Work-in-Progress Spotlight
July 29th, 2009 by Scud

Silent Evil

By Tanks_fst</strong> and <strong>Popeychops

It may seem odd featuring a project that is already up and ready for download at The Blacksmith, but allow me to explain (in the only way a talentless hack can do, by by making some half-baked social comment on ‘the industry’). I’ve always ponder why the majority of gamers (I did warn you this was going to sound like some half-rate piece of ‘gaming journalism’ [sic]) whine and complain about the lack of downloadable content and or the developers not releasing a patch every other week. Back in the older days of PC gaming you got one or two patches a few months apart and that was it, maybe one expansion or even sometimes two if the game sold really well. This increase in after-release support has also become a steady trend within our own designing community, with projects being patched, tweaked or even completely redesigned. This is my rationale for featuting ‘Silent Evil’ by Tanks_fst and Popeychops – it has been released but don’t expect these two to be sitting around doing nothing. By combining their efforts and working together they have been able to produce a quality piece of work in a relatively short space of time. Though they they are less well-seasoned members of our community their work, as well as themselves, have been very much accepted into the community and thus we can only suspect we’ll be seeing much more of them in the future. Either working together, or as individuals, I’m very much looking forward to what they have planned.

However, enough talk about the future and let us talk about the here and now, ‘Silent Evil’. It is in a very playable state, so download it now if you haven’t all ready, but this fun little gem is set to only get better. Though Popey states there are only ‘minor bugs’ that need sorting, his co-designer Tanks thinks there is much more that can be done stating ‘nothing is ever truly finished’. To revert back to being a video game journalist (an oxymoron of the highest order) for just a second, one could say what these two have planned is very much like the example I stated earlier. Ok, they will not be redeveloping the wheel, but they will carry on to iron out all bugs and perhaps add new content from time to time. But enough of this rambling, I’m sure we all want to hear about the gameplay. I don’t really have to sell this much as it’s a survival horror set within the zombie apocalypse, albeit in London. You may think that wouldn’t work very well AoK, but with clever trigger tricks such a survival counter and the various RPG-esque features such as gaining XP it is well worth a play. So download it today, but keep your eyes on The Blacksmith for an update isn’t that far away!

For this week, I’ve actually managed to hunt down two people, seeing as this is a co-operative project after all:

Seeing as there are two of you working on this project, what troubles have you faced when trying to coordinate its development?

Tanks: Well me and Popeychops have been good friends for some time now, so there wasn’t that many problems. The way we worked together was we would each take a turn in Silent Evil’s development, whether it was map design or trigger work. In the end though I feel that Popeychops did a lot of the Map Design, and I was the Trigger-guy.

Popey: To begin with we experimented with the TeamViewer remote assistance program, but found this to be slow. This meant the idea of us making it while both watching went out the window. We spent most days of development (hence most of the time we were developing it) while having a verbal discussion, which meant everything was discussed between the two of us. We ended up making it in small stages, sending the file over when we got bored. This meant we didn’t have any pauses, and sped up the creation of the scenario. I recommend co-op designing to anyone who has considered it.

Following on from the previous question, has there been ‘artistic differences’ between yourselves?

Tanks: There has been some artistic differences, yes. When Map Designing, I tended to do more urban, run-down city looks. Living in a council owned estate, I had lots of inspiration. Whilst Popeychops was map designing, I believe he did lot more open, upper class areas (for example: The King’s Palace, The Business Area etc).

Popey: The entire piece has been an insight into our personalities, as we began making serious bosses, such as “Mutated Man”?. Later on however, we began with “Mutated Rabbit”?, a war elephant, and a spearman named… you don’t want to know, really. Tanks made the first section of the map, which featured heavy terrain mixing but no buildings, while my first few sections involved minimalistic terrain, with simple building structures. Tanks later made the main housing estate, which is a brilliant, geometrically orientated complex. I made what because codenamed the ‘scientific area’, with wide open spaces, large groups of buildings and eyecandy. As I live in southern England, and Tanks in Scotland, I live in a much more ‘open’ landscape, with more agriculture (which I included).

So the file is already in the Blacksmith as we speak, but as I understand there are still a few minor updates to be done. Seeing as you had very vigorous set of play testers surely these should have been sorted out before this ‘final’ release?

Tanks: The play testers we had REALLY did help with a lot of the bug fixing and updating. Mostly all bugs are fixed, except from the minority of small, hardly noticeable bugs. As for the few minor updates – they are mainly ideas that me and Popeychops have thought in a case of “This could be like that”. As for the ‘final’ release, think of this as a brand new computer game. There will always be an update or a bug-fixing patch. Nothing is ever truly finished.

Popey: Our playtesters were fantastic, and we sorted so many bugs before we released it. I focused on most of the trigger fixes, while Jake did the more ‘creative’ solutions. When we felt the map was in a playable condition we made it ready to be hosted. Currently, the only problems are very minor balance tweaks and help for new players. The fixes for these would involve modifying the statistics of one or two units, and making one map revealer unit.

This questions has come up many a time before, but it is worth asking again to see different people’s opinions. What would you say to those who might say you made a “noobish” decision by filling your scenario with forumer cameos?

Tanks: I personally would say to them: “It’s just a bit of fun”. The cameos have been put in there for a couple reasons, 1. It was a fun idea that we would have AoKH members running around this post-apocalyptic London, and it would make for a fun and interesting challenge trying to ‘free’ said cameos. The second reason is a more personal one from me – It is an apology to AoKH for creating a small ‘hype’ for my old “Silent Hill” project which never saw the light of completion. As well as being a big ‘Thank you’ to those forum members that have helped both me and Popeychops in this time of development.

Popey: We wanted to thank some of the people who helped make it possible, and the cameos are convertible (apart from yours, oddly enough), meaning careful protection of them can result in an extra unit for that player. Player 3 does not get a ranged unit, so for him the ranged character is a must have.

I’m running out of ways to say ‘here are three screenshots’: