EPISODE 1784

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:01] ANNOUNCER: Fallout London is a 2024 total conversion mod developed by Team FOLON. The mod is based on Fallout 4 by Bethesda Softworks and takes place in a post-apocalyptic rendition of London. The project is remarkable for its ambition and scope, with the small indie team delivering a fully realized open-world RPG. 

Daniel Morrison Neil led music composition, audio design, and the voice acting department for the project. Jordan Albon was the lead 3D artist and the build master in charge of version control. They joined the show with Joe Nash to talk about Fallout London and its development. 

Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got a start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. 

[INTERVIEW]

[0:01:10] JN: Daniel and Jordan, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? 

[0:01:13] DMN: Yeah. Very well. Thank you. 

[0:01:13] JA: Hello. 

[0:01:15] JN: Perfect. Well, so as I mentioned, we're here to talk about a mod which was literally everywhere at the start of this year, this wonderful Fallout conversion mod which hits a lot of beats for me being from near enough London and living a lot of my life in Hackney. I was very excited to see this mods existence and a lot of stuff you've hit. And before we get into talking about the particulars, I think it'd be useful to introduce yourselves and what you did in the team. Daniel, do you want to kick us off? 

[0:01:36] DMN: Yeah. I'm Daniel Morrison Neil and I was the lead of audio. I've written to do both the music composition, audio design and implementation, as well as leading the voice acting department. 

[0:01:49] JN: Perfect. And Jordan? 

[0:01:50] JA: Yeah. Hello, I'm Jordan Albon. I am the lead 3D artist and build master of Fallout London. I'm in charge of anything 3D related, managing the 3D team and all the stuff they create with the beautiful little things we put in the game, and version controls. The actual updates and redistributing it to the team, keeping everyone up to date, getting everyone's files together. 

[0:02:10] JN: Perfect. Buildmasters is a cool title. That's a good one to have. And we'll come to what's - that's a very divergent process going from 3D asset creation to being the version control steward. We'll come to that in a bit. But I guess the start, for folks who aren't super familiar or who missed the news, I think it'd be great to talk a little bit about what Fallout London is and what it includes. I guess in a nutshell, what is Fallout London. Daniel, do you want to start? 

[0:02:32] DMN: Yeah. Fallout London is a complete total conversion mod which has been worked on over the past five years and it seeks to recreate the whole of London or at least a condensed version of London within the Fallout 4 universe. And pretty much entirely new story, new soundtrack, all new 3D assets. Everything's pretty much brand new in it. And everything that's been designed for it has got a kind of lovely British London twist to do with it. 

[0:03:06] JN: A reassuring shade of grey and a little dinge of everything is terrible, but we like it that way. I guess the important thing that I wanted to cover as well at the start is I guess the nature of it being a mod and the team. And this is something I want to ask you all about a bit later as well, but possibly the high-end of PR I've ever seen for a mod in terms of the pickup from so many games. Publications reviewed it as a game, which I've not seen from a mod before, which is really impressive. And I know that did lead to some confusion and folks not necessarily realizing that y 'all did this in your free time, right? This is a volunteer effort. 

[0:03:43] JA: Yes, all voluntary. Yeah. 

[0:03:44] JN: Perfect. And, Jordan, I guess, since you interact with us the build master, can you tell us a little bit about the team and I guess the structure and how you work together on it? 

[0:03:52] JA: Yeah. Oh, lordy. I was there since the start, and I can tell you now the team has changed a lot from what it originally was. The whole project changed from what it originally was. But the goal never changed. That was bring Fallout to London. As for the team though. Yeah, it's a mixed bag. Essentially, there's no commitment to, say, submit anything, if that makes sense. Everyone's hobbyists. They all work in their free time. There's no contract or anything like that. It's basically whatever you can chip into the project. 

And what kind of naturally happened was after the lockdown from COVID hit, you found that there was a few characters, two of us sitting in here who - actually, Danski, I can't remember if he was there then. I feel like he was. 

[0:04:36] DMN: I just joined at that point. That's a bit of a funny story. 

