I looked at your some of your materials using the editor, and this is impressive work. I can see at a glance you've spent hundreds of hours on this project. You should do some salesmanship, you have a lot to be proud of here. Some things people would be interested to know are:
1) How many unique, brand-new maps did you make for your mod?
2) How many hours of gameplay do you estimate your mod offers?
3) It looks to me like the mod features a significant gameplay element of survival, hunting and gathering food, firewood, and so forth. Could you describe your approach to this feature from the design perspective? I can already forsee the Russians and Poles lining up to play your mod (since broadly speaking they're really into this sort of thing as well). Were there other games or mods for games that influenced either your general interest in this area, or your approach to implementation of resource and survival themed content? Would you say your approach to these themes focuses heavily on realism, or is stylized gameplay the primary element?
4) In addition to all the gameplay offered, your mod completely redesigns the game's interface with new artwork. How much time did you spend working on such features, and how did you decide on the style you chose to incorporate?
5) This is a major mod, which doesn't come along very often in the Fallout Tactics genre. I have no doubt people will be endlessly begging you to translate the whole thing into English. Do you have any plans to do so, or are there important reasons you feel keeping the mod in French accomplishes personal artistic goals?
6) Your mod features a large volume of what looks like original music. Are these pieces by artists you know personally who made them specifically for your mod? Does your soundtrack strive to express particular artists goals, and how do your soundtrack choices complement your general gameplay design goals?
7) Do you have an overall philosophy regarding the combat element of gameplay? How would you generally characterize your changes to the standard game's weapons, AP categories, and basic fighting styles?
8) What sparked your interest in the themes and style of gameplay explored by The Sum?
9) Many people don't have any idea what sort of effort serious modding entails. From the time you first began working on The Sum, can you estimate how much time producing this mod has required?
10) Do you have any advice for aspiring modders looking to get started making their own material? Are there advantages to working with the Fallout Tactics resources as opposed to other forms of modding or game design?
Oh thanks really for the comments and theses fascinating questions you're asking! It's obvious you took great deal of interest analyzing the mod. The answers may not be what you expect at first, which is quite interesting I think!
1) BRAND NEW MAPS? - None or almost! This is the part I just didn't spend a lot of time on. And I don't really intent to make new maps too. I will just modify what I already have. I create clips and add them to existing maps to make them more unique. Or I remove the whole 0 or -1 floor and change it with something else, removing sometimes the roads in the process. But in a way I think not creating maps is why I was in such trouble, and still am when making updates to the mod. Because I really think I found and kept TOO MUCH maps. I started the project by collecting ALL maps I could find, maps done by anybody. I then started to rename them to fit my mod's idea, then duplicate some (random maps) to create variations later (some variations are still to be done). There are so many damn good fan made maps... Fallout 1 is a GREAT game and there is only 13 locations + a handful of random/special maps. Think about that... Maybe I should had that in mind at the beginning...
2) HOURS OF GAMEPLAY? I'd like from a minute to weeks... More freedom the better. You choose when the game finishes because it stop when you decide where you will live your life from now on. It can be in a populated area (need or may not need permission, may be impossible because of enemies nearby) or an unpopulated area (need skills and equipment). Then the end change regarding your choices and you have a short story on the place where you end up and each place where your actions transformed some groups. So you can finish the game super quick, but your character will not have any personality and the game will tell you that you didn't learn much. If you played for hours, you may have a long long text filled with details. And when you finish the game, you can choose to continue (like in Fallout2) if you are not satisfied or if you just changed your mind.
3) APPROACH? I must say to be honest that I normally HATE surival games! You always start over. I really don't like when I begin to know my surroundings, feel the ambiance, dangers, explore and BANG the game ends because I am dead. I think it is better to start over only when you want it or save/load. I hate to have a countdown on my head. So I want to add all realistic elements just for stylized gameplay and immersion. Just to represent the freedom of movement and actions more and get closer to a real anarchistic open world. Also to distract the player from killing and looting. I even want to add a special text if you never killed a human. For example, I really like Fallout 3 game with all the ambiance, textures and all, but I don't really like to spend all my time killing mutants, carrying a gun or doing quests. I'll be happy in some way if in my mod some players never keep weapons in their hands because they can do without most of the time and want to use other things. Or only keep one fighting character with them. At first, I only wanted to be able to create a fire, then I thought about how nice it would be to just have a full campsite somehere and carry it with you, then I tried to find a way to sleep anywhere like in Fallout 2, etc. etc. That went really farther that I thougt!
4) INTERFACE? Maybe a full week? You make me think I should offer to download my main photoshop files, I mean files containing the original interface and all small parts of interface in it at the right place on separate layers. So you create an image of the whole screen the way you want it and you just copy/paste the parts in the number of .zar files needed. The file names are the layer names. It really save time.
I knew I had to change the interface because I wanted to change game's terms like Pipboy, and wanted to change skills and perks too and knew I would need some new pip boy images I could not do. Also a friend who never played Fallout at all told me that the Steampunk rusted interface didn't worked with my game. So my goal first was to have a minimalist and all virtual interface, a futuristic computer interface. So I took some pointers from Google Chrome and Mac OSX. I wanted to add the edges of different kinds of smartphones and watches around the screens and a hand or arm to hold thm , a bit like in fallout 3, but I realised it is just too hard. As soon as you make any background bigger, all the elements go to the very top left of the background you added and go off the screen. So finally I only kept the minimalistic interface. I removed A LOT of things like VATS and terms like "Use on", "Single" and "Swing". I just kept the minimal, like "Throw" and "Activate". I also removed all action points icons, but I think I may have to put that back. I'll probably do that on in a very simple way, with black dots, black "A" or something.
