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Modflow: Internal organisation of a Mod (Part I)
In the beginning there was nothing. First games were so simple it was hardly a one man job to make them, and it would only take a couple of days. (pong, packman, etc). But times have changed, and so have games. We have now interviewed 5 mods from Half-Life 2 & Battlefield 2 where the various leads share their experiences. Games nowadays come packaged with all possible kinds of effects, shaders, physics engines, etc. It now requires a whole army of people, and it can take months, even years to make them (Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, first news item on their site dated 06/09/2002). No army can fight without a good commander, same goes for game-development. Every part has to work harmoniously together. Modelers, environment artist, coders, they are all doing their own thing, yet they are all working on the same project. The issue is to let them work well-ballanced, so that no one has to wait bootless, or is working on things that in the end are useless. (Iron Wrath for RavenShield, a full expansion pack that was released for free after a failed release of a previous expansion pack)
It doesn't matter if they are full scale games, or modifications. They both need organisation if they want to succeed their goal. The way to handle this organisation will differ in any game/mod. Game-Artist.net looked up some great mods, that have come to a point where organisation is inevitable. We asked them all the same 8 questions about their internal organisation, to give you an idea how they deal with this.
(Note: Due to the large answers we received, the article will be split up in 2 parts. This month we have 3 great HL2 mods Black Mesa Source, Off Limits and Hull Breach, next moth we will have 2 big BF2 mods)
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1. First of all, can you tell us something about yourself and the mod you are currently working on?
Chris Harrison: I'm Chris "Kester" Harrison, the lead level designer at Black Mesa, a complete remake from the ground up of Half-Life on Valve's Source engine. I started working in the level design field around 10 years ago, back on the Quake 1 engine; I quickly progressed on to Quake 2 and then eventually Half-Life, which is where I've stayed pretty much since. I joined Black Mesa in the early days, before it was officially announced and quickly became the lead in my area.
As it goes, my role on the team is pretty simple as I have such a good team of designers who can work autonomously, although when I need to step in to take direction over uncertain issues I do.
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Wesley Tack: Hello, my name is Wesley Tack aka Simon, I'm from Belgium and I am 26. My task within the mod is basically Art Director, all maps/props/textures content goes through me. I've also worked on three maps so far, two of them near completion, one is still on ice. The mod I'm talking about is Off Limits, and it's the only one I'm working on at this moment. The mod will have two human teams and one additional alien player. Both human teams are competing in the hunt for the alien, the team that kills the alien wins. As an additional twist there is only one weapon in the game capable of killing the alien, the railgun. The Vanguard team starts the round with this railgun, and the opposing Rogues have the alien on radar as their advantage. Evidently, the Rogues' initial task is stealing the railgun and preventing the anguard from killing the alien. Once they succeed in stealing the railgun, the roles are reversed. The railgun should be very much like the Quake 3 railgun once we are done with it, we will add a zoom feature to it though. The rest of the team's weapons of each team consist of contemporary weapons (with some customization, we're not into hyper-realism), but other than the railgun there are no futuristic weapons. The mod has gameplay features such as: drivable vehicles, capturable spawns, alien wallwalking, impressive alien jumping, and a special alien vision which will replace the character models with a neutral "prey" model (which makes it for the alien player impossible to know which team is which, since all it will see is walking guts and bones  - we needed a mechanism to enforce impartiality, since the alien is enemy to both teams).
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James O'Hare: I'm James O'Hare, otherwise known as Talon. I've been doing games art as a hobby for 3 years - I actually started doing games art as a result of Hull-Breach, I had no experience of low poly modeling before I joined.
I currently hold the position of Lead Modeler on a Half-Life 2 total conversion called Hull-Breach. A position I've reached pretty much through dead man's boots. Hull-Breach is an ambitious team-based multiplayer mod set some 2000 years into the future. We're trying to break the clichéd "laser-guns and aliens" mould that haunts sci-fi and depict a gritty and brutal view of future infantry warfare.
2. Mods come and go, unfortunately a lot of them die very quickly. What do you think is the reason that the mod you are working on has made it this far? Chris Harrison: Well in our case, a lot of the ground work had already been done in terms of the original game, so we, in a way, had a solid foundation to start on. We also have one of the most talented team of people I've seen working together for a common love of Half-Life. The support we also receive from the community is a great boost to moral as well.
