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Undead on Arrival

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Letting Go of the Rage

--------Acord, 6/18/2010 --------

Things I Learned From Blood Frontier 1: Don't release something before it's done. This was my single biggest mistake. Progress on Blood Frontier initially went very quickly. Nobody had to field emails, build community support, or constantly release updates and fixes.

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And then I released a beta. And then I got more people on the team that I made into serious stakeholders. And then there was a community, and web sites, and clans, and more player input than was useful. And then we got sidetracked and went so for outside of the scope of the original design that the end result couldn't be put back on track no matter how crucial it became as tensions increased and the shelf life of the team and the project approached it's expiration date. In reality, I was unsure and insecure when I released the first beta. I wanted to see if what I was doing was worthwhile in the eyes of the modding community, and a lot of people had expressed interest. If it wasn't, I wanted to quit while I was ahead. Such a huge mistake. 2: Every Project Has a Shelf Life. I don't care who you are, how much(or little) financial backing you have, who you're working with, or how good you are. Every project has a shelf life. Eventually, the development team is going to get sick of each other or sick of the project, and there will simply come a time when the scope must finally be altered backwards instead of forwards. Deadlines will slip. Money will vanish. Members will be put into a position by their real lives where they must move on to something else. Set deadlines, stay in your scope, and finish it. Worry about polish and adding features in later. Never, ever forget this. 3: Stay Flexible in Your Implementation. Blood Frontier was never created to be either flexible or modular. The engine that it was based on had two things going for it: Great networking code and a superior map editor. Unfortunately, the code base itself was designed in such a minimalist fashion that adapting it or adding anything into it was a HUGE issue. So when new features were added, a partial redesign was required which lead to modifying a whole lot of other stuff just to get it running again. In the future, I intend to avoid anything that is not modular and can be easily modified, even with very large features. This knocks a few of the heavyweight engines out of the running immediately. The more cruft that has been added, the harder the engine is to modify. The older the engine is, the more likely it becomes that it has a lot of cruft. 4: Cowboy Coding is Wrong. You know these guys. You probably ARE these guys. When you create code without planning it out in advance and knowing everything that will have to be changed to make it work, you are going to spend weeks implementing something that should have taken a few days. This sort of approach will simply create far more problems than it solves, and the next 20 updates will be focused on fixing new bugs. 5: Use Placeholders. When you implement something, waiting on the graphics guys to send assets to you so that you can get started is really not a good idea. The problem is that once implemented, if what has been done was not well thought out in advance then the assets will need to be modified or they will be wasted if the result isn't what was desired. After having the latter happen more than once, I simply refused to finish and submit assets until the game play mechanics had been tested FIRST and the assets were certified to be necessary. More than once I was asked to go back and add in special bones and more in order to support some small feature. Adding a bone into a model is a pain in the ass, because while the animations are probably already done you have to go back to the rigging stage or you'll wind up with severe vertex weighting errors. Professional companies have dedicated personnel who do nothing BUT rigging, because it is time consuming, difficult to get right, and there are often problems that aren't apparent until you have run the entire gamut of animations from every single angle and dropped it into the game.

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6: Good Assets Take Time. When I started doing modeling and animation, I jumped straight into doing characters, weapons, and scenery models. This was such a huge mistake that I can not even start to tell you how much time it wasted. The player characters and weapons were redone FROM SCRATCH several times, and yet another redo was on the way when the project finally died. So for every aspiring artist out there, here is the breakdown on project times per asset *IF* you are familiar with the process used and you are already pretty competent at doing these things. This also assumes that they can be dropped right into the engine with no extra work. such as defining a configuration file or a text file for it. GUI or menu graphics One level texture One scenery object One detailed object(animated or seen up close, like a gun) One good room in a map Modeling and painting a character Rigging a character Animating a character, per short animation 4 - 8 hours 1 - 2 hours 4 - 8 hours 8 - 12 hours 2 - 4 hours 30 - 50 hours 4 - 8 hours 1 - 2 hours