[0:04:41] JA: Yeah. It's all a burn out. It's a while ago. We had a few characters who just were there all the time. And these became the heads of departments. They were probably the most capable to run all of the other modders and people who are on the team, ranging from 2D artists, 3D artists, level designers, scriptors, you name it. Any department. Eventually, I will actually include Danski's department as well. That eventually went into a whole audio and media department as the PR picked up close to release. And when audio - 90,000 lines of dialogue, I think it's actually more than that now. When all of them had to be edited, it was Danski team go. It's collecting a whole bunch of people together for that as well who were previous members. One of them was a 2D artist. And then he started doing the dialogue editing with Danski, which is brilliant. 

I wish I could put a bow tie on it, but it's quite complicated. Like I said, there's no commitment from people, but you have to kind of gently urge people to get things done. Some people have various ways of handling that. But, from the start, we said, "Here's our deadline. We want to get it done by then," which I think really helped us because we could be voluntary, unpaid. There's no commitment financially to basically go, "Oh, we can do this forever." 

And I think a lot of us quickly realized the Fallout 4 modding scene was - and from being very popular, each mod would get millions of downloads, and it reached a point where that was really starting to slow down. Because of course, so many games came out since its release. A lot of the community had moved on, which is completely understandable. And I think we quickly realized that as a team and was like, "Boom. Deadline. Let's hit it." This does link into the PR as well. We had this whole thought of this is our internal deadline. Why not make it public? And that was our first initial release date. That's when we wanted to be done. And a few hiccups then happened. But yeah, that's the best I can give you on that, really. This is anything on this. 

[0:06:44] JN: Yeah, that's perfect. 

[0:06:46] DMN: Yeah. The way that all of it was kind of structured was, I think, modern is like quite a unique kind of avenue of game development, I would say, because you're already working with pre-existing material and it's based on changing something. Generally, what happens with this kind of community building aspect is it's lots of people want to change a game or what their ideal version is or create some type of story avenue from that. And it actually allows for the facilitation of actually having leads of department, actual departments know that there's this kind of mixture of role-playing as a game studio as well. 

I mean, we did model ourselves as close to getting stuff done and everything with all of that. But it's common amongst any kind of mod group to approach it from that way, where you have a leader department, things are delegated as tasks throughout the week and everything. And people kind of enjoy that because it's an easy way for like portfolio building, for example. Like writer for a game or whatever, if they're working on something, it's difficult to get into writing for games without having a game to work with. That's like a really good entry point for people to start working with pre-existent material. And it's more about learning how to change something rather than create something completely from scratch. It's a really good entry point for building portfolio as well. 

[0:08:08] JN: Yeah, absolutely. And I definitely want to come back to that point later because I know a lot of the team are, I guess, what you'd call "early career" in terms of being recent grads and that kind of stuff. I'm very interested in how that's influenced your directions. But just sticking with, I guess, the workflow and the team pattern for now. Because I think it's such a fascinating choice of game and also doing a total conversion to have gone for as a target. Because normally - well, not normally, but quite often a mod, even in Fallout 4, for a Bethesda game, is I want to make this aspect of the game better. I want to change this one thing. And it's very easy for me to conceptualize the volunteer work there. How everyone kind of knows what they're doing. Whereas when you're saying, "We're going to recreate pretty much all of zone one and two and then we're going to populate that and make it feel like a living place. So we're going to have all these things in it." 

I mean, I guess just how does that work organize? I imagine there must just be someone who's just looking for the map and going, "There's a blank space there that needs something. That's a ticket. Give it to the team." How does that work? I guess, as said, Daniel, there's tasks being doled out. But it just seems like a monumental effort with so much space and so much that needs doing, but actually getting an idea of what needs doing and getting it farmed out for everyone to do it in this scale just seems absurd to me. But maybe I'm being pessimistic about volunteer projects. 

[0:09:22] JA: The example you just gave there was actually really good to kind of pull from. How you said there's this little blank space on the map and use it. I would say that most organization came from - I'd say [Name inaudible 0:09:32], he is the project lead. He was the one who really drove everyone to kind of keep going in a way. Like, "What are you doing today?" Right? And it's like, "Oh, no." Some people might see pressure in that. But no, I think it's really good for people. 