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Wesley Tack: We have had our moments of inactivity, but we were never close to dying. The first year was pretty much weapon modeling and learning the tools we were going to need (except for all SDK tools, since the game was delayed for a year). We say the mod is nearly four years, but we've only been working on it for three, minus the summers, would make it two  . The main reasons for our inactivity's were Valve and the summer. Valve with their SDK updates didn't do any mod much good, and having to mail them with bugs in their source engine has only helped us out once, but hey, they have steam games to sell, why worry about the poor old mod community? Why Off Limits is still here, the main reason for any mod to survive is for it to have "do-ers" and not "say-ers". A lot of mods start with an idea, they write a story (which should be very limited for multiplayer games, that's one point where most go overboard already) and a design document which says whats needs to happen (where mostly the person writing it doesn't know how to make it, he just has some cool ideas he wants to see created), then you get a lot of people asking for recruitment and when they don't get any replies they leave it at that, and the idea is shuved away into the archives never to be seen again. Where as they could pick up the main tools themselves and start learning it and creating it on their own. This is basically what we did for Off Limits, when we didn't find people to do something we did it ourselves. But luckily at this point we now have someone for each task (mappers, sound designers, animators, weapon texturers, etc etc). Although some are not as active as they should be .
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James O'Hare: Determination, really. Though, perhaps it's closer to sheer bloody-mindedness at times. While a lot of members can only find the time or effort to contribute now and again, there's a loyal few who are stalwart and are willing to sacrifice that little bit extra to gain progress. Luckily for us, that few has mostly included at least one person from each "discipline" (animator, modeler, coder, level designer) and so we've had the means to continue even during progress droughts.
That said, we have had a lot of "dead" time; time where only 2 or 3 people are managing to contribute anything at all to the mod. These can and have lasted up to several months. Such times are slow and painful. I think this is the point that most mods flicker out, but it's really just a matter of perseverance to see it through to a point where other members can start to contribute again.
3. Let's talk about the design document also known as the "the holy bible" of every mod. Can you tell us something about how you guys created this, what steps you took and how much of the design document actualy made it in-game? Chris Harrison: This is a pretty defunct area as our design document is the original. Although in certain aspects we have created special documents concerning different areas, such as A.I. and speech. In general the basis of these is a team effort which is hacked away by all concerned until we have something we are all happy on. It's then a case of passing it to the relevant person to get it in game - be that the coders for A.I. or our sound guy.
Because of this almost all of these documents eventually find their way into our alpha builds.
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Wesley Tack: We never made a real design document, and we never will. All arrangements are made on our forum, mIRC or MSN. The holy bible for Off Limits would be our forum, it's our beating heart where Keats and I control all slaves. We have some threads that contain a listing of planned features, and have an Idea Box forum where any crewmember can start a brainstorming session, but that's as close as it gets.
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James O'Hare: Our DD started some years ago, before HL2's release. The initial idea was released to the public, allowing them to give their input and ideas and to gauge the kind of things the public would be looking for in a game. Once we had a good idea of the path to take, we started about setting the central ideas in stone. After a time and further exploration of ideas, we closed doors and started on production proper.
Our design document's evolved a ridiculous amount. Mostly in positive ways. Mostly because none of us had any experience with game creation at the time and only a vague idea of the limitations and possibilities. We quickly realised that the game we sought to make was really quite massive and ambitious, so we've sectioned off areas of the design doc into phases. So, first release would involve only the core FPS parts of the game, then each subsequent major release would add vehicles, player skills, character persistance, equipment, etc... into the mix. That way we are able to work on perfecting the foundations of each element and layer each new phase ontop of that, gradually making the gameplay progressively deeper and more unique.
So we should be seeing as much as possible of the design document making it into the game.
4. There is no doubt that a skilled team is required to make a mod of any significance. But, where do you find these people, and most of all how do you keep them motivated when times are rough? Chris Harrison: Black Mesa is in a good position here, as we all have a common goal, from our love of the original. However, as with any mod, times do get rough for whatever reason which can hit us hard. However we try and keep on top of things and set short term goals to work towards. We also have started introducing cabal groups, focusing on individual chapters so each designer, be it modelers or texture artists can see their work in game at a much quicker rate that they used to.