Note that these times are for detailed, professional looking assets, and that the times will vary depending on your competence, experience, what assets you already have at your disposal and the complexity of the assets themselves. If you spend less time and just crank something out to fill immediate needs and wants, you'll pay for it when you have to redo it later. 7: Create re-usable assets. This applies to everyone. The artists, the coders, EVERYONE. If you are making something that can't be re-used later, or isn't made from parts that can be re-used later, you need to seriously stop and try to find another way to do things. In code, if you create something that can't be copied and pasted or easily expanded, then you need to re-engineer the code. Tweaking is also much easier if you keep values in an external file, because it eliminates the need to recompile the executable over and over again. As an artist, you need to create as many general use assets as possible: basic materials, skeletons that can be re-used, level textures that are not 100% specific to any place in the game, parts that can be recombined into new assets and more. By doing this, you'll have something that looks and feels more consistent when you are finished, with principles that can be applied to more than one place. By failing to do this, you'll need to create a lot of assets every time you make something new, and that's going to eat your time. 8: Make Deadlines and Project Plans Make deadlines and stick to them - it will keep you from wandering off and working on things which aren't crucial. Make project plans that are detailed, assign tasks to everyone, and then make sure they understand and agree to those plans. If they have concerns with anything, later on is NOT the time to bring them up. If you fail to start with good, detailed plans, then you will start working on things that don't really matter yet. If you make plans and don't stick to them, then it's the same as having no plan at all. If you don't share plans and changes to the plans with everyone else, don't be surprised when they get pissed off. Allow plenty of slack time in the plans for real life. It WILL get in the way, and there's not much you can do about it when it does.

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9: DO NOT STAY QUIET.

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BE LOUD. Talk about EVERYTHING. Reach an understanding on EVERYTHING. If someone is going off-task, then tell them. Don't keep your concerns under your hat until they boil over and blow your head off. Letting things build up and explode can take you, bystanders, and the entire project with them. If you need to yell, do it and get it over with instead of waiting until later. What comes out of your mouth/keyboard later will only be that much more vile. 10: Communicate WELL. Avoid IRC and Chat Channels. Choose a medium that is conducive to good communication that automatically creates records of conversations. Forums are ideal for this, email is okay for one to one talks, and things like chat and IRC are a REALLY, REALLY BAD IDEA. I like chat and IRC, don't get me wrong. But they are a huge mistake, shut down often, and seldom create usable logs for future reference. Time is also of the essence on IRC and chat rooms. If you don't reply to something right away, then bringing it up later is often confusing, and anyone that does not happen to be paying attention at that moment will have an equally frustrating time replying. This is not so in a forum environment or with emails - things are kept sequential, regardless of timing. Everyone has time to voice their opinions and ideas, and they can reference other posts that are RIGHT THERE while doing so. In addition, it enables everyone to work on the project at any time of day or week and still stay in the loop - something that IRC or chat doesn't do. Keep tight control of your communication channels. Don't let just anyone join. Otherwise, you will spend a lot of time doing admin work and the trolls will never leave. It's better to spend the time to specifically allow people, and to be able to immediately and permanently remove them if they start causing problems. Email is only really good for private conversations, and should be used as such. Don't air your dirty laundry in public and assume no-one will see it, because it has a very high chance of biting you in the ass and creating unneccessary tensions. 11: DOCUMENT DOCUMENT DOCUMENT This is another area that Blood Frontier failed hard at. The code was poorly commented, The comments that were there were often unspecific and unhelpful, and documentation on art pipelines, map editing, and more was non-existent. The official reason for this was that documentation could be put off until everything was done, but in reality this never happened. As a result there were undocumented mapping commands, commands that were completely deprecated, and no easy way for someone to add art assets if they weren't already familiar with the pipeline. On top of this, a lot of time got spent explaining how to do very basic things to newcomers - a huge waste of time. Good tutorials would have alleviated a lot of this. 12: Do NOT Upgrade ANYTHING That Already Works. Here was another huge mistake. The first beta I released was severely crippled because I had updated the code base beforehand, which introduced hundreds of bugs and issues that weren't apparent unless you were playing online with other people. At another point, I updated some of my modeling software and got stuck waiting for a fix to a bug that didn't affect everyone but was a crucial part of my art pipeline. An attempt to update the sound libraries to something that did more stuff resulted in going back to the old libraries after wasting a month because of a bug that existed in the new library that never got fixed. It was a showstopper too. Changing some modeling software resulted in higher quality assets, but took a lot of time to learn - something that takes hours and hours. When you only have a couple of hours of time per day, this can translate into weeks of time spent NOT creating good assets. 13: Community Comes Last This is not to say that the community should never be involved, but building a

