litle miffed. But that didnt stop me from discovering how to do things like "UV mapping" and texturing, which had up until that point, been things I didnt know outside of their name.
I got an email reply from a fellow named Jack. who was the leader of Killing Floor. he mentioned that they were in need of artists, and when I showed him some of the things I had been working on he was really elated.
For a while I was riding hubris as this impressive modeller who could create weapon models and skins from scratch and grab compliments from my team as well as the commentors on the PlanetBattlefield and FPSCentral (now ampednews) forums and news pages.
A month or so passed, and then it struck me that I would have to do more than create a shotgun and show off screenshots of a level I made for a leaked build of the Half Life 2 Source engine earlier that month (obviously in no way related to KF , but it looked like it COULD have been)
if the mod was going to be realized.
So I started gathering source imagery of London, England.
It's a place i've been before on vacation, and I had some fun making houses and shops and other items that could forseably be used to fill our expansive battlefields.
Everyone was impressed, as usual but I started feeling like I was the only one contributing anything to the project.
Matt was Jack's friend, and he was contributing web design. Jack was handling PR and whatnot.
But outside of that....I was the only artist on the team! We had no coders....no mappers. Nobody who could really get the mod rolling. Killing Floor was vaporware. I began seeing it as this exercise in posting renders on news sites, getting acclaim for my work, and then smashing the work of other mods.
It was going nowhere fast. And The more I began to work with the BAttlefield mapping program, and the awful character animation and code managment tools, I lost all hope that the mod would make it.
As august rolled around, I was really stressed out. I had just been used and fired in a Job for a Toronto TV post production studio without being paid a dime, I was running another job with a real estate consulting agency doing 2d photoshop work which was ebbing away at my sanity with it's monotony, and all I could think of was how GREAT a mod Killing Floor could have been if we had just had a team with the skills to back it.
In an act of (at the time it sure seemed like) frustration and insanity, I decided to scrap the Battlefield engine, and quit the mod.
Killing Floor, as a Battlefield mod ceased to exist in August, and most of the members quit. Matt was frustrated enough by my actions to launch something of an attack on the KF forums . (we sorted things out later) but tensions were pretty high, because most of the team saw that I was the one who was hauling the project.
And I didnt get excitement or elation out of that idea like I once had.
I still loved the idea of Killing Floor, I had this thing for zombie video games and film. It was the atmosphere, or the tension , or all three. I had just finished playing the latest resident evil title for Gamecube, and rather than leave Killing Floor in it's shallow grave, I decided to do the unthinkable
Resurrect it as a one man project on the Unreal Tournament engine.
I had been following a mod for Unreal Tournament called "Out of Hell" which had been able to achieve a similar thing. The visuals I saw on the out of Hell website were nothing short of inspirational. They were grimey, personal, morbid, and they had this pervasive artistic sensibility. As if the creator of the mod was LIVING in this world he was creating, not just making maps.
In short, it looked like the stuff of nightmares, and it was enough to give me hope that I could , using this new engine, achieve a similar thing for my mod.
I bought a copy of the recently released UT2004 in early august, with no intention of playing the core game. The over the top science fiction / gladiatorial gameplay didnt excite me at all, but it was the ENGINE that I saw as a potential powerhouse for bringing my vision to life.
I had fooled around with the powerful UnrealEd map editor / modding toolshop back in the days of Deus Ex, when I had learned the basics making maps for my own enjoyment.
This gave me the edge I needed to hit the ground running with this new project.
And I defintiely had alot of initial success. I imported staticmesh objects of houses from 3d studio max almost at once, in the the game and was able to walk around my creations in real-time. This was something TOTALLY amazing for me to experience, because with Battlefield everything had been renders, or conceptual stuff. Because of the terrible tools, i was unable to really experience was i was creating in the context of the game world.
This thrill managed to stay with me for several months, through a dehabilitating elective jaw surgery, a bad relationship, and my first couple months at the Ontario College of Art and design, and new school, with a whole different atmosphere to accept and acclimatize to.
By December of 2004, a HUGE amount of material was in-game and I was rolling forward with screenshots and promotional wallpapers. I got a new website up, and people started taking notice of the project once again, some of them , fans of the original Battlefield undertaking.
But all was not well...
I had a massive amount of stuff in-game, this was true. But the Unreal scripting language really frightened me. I was no coder, and without someone who could work some magic in this department, KF would stay vaporware, even with it's shiney new wrapping.
I reached a certain point of desperation where I was posing staticmesh zombies and taking artful screenshots of them in-game to trick people into thinking that what they were seeing was actual gameplay.
And, it worked! I got an email from a coder called "Slip" who really loved how KF looked, and joined my MSN circle to start working on the biggest problem I saw facing Killing Floor at the time , the fact that UT2004 did not innately support the reloading of weapons!