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Wesley Tack: You need to do some research for each field, and you need something to show for, when you are looking for weapon skinners, post a weapon model and UV template, sell it, make them want to skin it. When we started to search for weapon skinners, we looked at the custom Counter-Strike weapon forums, our posts were mostly ignored or had replies of no use to us. They mostly had more interest in making another AK-47 or M4 for a mod that already had hundreds if not thousands weapons made for it already. But after enough searching you find everything. Same went for all departments, mostly we recruited through forums and did that for so long until we found the right people. And sometimes you get lucky and they come to you. This was the case for our player animations, where we had someone from Blur Studio's posting on our forums (he is also Belgian) and wanted to support us by doing some animations.
As for the motivation part, I just remind them that we are making the coolest of all mods.
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James O'Hare: We've got our team mostly through direct applications and word-of-mouth. I don't think we've anyone on board who's been specifically headhunted. I think a good 90% of the team (myself included) found Hull-Breach through our concept artist UkiTakuMuki's deviantART page.
Motivation is definitely tough to sustain, especially as mod work doesn't have that all-important paycheck waiting at the end of each month. Mostly seeing the progress of other team members is enough to keep people going with their own work, whos progress in turn keeps others motivated. It kind of snowballs from there. So my main job to keep people motivated is to try and make sure I and others can keep showing some kind of progress on the forums. That and a good hounding seems to do the trick
5. Can you tell us what experiences you had with staff turnovers so far? Chris Harrison: Although we have had some people leave, and some who have been asked to leave, I personally think we have done well in this area and I can only think of a handful who are no longer working, in some way, on Black Mesa. Again, I believe this is all down to our common goal, whereas with other mods it is generally the leaders "brain child", we all want to make this recreation of our favourite game, to the best of our abilities.
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Wesley Tack: Not that many really, the core crew from the early days has never changed. We've had a lot of people coming and going, but our current team is basically all we need, they just need to be more active . We've always been focused around a very small core team that by itself has the capabilities to finish the mod by itself if it should be necessary, surrounded by members that are very specialised but often didn't stay that long. The longer we are around though, the longer our members are staying too, so that's a good sign
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James O'Hare: Applicants seem to be like busses - you wait ages for one then loads come at once. We've seen a good number of staff come and go over the course of the mod, but an equally good number come and stay on. The killer losses come from dedicated and skilled team members who find they just no longer have the time for mod work, whether it be from increased workload from schoolwork, their job or other serious reasons.
Mostly the turnover comes from people joining the mod and essentially disappearing before finishing their first task or hanging on and never really doing anything. We tend to go through the team as a whole once every few months and work out who's worth keeping on. Rejecting and firing people is the hardest part of being a lead.
6. Can you tell us something about the internal organisation of your mod. Coders, modelers, environment artists all have to work together, how do you organize things that everyone has their tasks, and that no one has to wait days, weeks or months before they get what they requested ? Chris Harrison: As I briefly touched in Q4, we work with cabals, meaning our level designers are assigned a modeler and a texture artist, sometimes more than 1 of each. This means not only can they work autonomously, but they get to know each others work flow and things inevitably speed up. However not all of us work in cabals and they then tend to work on a first come first serve basis. But with the amount of developers we have it is never long before someone's request is worked on.
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Wesley Tack: Basically if we need something, we make it, and if it's something that we can't make we ask the person in charge of it to make it asap. As for map props, a lot of the props were made two years ago, at that period I was on a prop-frenzy and made a lot of the content still used today, so we have an archive of custom map props used frequently by any of our mappers. We have had contributors making requested map props as well.
As for getting everything together, all our content is managed by our Subversion server. If our forum is the heart of our mod, SVN would be its brain Whenever someone finishes a piece of work or a new version of the code, he commits it to the subversion repository, and it's available for all other members. We have dedicated servers that auto-update whenever someone pushes something on the SVN servers, so we are always ready to test. If there was one advice we'd give to starting mod teams that are serious, it is to immediately start with a decent CVS system and run all content in it, it has sped up our work flow tremendously.
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James O'Hare: The art side of the team (models, maps, concepts) tend to work closely together. At the moment, the general workflow goes... Mapper requests props, giving some reference photos and descriptions. The concept artists draw up concepts if they're needed. The modelers then choose which prop they want and get to work. If there are any very specific or important props, the mappers will tend to work closely with the modeler, so as to ensure it fits in with the intended style and scale.