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community is something that should happen at the end of a project, when it is finished or nearly finished. Creating a community too soon invites trouble that you definitely do not want. Community members will want to make their opinions known, and since everyone wants to be liked there is a really high chance that these opinions will be taken seriously. This will lead to a lot of second guessing of the plan, implementing new things, tweaking other things, and generally wasting time that needs to be spent actually making progress and finishing the project. Some of these things might be great ideas, but DON'T DO IT. Implementing community wishes and wants before the project is done is like the dark side of the force: Once you give in, it will forever dominate you. And it will also forever distract you from getting to the goal. Community is one of those things that certain developers do right. Valve comes to mind immediately. Team Fortress 2 is updated constantly, and it continually involves community members and keeps them interested. But one thing to keep in mind is that before there was a community, there was a finished game, and that makes ALL the difference in the world. We did it backwards, and it contributed heavily to our demise.
--------Acord, 6/12/2010 --------

Not Okay The wierdness continues to spread, unabated. Here's some basic information on exactly what happened for those who weren't present. 1: I was a dick to Quin, because the project was not progressing and once again had gotten sidetracked into two weeks of tweaking while I worked my ass off in what little free time I had to create a player model. This was after we had agreed to leave the balancing as is and to not mess with it any longer. There were other things to be done, such as other zombie AIs, the turret AI, and cleaning up the menu system into something halfway decent. This followed a long bitching session where I logged in, played the game, and found that every weapon value had been tweaked. The particular map I logged in on was Wet, which is a good looking map but had values for gravity, friction and more that were SO far off the regular values that it was difficult to play. The lack of quality control really set me off. I went and played an edit map on the defaults, and sure enough everything had been tweaked again, but it was exacerbated by the settings on the map. I found this unacceptable. 2: Quin went and changed everything in the gameplay to "bring it more in line" with what I wanted instead of contacting me regarding any of the emails I sent. At this point, he had already decided to move on. 3: Quin quit the project. 4: Tired of the drama and the hundreds of hours that Blood Frontier was consuming, I killed development - including removing everyone from administration except for myself. This is how it went. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or they weren't there. As part of my communications with Quin, I wished him well on his new project and told him to remove all the resources I had created from it. So imagine my surprise when I downloaded the first SVN, which was announced on sourceforge and made publicly available, and it contained ALL of my model and animation assets. First he railroaded and sidetracked the project, QUIT the project after doing a quick butchering of the source code, and then decided to use my stuff anyways. There are plenty of good placeholders out there, lots of free open source monsters and weapons etcetera, so this was really a slap in the face. I told him he needed to remove it within a week. He did so, pitched a big fit, and told me never to contact him again. The funny thing about email, as opposed to things said in IRC, is that it leaves a record.

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This is the first post that follows things through email correspondence. There will be more. Quin: I'm not entirely sure what your issue is. I've sent you queries regarding what models you want/need, directions for developing textures, weapon models etcetera, given you a zombie model with animations which has not been implemented, and sat by while you've done virtually nothing and given me no response. On top of that, you go ahead and stick this into a public forum and don't bother contacting me at all concerning any of this. Please explain it to me, and choose your words carefully. Every time I've tried to contact you regarding anything, all I've gotten is a vague brush off. Tell me what you want and drop the passive aggressive bullshit. -Tony Yes, I was beginning to get hostile. This was after seeing a big, angry post about how I was holding Blood Frontier for ransom and not participating. Big angry post here: http://cubeengine.com/forum.php4?action=display_thread& thread_id=2314 It is true that I wasn't participating - my Mom was incredibly ill, and had spent WEEKS going to the doctor and the hospital trying to fix it. I travelled down to Florida to check in on her, and possibly this was the last time I would see her alive if it didn't get fixed. I don't live anywhere near her. In fact, I live on the exact opposite end of the country. This on top of trying to get a job at the time is pretty damned depressing. But apparently that's just not an excuse. It's a clear indicator that I'm holding Blood Frontier for development ransom! Please read the entirety of this message before responding, or getting angry. There is a point being made which isn't entirely clear until toward the end. Every time I have asked you for an item I have written it in todo.txt -> = Models = * New player model (tag_affinity, tag_camera, tag_weapon, tag_lfoot, tag_rfoot, tag_head, tag_torso, tag_hat) * Turret/Pyro/Heavy models * Weapons (esp. rocket?) "Turret" has been sitting there pending for about one and a half years now. "Zombie" *is* implemented, issues remain with the model regarding animations, etc (no death animation, bones are unnamed, unable to tag/ragdoll); I'd gotten to the point where my requests were becoming more like harassment so I stopped asking for anything out of disappointment. You of all people should know my stance toward "benevolent absent dictatorships", especially after recounting my experiences with Aardappel. We have all been constantly asking for you to do some thing or another, and this has persisted for years now. I understand people have real lives, and that is not my issue; I have a problem with the fact that you are constantly unable to produce results because of it and will not let anyone else fill the void left by your absence. Of bigger concern is the amount of time you invest in writing down elaborate ideas instead of producing content. Yes, I understand you're trying to design a game, but I think we need to focus on immediate concerns rather than trying to totally redesign the game every year. I was admittedly quite pissed off when you handed me your weapon redesign document, as I feel that I am pushing uphill on a project going nowhere. I've spent more time writing code for things that never get finished because it always stalls at the artwork stage, and after then 20th or so time I just start to get a bit fed up of even bothering to try. With regards to the public forum bit, the topic on the Cube Forums was closed by me after some discussion with everyone about the tone of my message. I had written it in a fit of anger, and have since revised my point to its core while removing the hostile parts. It just so happened you got pointed to the forum post rather than the