But like I said, the example you gave with there's this little spot. That was what really worked well when it came to getting the quests and actually the level design finished, we saw people going, "Ah, where's this little empty spot on the map?" Use that. And it was just constantly being done. And I feel like it was like an empty whiteboard and they kept sponging out marks and that sort of thing until it was all filled out. I don't know if you want to say anything on that, Danski. 

[0:10:10] DMN: I'm not bad about those kinds of things. Probably not the most overall. But I do know for things like level design or whatever, they were creating a lot of London from Google Maps or whatever. And that's a way to descend and to just keep designing and designing and designing. But they all love doing that as well. Because, I mean, level design is like, to an extent, you get a load of assets like Lego bricks and you're essentially building a big level yourself and having fun with it. 

And with a lot of that, because there was so much world space, which was led by Wolfy and [Name inaudible 0:10:45] doing all of that, and they pushed for all of that to happen, all those kind of blank spaces and everything because of the things to do like British culture, whatever it is. A TARDIS could go here. This would be a cool little bit for that. It kind of worked very naturally with that. A lot of it was quite level design focused for a lot of things as the playground. And I think that's a testament to how they done everything because it meant spaces had to be filled or else it would be empty. 

But, of course, it wasn't a case of having to always create something always new all the time with everything. It was either we need enemies here. We'll put them there. Or stuff to do with let's make a fun little reference to something to do with British history. It was really quite natural more so than, "Oh, we need to fill this space out. Or we need to design that or this kind of thing." It kind of flourished quite natural, at least from the way that I'd seen it all work. 

[0:11:39] JA: I think it really depends on the department as well. Certain departments had - it's not that they had a great load of work, but the work was almost more nitty-gritty. Whereas there were certain processes. I would say, for example, Danski with the audio editing, he nailed it. The dialogue editing. He added everything. The engine, you can export everything out into spreadsheets. And it's all really organized from the get go. Whereas with the 3D art, it's just kind of bonked together. And same for the level design. We ended up creating Google sheets to track stuff because there's no way you can really track it in the engine. And I do feel like that really did play into how things got completed as an overall - how everything got completed and put together really.

[0:12:23] JN: Right? Well, you've both said things in that past bit that have triggered me to bring into our next topic. Because we've hit the engine and we've hit the term world space. I know a little bit about Bethesda game modding. I know about the creation kit. And when I was looking at the creation kit in preparation for this episode, I was like - I was watching videos, people using it. And I was watching it like chug along, trying to load some stuff. And I was like, "There is no way they've done the work of this scale, this mod purely in the creation kit." Was that the tooling? Was that the base? It was all the official creation kit. 

[0:12:55] JA: Yeah. Of course, the 3D. Not as much audio. Certain things, absolutely not. But yeah - 

[0:13:02] JN: The core modding.

[0:13:03] JA: Yeah. There's two kind of discerning things. I'd say one of them is the master file. The master file is this little file. It's not that little. It's like 250 megs. 300 now. I remember when it was like 15 megs. Anyway, that master file is what the game goes, "Oh, hi." That's where all the world spaces and all the information is stored. This is where that character stands. This is the pose that they're doing. Whereas the assets and everything are kind of localized outside of that. They're completely different files. The really big asset files. 

[0:13:34] JN: I guess she tells us a little bit about the creation kit and how it would compare to, I guess, a more - I don't want to say more typical, but like a commercial engine like Unity or etc. What tools are you working with there? 

[0:13:44] JA: Yeah. Things with Unity and Unreal, they'll package everything into their own asset formats. Whereas, of course, with Creation Kit, they use proprietary or quite outdated stuff, being the nit-immersed game formats. Gamebryo, if anyone's ever heard of it, that really goes back as a really old multiplayer engine from, I think, 1995. And that's what eventually was used to build Morrowind. And it went from there to Fallout 3, Skyrim. They kept updating it. 

And I think that is something really interesting about the games industry is you see - I try to find a game engine that isn't based on CryEngine. The amount of game engines, you go, "What game is this game engine using or whatever?" And it's like, "Oh, it's a fork of CryEngine. Okay." It really goes back. Yeah, the Creation Kit's quite archaic. It's old, but it's really user friendly. It's definitely built for speed. And everything's on the screen. Everything you need is there. Unless you start doing something really quite deep and technical, then you really need to start rubbing brain cells together. Like, "Oh, God, what am I doing?" 

