Fallout Modder Interviews: Lexx and Ardent

No Mutants Allowed is continuing its series of interviews with Fallout 1/2/3/Tactics/New Vegas modders by interviewing two more modders with noteworthy achievements in Fallout 2 modding, Lexx (Shattered Destiny mod) and Ardent (Ardent’s Mod). Lexx:

7. You’re making Shattered Destiny 2 on your own. Considering your experience in the field, do you have any useful advice for other solo modders out there?

Yes. If you want to create a new mod / a total conversion, create design documents *before* starting anything. If you want to make a new game, start writing down *everything* you can think about. If you feel that there are parts that you have no ideas about, try to fill these holes *before* starting to work on the actual game. Because if you don’t work with good design documents, you will soon forget what you wanted to do here and there and hey wait! What happens if story chapter X and Z is finished, but you have no idea about Y yet? Ah well, let’s fill up that hole with something random..!

Sooner or later, working on the game will become a mess (if you continue to work on it anyway- most mods without concept are dead born) and the chances are actually pretty high that you have plot holes and elements that don’t make any sense at all. Additionally, creating design documents first will speed up the development later, because you know exactly what you want to do. That’s really important, because working alone means you have to motivate yourself alone as well.

This actually is also a good advice for non-solo modders, if not even more so, because working in a team requires that everyone knows what’s going on.

Ardent:

What work are you most proud of?

If you mean modding work, that’d be quite obviously my mod. All the praise I got for the first demo makes me very proud of it. As for specific parts/moments of the mod, I was very satisfied with the Factory: with the triple questline, with all the little details and choices that are there, with how much you have to watch out for what you’re doing, etc. Long story short, it came out exactly like I wanted it to. I hope I can maintain this quality for the remaining locations. I am also happy with my food system and other player-related systems that will appear in either Ardent’s Mod or Mutants Rising (or both).

Secondly, I am rather satisfied with some of my work for MR, both design-wise and script-wise. I won’t give more details before the game is out (it will be, really), sorry. However, to cheer you guys up a bit, I stole Lexx’s idea to include some screenshots in the interview, so have a look at some stuff that was made after I released the demo for Ardent’s mod. I have to warn you though, everything you’ll see here is still work in progress. There are imperfections and things may still change for the final release. The screens also contain some spoilers (nothing too bad, but still, you’ve been warned):