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blog where the edited version resides. Even eihrul cautioned me against writing such a post, but I was so upset I didn't listen to his advice. I'm not sure what you mean by "vague brush off", perhaps you're taking my response to your weapon redesigns and applying it everywhere because you have been angered by the post. I think I've been very patient up until this point, but it has worn kind of thin; I don't believe an open source project should be held up by one person - If you can't do the work, then we should at least be letting other people create the content, you can always replace it later when you actually have time to do so. Even this would allow us to move forward while we wait, and possibly bring on some very good talent to help out, I believe everyone should be given the opportunity to learn in the real world on a project like ours. I've made it clear many times the current situation is not working, and you've really done little to reassure me there other than telling me real life is getting in the way (maybe not so much an excuse, but it is becoming a bit like a broken record). I don't mind you have a real life, I don't mind that you're not around very often, I understand that I have no life and hence too much time to dedicate to the project. I am bothered by the constant stalling in specific areas of development; this is why the campaign hasn't gotten anywhere despite the ability to do so; I don't want to write code just to have it languish in obscurity because nobody is producing the content to drive it. You've known since the beginning I have commercial aspirations for our project. I don't want to commercialize the FPS but I do want to be creating Indie titles eventually. I don't have the luxury of being able to go out there an work in "the real world" because of my illness, so my only chance at a half decent life for myself is to be self-employed. I've spent the last ten years of my life educating myself to that end, and live in near-poverty the entire time. My social security benefits is barely enough to cover my rent, food, and utilities. I want a better life than this, and I would like to be able to do this with you by my side, but that isn't going to work so long as you're forbidding anyone else from contributing to your areas while you're preoccupied. In a commercial venture with such mismanagement we'd certainly fail. You need to understand that my end goal is to create a better life for myself, just like you are doing already by doing your courses and getting employment. I feel like I am being held back because I've tried to be diplomatic and gotten nothing but decrees of "no outside involvement", hence the tone of my original post was quite (unnecessarily) harsh. It's not that I want to work with anyone or somewhere else, it's that I may need to if I am to attain my goals. I'm not going to respond to your comments in the channel on IRC at this point, because like my original posts, they are an uncensored angered response which would simply undermine the unity of the project with arguments. I understand where you're coming from and have been very patient for the last three years so far, please understand where I am coming from. You're not being "cut out" or replaced, we merely want temps to fill the giant hole your absence leaves in the project we all care so much about. If you would like to be more involved, consider coming on IRC instead of updating your Facebook/Twitter status, or writing huge design documents without getting input from the rest of your community (we can't make sweeping changes without the appropriate brainstorming sessions); as it would be a more productive use of your time. You control how involved you are in the project, not me; we've all simply tried to continue on with development despite the fact. You may have founded the project, but I am the one who's been doing 90% of the work in development and making it successful; or do I need to recount the few hundred tasks I do as Lead Developer every day with little to no reward? I'm just asking for a bit of flexibility so I can have some cake too one day; your restrictions on how we're allowed to continue has become more than a roadblock in the development of the project and my personal progress in the game development field that will one day generate me a real income which I so desperately need. -Quin The zombie had been done for quite some time. It got implemented less than a month before I received this message. Apparently, I was being assigned orders in the todo.txt and not carrying them out.

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This is because I am the designer. I don't take orders - we discuss things. I sent ideas on possible directions, but there was no discussion - all my ideas were taken as orders! A rocket? Fucking seriously? We had decided TOGETHER a long time ago not to put a rocket into the game. Every goddamned game has a fucking rocket launcher. Where in the fuck this came from who knows. It's pretty apparent at this point that there is a control issue behind most of this. I like to receive email and be asked about input. Sticking something in todo.txt and never discussing it is as far from that as you can get. I'm essentially being bitched at for failing to follow orders here. It's true that quin did 90% of the work. That is because 89% or more of the updates were dedicated to tweaking and farting around with settings instead of getting shit done. If you think I'm lying then look at the SVN logs. I did and it made me FUCKING FURIOUS. Note that what is said in this email is about as far as you can get from what was wanted with the actual game. In truth, Quin has NO aspirations to do ANYTHING commercial, and NEVER DID. So now I am being blamed for holding back his progress as a commercial developer. Huh? Well, this email thing isn't working - And you're right, I am not dedicating enough time to this. It's very scattered, starts and stops and takes a back seat to a lot of my other work, which has fortunately been discharged, and I haven't taken any since my new job(census) starts soon. Since e-mail isn't working, we actually need to be more regimented so we can be on IRC at the same time and be on the same page. I'm sorry - I probably took it the wrong way. It's hard to convey tone in text, and I headed to the gym for an hour to boil it off. As far as my job schedule, it will likely be tilted towards early evenings and weekends so I can catch all these people who couldn't be arsed to send in their census info. It's temporary, but it's $17.50 an hour, which is better than I'm doing freelancing right now. As far as the player model, the arms, armor and upper body are sculpted, and I'm still working on the head(s) and legs. Once that's done, I'll be animating this beast and re-animating the zombies at an actual mo-cap studio. The turret is just one of those things where I'm not happy with how any of it's turning out, and it's going to take me a bit to get a feel for it. So let's set up a regular time that we can both dedicate to being online, communicating, and working on this thing. 11:00pm - 1:00am EST works for me, but I don't know what your schedule looks like. As far as the idea of redesigning the weapons, just say NO, that's too much work and re-vamping. You don't need to beat around the bush - just say it directly, and since the programming is your(and eihrul's) domain, I'll take your word for it. As far as a lot of time, it was a few minutes when I could spare it and it was on my mind. When it comes to art, I specifically want to remain the sole artist for the characters and weapons. Everyone wants to jump right in and do the hard stuff without showing me that they're capable of pulling off a decent looking box or barrel or bush or skybox first, so yeah, most of them walk off because I want them to prove that they can do the small easy stuff before they go for the big hard stuff, and nobody wants to do it. It's not friendly, but it is quality control. You wouldn't handle it well if someone wanted to start coding the AI after punching their very first 'Hello World!' in either, and as far as 3d modeling goes it's about the equivalent. So I apologize - yes, I was pissed. It's not all at you, I could probably have spent more time on BF than I have. But dammit, if you're mad at me over something then tell me. I'd rather you argue with me or bitch at me than to post something like that out there where everyone can start stipulating on who's going to rage-quit first. You don't have to be passive aggressive with me - we're not related ;) So let me know and we'll just set up a schedule so I can block my time off from

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other stuff. It's 10:41 pm here right now. -Tony Let me clue you in on something: It takes a professional modeler 40 - 80 working hours to create a character model. It takes more time to rig it and animate it. For some reason, this is where most people want to start their modeling careers at. It is the MOST DIFFICULT MODELING AND ANIMATION TASK, and until you've done some time somewhere else, YOU'RE NOT UP FOR IT. And here we see where one of my ideas simply got discarded. The idea was to make the weapons customizable and put them together out of pieces. The pieces used would determine the behavior of the weapon. Coming up with an idea in a few spare minutes of free time was obviously unacceptable. But this was an attempt to get Quin to choose a direction to go with development. Something he hadn't done and did not want to do. 11-1pm is 4-6pm the next day for me (it's currently 4pm Sunday), I'm trying to maintain a fairly decent sleeping pattern these days so I'd probably be wanting to make dinner toward the end of that time (or going up to the house to eat with the family when Mum cooks dinner). You didn't take my post the wrong way, the original post was very blunt, rude, and hostile; which is why I revised it. It's unfortunate someone got to you before I was around and directed you to the wrong place. I'm sorry about airing it in public like that, I'm just one of those brutally honest and transparent kind of person. I felt people had a right to know what was going on and why I was doing what I was doing, yes I got a little verbose in my frenetic state. The difference between code and content is less subtle than you think too. For one, we can review a person's artwork before putting it into the main branch, so there's less issues raised from someone going off and doing their own thing improperly. Also, we don't have any problem with code contributions (we currently have more coders than artists, like most open source projects), whereas we do have a problem with a lack of content; that alone makes me less picky about what we get at this point. Even with code, we'd be reviewing the work people submit, and I am currently in the process of courting a few interested parties into contributing in areas of code I'm less interested in or don't have the time for. I'm giving up some of my control to help the project progress further/faster, and it's something I think we both need to learn to do if we want to start creating Indie titles in the future. At this point, I've already raised interest from a couple of people in contributing a few pieces of work. At the very least, I'd like to see how those pan out seeing as they're already in-progress; you're welcome to review their finished works and act as an art director there. As I said in my previous email, it doesn't matter where the content is coming from at this point, so long as we're making some progress (I've set the next milestone release for June/July). When you've sat down and made a complete model, then we have the option of either replacing the inferior works with yours, or in the case of a good piece, supplement them together and further expand our versatility. We've had three years already to make this game, which is maybe only 10 percent complete at this point. If we're to be at all successful we need to pick up the pace and let down our defenses toward outside contributions, otherwise we're no better than Sauerbraten, sitting there in obscurity while the whole world passes it by. It doesn't feel true to the open source spirit to be closing off development like we have. Maybe when we're churning out stuff at a decent speed we can afford to be more picky, but at this point we cannot. As a revisionist project, it really doesn't matter what things are contributed now, so long as we work toward an acceptable end goal which is eventually reached. If you can just trust me enough to get these tasks done (well) and relax the rigid attitude, I'm sure the results we get will be beneficial for us and the project. I'm not going to be including anything-and-everything, but I would like to have the opportunity to get some of these things done to an acceptable level. This is our open source project, "by the people for the people"; we can show off our individual stuff in other ways (the Indie titles for example). I have the inheritance from my father's estate now (we've sold the house and moved

