So who hasn't seen the fallout fan made Postworld yet? If not, I managed to snag an interview with Alexander of deVoidStudios to shed some light on the topic.
Me: Can you tell us a little about what Postworld is? Is it a fan-sequel to Fallout, or something completely different?
Alex: Well it started out as a crazy idea for a Crysis mod. Like so many other Fallout fetishists before us, one day we just woke up and said '...hell, how hard can it be to remake Fallout?'. Thinking back, it seems we were the only ones who thought it would be easy. Of course after a while it became clear that it was not going to be easy at all. At some point we were ready to call it quits but, then we discovered Unity 3D.
Unity helped us create something that many people found inspiring. Later we were approached by quite a few people, some from the Fallout modding community, others were just players who loved the original Fallout games as much as we did. The enthusiasm rush din't last long though, eventually some left due to their real life commitments, others due to 'artistic differences' and some just disappeared.
We also had a few of those paranoid '...Bethesda will lynch us for this...' moments. Eventually we decided that the best way forward was just to drop the whole remake idea.
As exciting as it was...I don't think we would have lasted long enough to see it through. It was just too much work that somebody did a decade ago...and they did it better than anybody else ever could.
Slowly we started working on our own universe and after about a year of painful debates and arguments I can honestly say that when we are done with the story...it's going to be great. Right now it's just a lot of really great ideas mashed together in a big text file.
So, Postworld is not a fan-made sequel to Fallout, it's a whole new game. But this does not mean that we are out to reinvent the wheel. Postworld will have a true turn-based combat system. It will have a character creation and management process similar to SPECIAL. We will also have Perks and Traits of sorts. Although we are planing to have a Skill system that is a lot like the one in Fallout the way players increase their proficiency in a particular skill will be very different. There will be lots of other similarities and differences, of course, but it's still too early to talk about that. Finally, it's not going to be a FPS...I though I would mention this just in case anyone is still wondering
Me: It looks like a very professional and organised project. How many people are working on it?
Alex: It's almost organised. As much as we tried to avoid falling into the same traps most development teams do, we haven't managed to avoid them all. One of the big problems is design documentation. This one just doesn't want to go away, but we will get it done eventually. The hard part is to figure out what features we want to be in the game. Now we are just collecting ideas and working out some general gameplay concepts. Once we run out of ideas we will go over the list and see what goes into the first episode of the game and what will come later.
Team wise we are currently down to 4 core members, and about the same number of part-timers. We also got some folks that we outsource specific tasks to, Concept Art for example.
And as far as professionalism is concerned, to be honest the only reason why our early tests look this good is because everyone on the team poured their heart and soul into their work. If it wasn't for their dedication none of this would be possible. And wait until you hear our music tracks, they are just something else. No really, our composer had a death metal band at some point in his colorful career.
Me: How long have you been working on this project, and how long do you think it will be before we will see a finalised product?
Alex: We started working on Postworld in the middle of 2009 but we only moved to the Unity engine this January. For the better part of this year we were learning the new IDE and it's middleware components. Now with the recent release of Unity 3 we will need to spend some time to get familiar with all the new stuff that they added...there is a lot of new stuff.
It's very hard to say when we will be done with it. But, what I can say is that most likely we will go for a two year development cycle. The reason I'm saying this is because, if we just let ourselves to get dragged into a lengthy development process we risk not delivering anything at all.
At least like this we will have enough time to work on all the major engine components, and get some content done. Working in short bursts will let us deliver the game in small episodes. Probably 8 to 10 hours of gameplay in each episode, it's not much but with current team size I think this is the most that we can reasonably expect to deliver.
Another thing worth mentioning is that, we don't plan to do any serious development work on Postworld in 2011. We will continue to work on the story, characters, combat and other subsystems, as well as the models but not on the engine as such.
The reason being is that we are currently working on a small arcade game that we plan to release in the next 6 months or so. We set some money aside to fund its development. There are some Unity 3 middleware components and add-ons that we need to buy, team salaries to pay as well as payments for work that we outsourced.
If we are lucky the game will sell and pay for itself, hopefully it can even make a small profit so that we could make a few DLCs to bring in some extra cash.