5) ENGLISH? It is 100% sure I will come with an english approx. translation very soon. Next month if I can? But for artistic reasons hehe I will keep all french speakers dialogues in french! So the interface and narrations will be in english, but eventually dialogues will be either in french or english depending where you are and who you speak to... I would like the character to be able to respond in the two languages only if he have enough of speech skill. That could be funny and practical! So english or french only speakers could keep their speech skill low if they don't want their character to say things they don't understand, and then their character will say something like "Sorry I don't speak french" and the other character could continue in english if he/she can.
6) MUSIC? All music come from a friend of mine, Antonio de Braga (antoniodebraga.bandcamp.com). I never thought he would be SO INTO IT! It's incredible. At the beginning I wanted between 10 and 20 original tracks. He already done probably 50 original tracks for the game and keep making some more, I can't believe it! And all this material stays his and he is planning on selling two albums out of this fabulous stuff, "The Sum" and "Nous Aurons". The Sum is post-apocalyptic inspired, and Nous Aurons is more utopia inspired tracks for populated locations. (The Sum is already on sale! : antoniodebraga.bandcamp.com/album/the-sum) So now my goal is to do a bit like Jodorowsky wanted to do in Dune (a different group for each planet). I want to add an original music piece for each main location! And I plan on adding some random minutes of silence before and/or after each track to have moments of pure sound effects in the game. I like what effect it creates in Tactics, the wind and so on, no music. Music sometimes don't give a strong feeling of being totally alone somewhere in the wasteland.
7) WEAPONS? This will be the hard part for me, as I did the same thing for the weapons as I did for the maps. I brought together so many, I feel I will never be able to balance all that. But I think this will add nice randomness to the game. I like Fallout and Fallout 2 because you can come across impossible combats from the beginning of the game, enter very nasty and dangerous areas, or get special powerfull weapons sometimes quick to transform the game. Also, in Tactics I like the way you can win combats in a semi-realistic way, step by step, even if the battle seems impossible at first. At this point, I think I will have more arcade style combat to my mod because of less guns in general, because you can beat groups without killing everyone, because often the enemies will not kill all your characters and let you go, and because of the focus on so many other things in the game. Also there will not be any XP from combat and ways to teleport away from it (using GPS devices or other devices). Also, combat will just be one way of solving problems. Like doing combat to get back the objects stolen from you, attack a group that exiled you to have the right to stay somewhere, attack animals to eat, attack an electric system to beat down forcefields, etc.
8) THEMES AND STYLE OF GAMEPLAY? I first wanted to create an post-apocalyptic art video game. The "art" part was not easy to conceive. I am a visual artist and I did conceptual exhibitions just before about survival and apocalypse (buying thousands of dollars of food for survival and making a grocery store-like exhibition out of it). But that time I wanted to make a video game and add something more to the pessimistic view of the future. So I ended up choosing to make a project more on utopia and finally the real meaning of anarchy. I was trying to bring to life my own personal ideas on what could be the perfect society and link that with our present time and be very critical about that time. And I thought of Fallout, the most popular game with that much freedom of movement and actions... and also about creating a city for each blurry idea of a perfect society I could have or find.
9) PRODUCTION TIME? It's been about two years now of full time work. Time pass so quickly... I can do that because I got artistic grants for my work from art councils, so it is a very serious thing I'm trying to accomplish yess! I think this is the only way I can do all this without having to bring together a team.
10) ADVICE? TACTICS RESSOURCES? I didn't try modding a lot of games but I was lucky, I think I took the best. Newer games than Tactics are too complicated in my idea & time consuming because of all that 3D. And retro-gaming is very popular anyways! Older games like Fallout 1 & 2 don't have great creation tools and are coded in C++ or other cryptic languages. Maximum freedom, too long to program. Yes Tactics is the best, and is also because you can make a new objects with just one small image! And you really have to force your way through the mod or forget your damn spawning points to create a bug. For advice, I'll say make a small game first with a simple main quest and not too much core missions. Do the Worldmap at the very end and do it completely in one shot, map image and movement map first. If you don't do that, you will have to start all of it over at a moment or another. I had to. Create a starting map called "start" and use it just to call all your global variables, give special starting items to the player, play a video and redirect the player to the start mission. This is very annoying to have to change campaign.cam or walk a LONG time in your worldmap just to test a map! Or move start triggers to a new mission if you want later to change the start mission. Or have to duplicate thoses triggers. It's way better just to open start.mis and change the trigger for the right mission and test instantly. You can even use that start.mis mission to create multiple beginning maps for different prefab chars. And maybe don't spend too much time on map design unless you like it A LOT, because there are hundreds and hundreds of great maps to choose from and it is way easier to just adapt them or change any part you want than doing a map from scratch... And finally, if there is something you don't want to do, don't want to have in your mod or feel you will waste ALL your time doing it, try to remove it completely from your mod and ask for advices on how to do that. A lot of things can be totally removed (worldmap, random encounters, special maps, portraits, custom chars, vats, exit grids, radiation, etc. etc.), you could be surprised how much.
Eagerly awaiting an English version.