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to Victoria), the money I gave you was out of my own pocket; I basically gave you half of all the donations I've received up until this point, including that which funded the construction of my last PC. I am looking at kicking off an Indie title sooner rather than later with this capital. We need to get our priorities in order so we can make a go of our own studio/team, think of the FPS as just the (freeware) lure to attract customers to our purchasable titles. Nobody has ever really become famous on open source alone, so I don't think it's worth worrying that much about that part of our work, an Indie title will have a shorter time-frame with fewer requirements code and content wise than a full blown first person shooter (which is inevitably open ended and never-ending). -Quin

So let's take a look at this: 1: Sorry I went and posted this behind your back and that someone showed it to you before I edited/deleted it. 2: I am very blunt and straight forward Do these two things make any sense when put together? No, they don't. That means that they are bullshit. 1: We can't be picky about what content we get. 2: We can review everything before we put it in to make sure nobody is going in the wrong direction. Contradictory? Yes. 1: If you can just trust me enough to get these tasks done (well) and relax the rigid attitude, I'm sure the results we get will be beneficial for us and the project. 2: I'm giving up some of my control to help the project progress further/faster, and it's something I think we both need to learn to do if we want to start creating Indie titles in the future. Wow. Just... wow. So, I want you to give me more control... But I want less control because I think it will help? Well, what the hell ever. At least I had an agreement to stick to a schedule. That particular agreement lasted for all of about two weeks, before I would log on, poke people, find nobody home most of the time and eventually gave up. So I did one last response to this email, and never really received on in return. Here it is, with context: Q: 11-1pm is 4-6pm the next day for me (it's currently 4pm Sunday), I'm trying to maintain a fairly decent sleeping pattern these days so I'd probably be wanting to make dinner toward the end of that time (or going up to the house to eat with the family when Mum cooks dinner). T: Alright - so I'll still need a time that works for you. With the way my life is right now, it needs to be scheduled or I can't make any promises at all. We can try 9pm 11pm, which would be somewhere between lunch and dinner your time. Q: You didn't take my post the wrong way, the original post was very blunt, rude, and hostile; which is why I revised it. It's unfortunate someone got to you before I was around and directed you to the wrong place. I'm sorry about airing it in public like that, I'm just one of those brutally honest and transparent kind of person. I felt people had a right to know what was going on and why I was doing what I was doing, yes I got a little verbose in my frenetic state. T: Well - let me know first. I thought everything was going just fine, and then I get a bomb like that dropped on me. It worries me that you felt better approaching things that way than simply telling me what was really on your mind. Q: The difference between code and content is less subtle than you think too. For one, we can review a person's artwork before putting it into the main branch, so there's less issues raised from someone going off and doing their own thing