But yeah, when it actually comes to, I'd say, the art, the level design, building the world, it's really intuitive to use. And as Danski was saying earlier with people almost - or even yourself, with people coming out of university, graduates, et cetera. I would say for someone who wants to get into game design, the Creation Kit is brilliant for it. It's a really kind of user-friendly thing to use. And you start it with millions of assets to just jump in and build something, which I think is great. That definitely helped us. There's two sides to that coin being Fallout 4 is based in Boston, which has a lot of New England architecture, which absolutely helped us a lot. A lot of the architecture just fall in place. 

[0:15:31] JN: Never thought of that. Fascinating. Yeah. Again, the scale thing. I think I can't remember where I saw this, but I saw someone mentioned - one of the team mentioned somewhere in an interview that the size of it caused you issues in numerous ways. I think distribution, that was one of the reasons you went with GOG, right? That you couldn't upload it to Nexus Mods. 

[0:15:47] JA: Yeah. Yeah. Some of the - I'll get a bit more technical if you like. Just for example, the textures are always - no matter what the game is, the textures are the number one thing that cause you to lose hard drive space. Of course, with the Creation Kit, it uses DDS format, which I think DDS format did very well. It's a pretty awesome format. Very good compression. Quite a lot less than certain settings. And then you archive it all, which compresses everything down even more. 

But yeah, we absolutely hit the size limit of the Nexus, which we originally wanted to release on. Because of course, big mod, big modding website. Why not? Well, I think to be honest, back then, we were kind of quite amateur about it in the sense that we're just like, "Yeah, we put it on the Nexus." We didn't even question whether they would take it or not. That's me speaking, honestly, when it was early days. 

And then when it came to realization of like, "How are we going to get this to people?" We tried to go through Steam. But the Steam process was a bit tricky, because if we wanted to do it in any official manner, we had to go through Steam and Bethesda. And that quickly became a juggling game of like mommy and daddy fighting. Are we talking to you? Are we talking to you? And we quickly lost interest because our deadline was creeping up closer and closer. 

And we ended up having to look, "Oh, no. We need to build launchers, installers." We need to get permission from Bethesda itself, which is harder than people think. We did have some communication with some people, but they can't just go, "Yeah, put it on Steam, guys." They have to go to their manager, who probably has to go to their manager, and then they probably have a meeting. And we were just getting nowhere with it. And then that's when - I can't remember. I feel like GOG reached out to us, if I remember. 

[0:17:29] DMN: I seem to remember that it was the case that they'd reach out. Yeah. 

[0:17:32] JA: Yeah, I believe it was someone called Virgil who was our kind of - he ended up being our manager, if you will, at GOG, who really stayed in contact with us. They reached out to us and said, "Yo, I'd love to host Fallout London." I think they saw some potential in it. They of course wanted to grow their platform because - I was actually quite surprised at how many people didn't have GOG installed even on the team. Some of us did. But they're absolutely lovely people. And it was only after like people really start to look up who they were. They went, "Oh my, God. It's CDPR." And a lot of people know who CDPR are. 

[0:18:05] JN: Oh, I didn't actually know that. As in CD Projekt Red? 

[0:18:07] JA: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. 

[0:18:08] JN: Oh, I had no idea they were linked. Okay. 

[0:18:10] JA: Yeah. Well, they're essentially the same company. They're not. They are not. GOG is separate, but they're very closely interlinked. I don't know how much I can say on that front. 

[0:18:10] JN: Yeah. No. No. Yeah. 

[0:18:23] DMN: At one point, I got sent a drive link to upload stuff and it had like all the CDPR team on it. I was like, "Oh -"

[0:18:30] JN: The joys of nested corporate structures. They always blow the line somewhere. Yeah, but I knew them as like the DRM free Game Space or the retro Game Space. But like, yeah, I had no idea they're related. That's really interesting. Okay. Yeah, sorry to interrupt. Yeah. 

[0:18:41] JA: Again, I don't want to speak too much on it. I don't know how closely related they are. I do know they are very close in terms of where they are based. And they definitely speak to each other. You may have to correct me there because I think - 

[0:18:56] JN: I've just looked it up. They're wholly owned by CD Projekt Red. You're correct. 

