“No.”
That’s the first thing Dean ‘Prilladog’ Carter, project manager for Fallout: London, said with a cheeky grin when I asked him, and besides being clearly not a modding newbie, he’d also give it to anyone who’s seen Any advice from the Fallout: London guys.
He’s obviously joking, but there’s a serious point here – don’t sign up for something like this unless you know exactly what you’re getting into and are sure you want to do it.
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Having now completed the development of a large mod, the FOLON team knows better than any other team on the planet how to deliver such a large and impressive project while working on the side, but it requires a lot of adapting and tweaking to learn how to get there .
Take the mod’s sheer scale, for example, and maintain a balance between sticking to the plan in terms of functionality and allowing for moments of creative inspiration during development. “I guess in a weird way we didn’t [do that]that’s why it got so big,” Carter said. “It’s a known fact that content creep kills projects. We certainly — because obviously this project started during the pandemic — we had two years to throw stuff against the wall and see what stuck. , and then it got out of hand, but then we conquered Everest,” he continued, adding: “Once we kind of liked getting to the top and we got a little tired of all the other ideas we had come up with, we were like, ‘ Well, to this point, we’re more down to earth now’.
Knowing there wouldn’t be another pandemic and therefore “two more years of free time,” the FOLON team had a handle on priorities and got used to asking the tough but necessary questions – “”Do we need this?” No. “Do we have time to fit it all in?” No.
While projects of this nature are often considered to have a different vibe than their counterparts in the gaming industry itself, these projects are developed by for-profit studios that don’t exist in the gray space between work and hobby that modding does. Zone, Carter said that in order to make Fallout: London a reality, the FOLON team had to adopt at least some of the same mindset as the pros. Of course, since the team doesn’t have a large number of people volunteering their time without any compensation to develop the mod, the project leader needs a unique approach to managing people.
“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on this. I don’t want to say harsh, but we’ve basically run this because [though] we are one [professional] Studio,” Carter admits, “I feel like in order to push things over the line, you have to do that. “Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s a hobby element to this, and that’s one of the questions we ask people when they join,” he explained. “We’re actually asking, ‘What are your goals?’ “Some people say bluntly, “I want to be involved in this industry because I want to find a job in this industry.” Some people say they want to get involved because it’s a hobby, [saying things like] “I want to do something fun with other people on the weekends.” We let them tell us what they want to do, or how they expect it to work, and obviously that can change in development, but that then tells me as a project manager how I can manage that person.
“It sounds strange, but if your aim is to work in this industry, if you start working at Sainsbury’s and then suddenly move into one of the fastest-paced industries, then it’s going to be a wake-up call for you. Those industries that require you to do this, this, and this, and then the company says, “We’re going to start working overtime.” This will be a wake-up call and you’ll say “no, can’t do it” and burn out. However, if you work for free on one of these projects, you’ll be prepared, and we’ve noticed [is that] People have done that and gone to the studio or whatever and they hit the ground running. We have a lot of people now who have gone to Game Studio and have been promoted in the time it has taken for our mod to be completed, and they’re really saying ‘you’ve prepared us so well for this.
Leaders also have to figure out how to handle two of the most difficult things any studio, professional or amateur, can face: the sudden departure of employees, and maintaining positive relationships with potential players. In the former case, the FOLON team had to deal with the Russian-Ukrainian war, which resulted in developers involved in key mission lines suddenly and inevitably abandoning their posts, leaving the team with no choice but to find ways to stay calm and move on.
“We’re not a big corporate entity, and if we suddenly lose these people, we can pay more people and they come in and get the job done quickly,” Carter told me. “We’re a small team with a human element, just like if – Touch wood it’s not going to happen – but if something happened to me, it would have a huge impact on the team if something happened to the leader of that department. We all experience loss in our lives. You know, this happens all the time.
“It’s the human element, you know, and I probably still wouldn’t change that. I don’t like the fact that, ‘Oh, I’ve known you for four years, oh my gosh, I have to find a replacement.’ I actually really don’t like that when I hear that, because obviously the industry has this problem right now, which is why they started forming these unions and there are these new laws and people are protesting now. So yeah, I don’t like people being fungible. I think it takes away their humanity and I love this close knit family [feel we have]”.
Then there’s the latter, with Carter stressing that the approach taken by the FOLON team is not to allow developers to speak out in the mod’s public Discord without consequences, but rather aims to handle any mishandled situations in a fair manner. “We would hold meetings and say to people ‘for every 10 people who really like it, one will come to you,'” the modder said, adding that Reddit in particular was a challenge in this regard.
“I won’t deny it sometimes, even for myself, when you try to do PR, the facade slips,” he said. “At the end of the day we’re just human beings, and things like this are going to happen eventually.” Someone, you know, they’re going to Say something snarky to you and you basically tell them to get off the server in a rude way. Like we’re humans, you know, it happens and we’ve sent the message [team members] after that [saying] “You could have done better.” At the end of the day, that’s one of the things that I actually really enjoyed about continuing to run our own company, because I don’t think I’d want to run it in a particularly different way. We need humans and I don’t want us to get into a corporate space like this and become worse than we are. One of our greatest strengths is that we are human; [and] We as humans interact with other humans.
Carter says this fundamental approach and emphasis on the human element is something he insists the FOLON team maintains, as it makes for a next step that some members of the FOLON team may have been hinting at in different ways for a while – becoming a full-scale indie game. studio.
“Basically, my vision for future endeavors is that we’ll make a different game,” the modder told me. Say, if an investor came to us and said, ‘Okay, you have to do this, this, and this,’ I would say, ‘No, I’m going to find someone who’s a better fit for us.’ I’d rather be in our To feel happy in our development and enjoy what we do, and then become a soulless entity that only does what the shareholders say it will do.
For now, though, as the organization focuses on fixing and eventually adding content that had to be cut in Fallout: London, the organization plans to try and help anyone who might be inspired to start their own foray into the massive world. The implications of doing this need to be clearly understood. Carter believes there are many aspects to this that people may not realize, from having to organize to pay to maintain basic project necessities such as a website or even something like Discord to allow your team to communicate, to the likelihood that you will end up not will get a “pat on the head” from the company behind the game you’re modding, even though it does let you mod its games.
“this [community] “I really hope that we make some kind of video that basically explains all of this stuff in detail,” Carter said. “I hope that from that video, because we will do that, where we explain it, it won’t be out of a Kind of feels right or we know best because we’re just modders.
He added: “The thing with inspiration is that it might seem like a good idea, but you might not realize how much that idea takes over your life. If I was working the hours I’m working now, I don’t know, I’d be Might live in a bigger house but no I don’t have a job, I’ve been working for free with a creative kit, no money, my savings have been wiped out, please excuse my expletives, it’s like they disappeared. Same.
“People don’t realize the sacrifice that goes into something like this, and the most important thing is that you can be inspired but understand the sacrifice. The biggest advice is to research how long it takes and how many man-hours it takes, and if you can’t do it , I would say, then look at other people doing it.