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improperly. Also, we don't have any problem with code contributions (we currently have more coders than artists, like most open source projects), whereas we do have a problem with a lack of content; that alone makes me less picky about what we get at this point. Even with code, we'd be reviewing the work people submit, and I am currently in the process of courting a few interested parties into contributing in areas of code I'm less interested in or don't have the time for. I'm giving up some of my control to help the project progress further/faster, and it's something I think we both need to learn to do if we want to start creating Indie titles in the future. T: Be that as it may, I still need to see that people can do the basics first - either from work they've done for Blood Frontier or from their portfolios. There's good reasons for that, and as the AD the style needs to remain similar or it looks like just another hodge-podge project with more brown castles and half-assed characters. If someone's not a good fit, they're not a good fit. As an example I love geartrooper and I like his stuff, but it's too cartoony for BF. I'm glad we have mappers contributing, and some of them are really excellent, but I'd be lying if I said that every time I see a red-white-blue tile level that I don't want to open it up and retexture the whole thing. Q: At this point, I've already raised interest from a couple of people in contributing a few pieces of work. At the very least, I'd like to see how those pan out seeing as they're already in-progress; you're welcome to review their finished works and act as an art director there. As I said in my previous email, it doesn't matter where the content is coming from at this point, so long as we're making some progress (I've set the next milestone release for June/July). When you've sat down and made a complete model, then we have the option of either replacing the inferior works with yours, or in the case of a good piece, supplement them together and further expand our versatility. T: Quin - I wouldn't presume to let someone replace your code, or to start adding features because I'm not 100% qualified to judge if it's any better or more stable in terms of how it fits into the engine. Likewise, I have a vision for the look of the game including characters and levels. I'll leave the code and recruiting coders to you, leave the art and the art style and the artists to me. The only time I've ever heard anything is when people want to use stuff FROM BF, not make stuff FOR BF. Please forward them to me. T: Textures are welcome, so long as they're futuristic and gritty. Map models and maps need to follow the same. I don't know how many times the menu graphics and the UI stuff has changed by now, and I'm pretty sure that the amount of textures contributed by other people outweigh my own at this point. T: I'm willing to let stuff in but it must be professional grade. No exceptions, and I'll have to be final arbiter of the art. Have some faith in me that there may be good reasons for this. Q: We've had three years already to make this game, which is maybe only 10 percent complete at this point. If we're to be at all successful we need to pick up the pace and let down our defenses toward outside contributions, otherwise we're no better than Sauerbraten, sitting there in obscurity while the whole world passes it by. It doesn't feel true to the open source spirit to be closing off development like we have. Maybe when we're churning out stuff at a decent speed we can afford to be more picky, but at this point we cannot. As a revisionist project, it really doesn't matter what things are contributed now, so long as we work toward an acceptable end goal which is eventually reached. T: I need to know exactly what the scale is that you're planning here. The hard work is going to be in doing the SP/Co-op campaigns, and given the relatively paltry nature of games like L4D content wise I don't think we'll have a huge issue matching up and passing it if we focus, but cranking out 60 missions like we're using DoomEd is something else entirely. Q: If you can just trust me enough to get these tasks done (well) and relax the rigid attitude, I'm sure the results we get will be beneficial for us and the project. I'm not going to be including anything-and-everything, but I would like to have the

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opportunity to get some of these things done to an acceptable level. This is our open source project, "by the people for the people"; we can show off our individual stuff in other ways (the Indie titles for example). T: Possibly true, but please make sure that before you feel that is where we want to focus that you've thoroughly researched that market. I think you'll find that outside of getting on steam or getting a top slot on the iPad/iTouch app store, most PC/Mac indie devs are starving. I know you hate the idea of it, but if you're serious about the commercialization thing, it's basically XNA, Steam, or fail. I've had not one, not two, but THREE indiegame art contracts fall through because the teams went broke, got screwed by portals releasing their betas, and in one case the guy(who worked at Ocean software back in the day) had to take a job at Target to pay his bills and absolutely would not pay me for the first milestone even though work was finished up through the first three. T: You've also got to take a good hard look at what kind of games are selling and where. Q: I have the inheritance from my father's estate now (we've sold the house and moved to Victoria), the money I gave you was out of my own pocket; I basically gave you half of all the donations I've received up until this point, including that which funded the construction of my last PC. I am looking at kicking off an Indie title sooner rather than later with this capital. We need to get our priorities in order so we can make a go of our own studio/team, think of the FPS as just the (freeware) lure to attract customers to our purchasable titles. Nobody has ever really become famous on open source alone, so I don't think it's worth worrying that much about that part of our work, an Indie title will have a shorter time-frame with fewer requirements code and content wise than a full blown first person shooter (which is inevitably open ended and never-ending). T: That being said, we need to figure out where to focus our efforts. With the PC market as is, I think that's suicidal at the moment unless we can create something so highly refined, polished, and stylized that we're guaranteed to get it on Steam and D2D. XNA isn't that hard to learn, and since I'm a student I *do* have a CC club membership. Before any of that's done, we've got to finish BF. Co-op, inject roaming team-apathetic chew-on-everyone zombies into the multi-player to make things super hectic and slightly original, and a single player story mode. Having access to a mo-cap studio will help a lot there, and I can get pretty much all the free talent we'll ever need for dialogue etcetera. Being up here and getting into the dev community has been a serious plus. Let's make note of something here: Quin was receiving all the donations for awhile. He was in much worse shape than I was, and where he was located at along with his physical problems the chances for him to find any source of income was pretty small. Does that sound like the actions of a control freak to you? No. I did that because he really needed whatever he could get. I'm glad he got to a point that he got to pay it back. As far as open-ended and never-ending goes... This is completely wrong. What has happened is that BF has become community driven before it is finished, and so it has really suffered for it in terms of irregular gameplay, thousands of tweaks, extra stuff added in that wasn't really necessary, wierd maps with wierd settings, the list goes on and on. Instead of taking feedback, we had let the community dictate what was going into the game instead of actually finishing it. Initially this seemed like a neat idea, but in the end only leads to feature creep - in the worst kind of way. Most companies develop a game, beta test it, get some feedback, and release it after considering that feedback and fixing any reported bugs. THEN they worry about the community. And that is what we should have done, but didn't.
--------Acord, 6/12/2010 --------