[0:18:58] JA: Excellent. I was right. Brilliant. Yeah. Sorry. I just realized what happened there. Excellent. I have vague memories of people saying they were based on them. Okay. Yeah, the moment people really looked up who they were, it's like, "Oh my God. This is like a match made in heaven." Because we're a bunch of lowly, obvious to modders. And you have these really humble people who are absolutely lovely. And they make great games as well. Like, "Come on guys. Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk." 

[0:19:24] JN: Particularly in the genre you're modding for, right? Like open world RPGs. Yeah. 

[0:19:27] JA: Exactly. But that's the thing. They also really promote their modding. They love modders, of course, for however many reasons that might be. But they're really supportive of their modding community. People can argue not as much with Cyberpunk. Because every time they update, everything breaks. But if you own anything on GOG, that's Steam users. Remember that, guys. That is Steam in itself. That is a big nightmare of Steam. Whereas on GOG, you just install the game you want and the version that you want. And then you optionally update it. You never have to update the game. That's the whole joy of their entire platform. 

Again, this is why it really was a match made in heaven. The fact that their platform is DRM free, they have no obligation to keep the games updated, the users that is. They don't roll out automatic updates unless you have it turned on. You install whatever version of the game you want. You own that software sort of thing. You have control over it in that sense. Whereas on Steam, as many people know it, will just force update. You can manually get around it, but it's not - you don't want to ask your average user to go into their Steam files and set things as read-only and all this other stuff. Compared to GOG, DRM free just being like, "Oh, you click the button then you have that version of the game." There was lots of things happening there. Well, I think it couldn't have gone any better. With the complications in the Steam side of stuff, you compare that to GOG when - of course, there was the complication of Bethesda's next gen update, which had us on the edges of our seats. 

[0:21:00] JN: Yeah. Sorry. Just for folks who haven't been following the news on all of your trials to release, do you want to briefly summarize what happened there? 

[0:21:07] JA: Yeah. So, I don't know if Danski can clarify. I think it was two days before our intended release day of April 23rd. 

[0:21:17] DMN: Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, I think it was. Yeah.

[0:21:20] JA: Yeah. I had been keeping a close eye on the Steam database. If anyone knows on the Steam database, you can see when builds of games are being updated. And you'll see what the newest version is. And if there's any in what's called the staging branch or staging essentially before it goes out to the public, you can see that. And it's all public information. A few of us was keeping an eye on it. And we saw something go up. I think it was like May. April, May. Sorry. It was earlier in the year. It was about February. We saw some update get put on Fallout 4. And we were shivering a bit at that point. Like, "Oh, my God. What's going to happen?" Because there was a rumor of this next-gen update coming. 

And lo and behold, we gave our release date. And then two days after our intended release date, Bethesda I think put on Twitter that they were going to drop the next gen update for Fallout 4. And it completely broke everything we did. That's not entirely true. 

[0:22:21] DMN: It pretty much broke everything.

[0:22:22] JN: Yeah. We were smart enough to block the update before it came. Like I said, some of us kind of knew it was coming, but we didn't know when it was coming and we didn't know the details. We didn't have any details on it. We're completely in the dark, basically. We just knew something bad was going to hit us. And when we actually finally got the news, it was two days after our initial release date. And that killed our motivation a bit. 

We did keep going. But a lot of us blocked the updates. And those who did update to test, they updated to test the next gen, everything was just unplayable. It was bad. Everything was crashing. We had to do loads of work to even convert the files to work on the next gen. And then once - I think I spent something like a week basically rebuilding it to work on the next gen update to find out that there was this crucial bug with the next gen update itself being performance issues with NPCs. This was later found out by someone in the community. I wish I could remember their name right now, but they're an absolute star. They found out that the face gen, this ancient technology that Bethesda used for talking NPCs, that that system in the next gen update was completely broken. And it was creating massive performance issues where you'd be dropping down to about five frames per second randomly or when it loads them. And that still isn't fixed, by the way. Yeah, we get asked probably on a weekly basis of when are you going to the next gen when Bethesda update the game. It's unplayable at the moment. 