In a few short weeks, we had a working reload system for the guns, and all the weaponry had been modified by way of code to be more realistic, and differentiated from the UT weapons they were extended from (this is an unrealscript coding term which refers to building on existing hierarchies in a given codebase)
We were rolling all the way into the new year, and things were really looking up.
But then Slip had to go away on vacation. He said he's be a month ,and then would come right back to the mod. For those of you who've tried to keep up your own motivation levels for a solid month when you have no one else to bounce ideas off of, or work alongside you....you know it's hard. REALLY hard.
I went on the search for another coder. It was all I could do.
At first, I had no real success, but within a month of Slip's departure I got an email from a fellow who called himself "Slinks" and promised to offer assistance to the mod when and if he had free time to put into it.
At first, it was very arms-length. I would drop him an MSN message when something in the codebase stumped me (by this point I was a semi-competent coder myself) and he would give me a fix, or whatnot.
Eventually he started writing actual blocks of code for the mod, and I told him how his work fit into the game. He started taking real interest in Killing Floor not long after, and he worked a HUGE amount on all sorts of the issues Killing Floor had, and the features i envisioned for the release.
Within the space of a month, we had made REMARKABLE progress. Killing Floor had switched gametypes from being a Deathmatch game which pitted "zombie" players against armed humans (and wasnt too fun), to a spinoff of the Invasion gametype which shipped with UT2k4 and allowed a small team of players to fend off nearly endless waves of foes !
It wasn't exactly what I had forseen in the beginning, but it was undeniably good fun, and a real step up from the Unreal variant, because i managed to code in ragdoll physics for my zombies so that when you fragged them they would bounce around in a really satisfying way!
I got back from a party one night and logged onto MSN to ask Slinks how progress was going. We weren't talking long before he dropped the bomb. He strongly suggested that we should drop what we were doing and force a demo release as soon as possible to let people know just what Killing Floor REALLY was.
I am, by nature a perfectionist. And when he suggested this, I might have been appalled. BUt I was riding abit of the hubris that we had going from all the milestones we seemed to be skipping past since he joined, and probably more than a little drunk as well, so I agreed, and we set the date for the first public release of the mod.
When that day came, the reception was UNPRECIDENTED.
a small 64 mb demo with a SINGLE map, a couple of weapons, and not much in the way of variation in enemies....And it seemed like the people who were playing it, loved it!
We posted at Planetunreal, BeyondUnreal. and Moddb about it, and roped in a much larger crowd on the forums than i had EVER seen.
The former team leader, Jack moved into closer communication with me around this time, and it was an exciting moment for the mod and it's developers because of the great reception we found it getting across the board!
I got emails from Wired magazine proposing a feature , PC Gamer UK, moddb declared Killing Floor to be the "mod of the month" based only on it's demo release, and it was the featured file on File Frontier AND Fileplanet for a while.
IN retrospect, choosing to cut the demo loose was probably the best decision we ever made, and demo proposal was the greatest thing Slinks contributed to it .
And then tragedy....
Slinks went off the radar.
He had, up until then, been logging into MSN almost every day and keeping me up to date with what was going on. But his visits became more sporadic, and then not at all.
Total blackout, man....
a month later, i had to declare that our golden boy coder was out of the picture, and look at fiding someone new.
Now in this time, we had picked up two VERY talented mucicians, David and Zynthetic who had amassed a sizeable library of tracks to give the mod a truly unique feel and seal it as a true TOTAL conversion.
Fortunately, the momentum gained from all the features various news sites had run on us, and the press coverage we had recieved yielded a new coder, and an artist!
That coder was Gareth, and he has stuck with the mod since. Like Slinks, he began developing at arms length, by lookiing into problems with his free time, and making clear that while he was skilled in C++ related code, he wasn't very familiar with Unrealscript.
As time ran, he moved closer to the project, and struck achievement after coding achievement, which was not only remarkable from the standpoint that he was new to this form of coding, but that he had to salvage through alot of Slink's old (and very advanced) codework in order to do it!
Dietrich was our new artist, and struck me immediately as a vERY passionate guy. He seemed to really dig the mod, and had a vision for where it could go . I was at first a little reluctant to let another artist take on a role of creative authority with a project that had, almost since it's inception, been my artistic initiative, but he proved me wrong with a series of character models thjat later replaced the antiquated and slapdash zombie meshes of the demo release.
And that about brings us to now.......
We've all been working our ASSES of here to get this thing done, and im gonna go out and buy some fucking champaign the night before the release...You can bet.
It's been a real ride guys, and a real trip.
Thanks for everything!
Salvo
Dietrich
Slip
Slinks
Kritanta
Dave
Zynthetic
Gareth
Kannosis
Jack
Matt
Long Nguyen (ma MAN , CHICKEN PLUS RIBS COMBO!)
Josh
And anyone else i forgot, you know who you are!
;D