What It Was My idea was pretty simple: Make an SP mode that could be played by multiple players

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at the same time in co-op. I like zombies and sci-fi, and that became the theme. At the time, nobody was doing it. Left 4 Dead hadn't been published yet, or even announced. Co-op was something that, for the most part, only happened at LAN parties and when people were playing a console FPS in splitscreen. Even now, I feel like the idea is nowhere near as good as it could be, and hasn't really been well executed by anyone. Looking back, I received a lot of great support from a lot of great people in the Sauer community. Not surprisingly, most(I think ALL) of them vanished as the game wandered further and further off track. I miss them - they were just happy to make the occasional suggestion and observation, didn't troll, and offered great support. I don't know where I came up with the name Blood Frontier. It stuck. I think I just needed something cool sounding to enter into Sourceforge. I do know where the name Red Eclipse came from. It is just another passiveaggressive backstab. Here's something that won't really shock anyone. This is not the first time that this has happened with this engine. This is not even the first time that this has happened with this particular individual. http://cubeengine.com/forum.php4?action=display_thread&thread_id=1458&start=0 Some things apparently don't change.
--------Acord, 6/10/2010 --------

Where It Began. I started work on what was "The Unnamed Sauer Mod" several months before releasing anything. I replaced most of the content(forgot a couple of things, like the n00b I am!), and modified some of the stuff in the SP mode. I dig that sort of gameplay. And then one day I updated Sauerbraten. The SP mode had been ripped out, the network code had been significantly altered(although I didn't notice), and as a result I released a very, VERY buggy beta. It was, in fact, unplayable. People tried anyways. During the process, I asked a lot of questions to one of the programmers in the community who seemed inclined to answer. He was very friendly and helpful. He seemed to know what he was doing. The Sauerbraten community did not want this person coding for Sauerbraten. But like me, he said FINE, if you don't like my ideas, I'll do my own thing! And I respected that. Because it's hard to be a lone wolf.
--------Acord, 6/8/2010 --------

Blood Frontier is dead. I've tried making my opinions and point of view known elsewhere. It's heartwarming to know that certain people SO BADLY want you to stay quiet while they continue to tear you down that they are willing to abuse their administrative privelidges on certain community websites to do so. The reasons that the project died are numerous. The conflicts have been less than private, but only recently did I become publicly critical of the project. I worked hard on it, although as an artist I don't have the luxury of repeatedly posting and tweaking something to get it right because of the long, involved process in creating certain types of models. Quin worked long and hard on it, often far more often than I did. I am physically capable, and as such I must work for a living. I have to better myself through education if I want to do something besides work in retail or substitute teach or freelance or do temp jobs that end and leave me broke and hunting again. I don't really have a choice in this, as the alternative is being a bum. I had some money to live on for awhile, and now it has run out. So any time that I spend outside of school and work must be regimented. And since I have bills to pay, I simply cannot afford to work on something indefinitely

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that isn't ever going to pay off. Houses don't pay themselves off. Bachelor's degrees are expensive and require time to boot. This does not even truly begin to describe why Blood Frontier is dead. But it is a good start. This is the beginning of a long series of posts. There is much more already written, and many more to follow. --------Acord, 6/7/2010 --------

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