We will need a lot of money to finish Postworld, so like I said, if we manage to turn a profit on the arcade game it will help us finish Postworld faster.
Me: There are some people on this board who fancy themselves as developers (cakester can suck my balls haha), could you shed some light on what it is like to work with Unity 3D? And how does it compare with other engines you have used in the past?
Alex: It's like nothing else! There is no tool out there that even comes close to Unity. Period!
I personally worked with Source a bit, and we toyed with CE2 at the beginning of this project. Don't get me wrong they are amazing engines...with crappy tool sets. Many people will disagree with me but personal preferences aside Unity is a work of art. Ok, I'm addicted to it so don't ask me to be impartial.
Granted it may not have all the AAA features that the other engines have, and it may not satisfy every graphics whore out there (I'm one of them) but there isn't a single IDE out there, to my knowledge, that can compare to what Unity has to offer in terms of usability, speed, and just pure joy. I mean you start it up and in the morning and it just makes you smile, it's fast, easy to use, and it's a bloody steal. Unlimited commercial licence for like 1500$ is an amazing deal.
A bit of a fanboy rant but that's just how I feel.
Me: Postworld is obviously inspired by the earlier Fallout games, something people like me are happy to see. What are your thoughts on the direction Bethesda has taken the series in terms of gameplay style and genre?
Alex: I hate it. Really I do. But kudos to Bethesda for seizing a good investment opportunity.
The game itself is fine, it has all the things a gamer of this generation can expect to find in a mainstream title. Guns, boobs, explosions, some more explosions, mediocre voice acting. But, Fallout is more than just a game...at least to us.
It was not meant to be a FSP, immersion has nothing to do with the camera perspective. I mean remember that pilot that you find in the Broken Hills mine in Fallout 2. When I spoke to that dude my imagination went wild, I pictured his plane, how he crawled into the cave, what his clothes must have looked like. All that from a few lines of text, that's all it took for me to feel immersed and amazed.
So as a fan of the original Fallout games I'm not happy with what I saw in Fallout 3. However, to be completely honest as an aspiring game developer I must admit that despite the fact that Bethesda did not succeed in creating a decent Fallout sequel they certainly succeeded from the financial point of view.
Me: It's very obvious a lot of hard work has gone into this project. What is the motivation behind it and what has prevented it from reaching a similar fate of projects such as Fan Made Fallout?
Alex: Every person on the team has his or her own dreams. For many motivation comes from the simple fact that they are part of something exciting and interesting, perhaps even from the fact that it's big, huge and scary. I don't know really, I can't speak for the rest of the team on this particular topic.
For me personally motivation comes from knowing that I get to work on something that always fascinated me as a kid, and continues to fascinate to this day...computer games. I always dreamed of creating a game like Fallout, I want Postworld to be that game.
As for the fate of Fan Made Fallout and some other ambitious projects. I don't think that lack of motivation was the primary reason for their demise. Sure, it played a part but based on what was said after FMF was cancelled I think they failed because they tried to do too much, and wasted too much energy and time trying to manage a big team.
Managing tasks, source control, asset creation, choice of tools etc, these are all simple problems. We use Basecamp to manage our projects, Beanstalk and Subversion for source control. These tools are all web-based, have free plans for small teams and are very reasonably priced if you want to get some fancier features. Unity takes care of the rest.
Issues like artistic differences, arrogant members, and pointless squabbles are harder to solve, but essentially the core team makes a decision that the rest follow. If they can't, there is always someone out there who can and is willing to follow.
I know it sounds harsh but based on my personal experience with Postworld, everyone has an opinion and everyone wants to get their way but at the end of the day it's the team leaders that will need to bear the consequences of making the wrong decision. You can make a few mistakes along the way, there is no escaping that, but if you are making mistakes every step of the way the project will never see the light of day. It's that simple.
The hard part is getting the core team to share the same vision for the project. It's the most painful part of the process even more so when people stop caring because the feel their ideas are being tossed aside in favor of someone else's. It happened to us once already I just hope we won't have to go through something like that ever again.
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Check out some tech demo footage and shit over here
Blog: http://blog.devoidstudios.com/
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