The mappers will also prioritise the models and textures they need the most so that they get done first. For textures, the mappers liaise directly with the texture artists. This seems to result in a fairly efficient workflow, at times the main challenge is to keep enough props requested for people to stay busy.
I'm not very involved with the code side of things other than we (as in: everyone other than the coders) request loads of really cool stuff, they in turn slap us in the face with some well-aimed reality and then they go and code what they can. Usually with indecent skill.
7. Every mod has that one thing that makes them unique. Can you tell us something about what makes your mod unique, and how you came up with this idea ? Chris Harrison: We're remaking one of the biggest PC games of all time. This not only means it's a huge task, but it's one with so many people's expectations riding on it.
It wasn't really a difficult decision to come up though, to start work on Black Mesa, as after Half-Life: Source was released and Valve's comment of a community remake, the door was left open and we stepped up.
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Wesley Tack: The original mod idea was developed in about two hours of brainstorming after seeing the first Half-Life² footage. Where we previously joked about starting a mod, we now had an idea and the will to make it happen. What makes us unique? We have a unique gameplay concept, for sure. It's influenced by many gametypes such as VIP, AvP and CTF, but it's still something new. We also have a unique mix of features that make the game a blast : drivable vehicles with player animations (people can drive around, you see them in their seat, and they can still fire their regular weapons at you), the character model replacement to make the third team (the alien) not know who is who, the wallwalking and jumping from building to building in our large environments gives you a lot of freedom to use that. And there's a lot more to come, special weapons, boobytraps, etc, etc. And as playtesting has proven over and over again, it's a lot of fun to play it.
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James O'Hare: The CRBs (Covert Recon 'Bots) would probably be one of my favourite and most unique solutions to a common gaming problem. They allow you to play an integral role within the game even in death.
The idea arose when looking at the problems with team-based games like Counter-Strike, where you will often find yourself simply sitting back and watching the match unfold, effectively as a ghost, once you've been killed.
With the CRBs you will respawn on death as a small autonomous robot fitted out with a camera and sensors, able to move around the world and spy on others. Your teammates will be able to tap into a live feed of what you see, allowing you to scout out enemy positions or clear routes for the alive members of your squad. You'll also be able to relay the position of enemy units to your teammate's Heads-Up Display.
8. As a mod team members don't all work in the same office, let alone the same country, what tools do you use for communication and coordinating tasks? Chris Harrison: As with most mod teams I'm sure, we have our forums which is the main hub of communications, which is especially useful as we have developers from literally all over the globe and when time zones make it difficult to hold any kind of real time communication, we need somewhere to collate our ideas. However, we also use skype and most nights a selection of developers will hold conferences, whether it to insult each other or talk about the mod is a whole different thing though!
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Wesley Tack: As explained above, we use our forum as the main board, where we can post or PM members if needed. I personally like to use MSN most, since you can get things done a lot faster by nagging about it every day (with most people anyway). And then theres still our public mIRC channel on Quakenet #off-limits where we have a lot of discussions to, but not always mod related As for the coordination part, as mentioned earlier, credit for that goes to subversion.
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James O'Hare: For general communication we tend to use MSN Messenger. General discussion, showing progress updates and criting of work is usually done on our team-only forums. As a lot of us live in different time zones, we find that being able to leave messages on the forum makes it easier than waiting around 'til the wee hours of the morning for someone on the other side of the world to sign on to msn or IRC. Additionally, we use a third party work management system called Projectpath to store backups of files, manage to-do lists and it also serves as a design document/discussion forum for the key gameplay elements or other major issues related to the mod.
To keep everything that's finished and awaiting compilation up to date, we use a CVS (concurrent versioning system). We've also a custom-coded system that automatically compiles the mod from the CVS and keeps the test server synchronised with the latest build. We thank you very much for your time, and wish you the best with the development of your mod!
don't forget to visit them on their website.
Last edited by requiem2d; 01-01-2007 at 07:30 AM.
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01-01-2007, 07:18 AM
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. I personaly wrote pong in c++ in a couple of hours. It was running on a simple 2d Game engine, which can't be that hard to make if you only need to play pong, and if one knows what he's doing... 
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