[0:23:47] JN: You also had - I don't know though if it's accurate to call the script extender and mod. But you also had things you were using downstream that were broken as well by this, right? 

[0:23:56] DMN: Yeah, it was all relying on other people fixing those kind of things. And that's dependencies. That was another kind of thing as well. Because it all worked totally fine before the update. And it wasn't really that much. You were missing out past the update. And that was another good thing about GOG as well was you can link it straight to that correct version of the game and everything. So, worked out for that. 

[0:24:21] JN: Yeah. Which is ideal for folks who - it's great that Bethesda is still supporting the game 10 years after release. But if people haven't played Fallout since 2015 and then they're coming back just to play Fallout London and they can just download the correct version and get up and going. It's much easier, right?

[0:24:35] JA: Yeah. Well, throughout the entire development of the mod, we had worked quite hard to make sure that it was just a one-click install. We got permissions from modders all over the shop and all people on the team so that we could put their stuff into the master file that I mentioned earlier. And you could just press play. You didn't have to go onto the Nexus and download 50 mods before you could play Fallout London. We even got permission to ship with script extender and all of the script extender components that we do ship the game with. That's not easy to always do because some of these people aren't there anymore. If we didn't get a response, we just had to not use it. And like you're saying we've updating dependencies, these guys are like the absolute stars of the community. They are the magic men of the community right there. Wizards. They're doing all this stuff behind the codes. Fixing address libraries and stuff that is completely on another level to anything that I think some of us do on the team. And it's completely dependent on them to update their work for us to even get it on to the next gen. 

And sadly, because some of them did - a lot of them did, I think in the end. We were waiting for two plugins to get rebuilt. But because we had this kind of weird flip-flop stage where we're like, "Are we going to do it? Are we not?" In the end, we just said, "No. It's not been updated. The performance is too bad. We can't release like this. People will complain." Let alone testing. Bear that in mind. I've been testing for about a year and a half on the old-gen version. We would have to do all of that again. And we would have never released, I think, until halfway through 2025 or something, or the end of 2024, if we did that. 

[0:26:15] JN: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I guess that's another interesting aspect of project like this, which is I've seen rumbling. Are you still intending to put our next gen version? Is that a thing that's happening? 

[0:26:24] JA: No.

[0:26:25] DMN: I don't think that's going to happen. I mean, it depends on a lot of other things. But I mean - but then we're creating updates. We're adding things as well. Then having to do that and retest all of that probably isn't worth it at this stage with everything. But maybe down the line. Who knows? Maybe if we keep working on it and then actually make it work with next gen. But probably not. 

[0:26:50] JN: Okay, that makes total sense. Because my question was going to be - and I guess this even goes now for patching and doing stuff after that. As you said, a big part of having the deadline was you're doing this free. There needs to be an endpoint on it so you can get on with your lives. How does that work with putting patches out after? Is it just whoever's still around and has passion for it? Have new teams formed with deadlines. Daniel, can you talk on this a bit? 

[0:27:09] DMN: Yeah. I mean, the community has been really good about it with reporting any type of bugs or things that we're missing or things which were broken or whatever. And we just put all of that into a spreadsheet. It's mainly quite a lot of the heads of department which are doing things. There's still quite a number of team members which are doing optimizations or things that could be causing some types of crashes. But for the most part, we just have a big list and we work through it now, which is actually kind of nice. Rather than having to come up with new solutions to fix various things, we've now got everything all logged on Discord and everything as a case of going through all of it. Is that one done? Cool. Delete that message. Next one. And a lot of them are very small fixes. And it's actually quite therapeutic at this point, at least for me. I mean, there's some other bigger fixes that needed done. 

There was actually one where [Name Prowell inaudible 0:28:02] - we were finding ways of like trying to get like ambient audio to kind of work a bit better. And [Name Prowell inaudible 0:28:09] came up with this genius idea where you would do all of these kind of packing, kind of packages of all of these kind of things where you would like lump all of these bits of rubble altogether. They'd be kind of like kick-bashed with different things and you can load that as like a preset thing. Like your certain amount of rubble or whatever. And we wanted a bunch of ambient audio for everything. And he unfortunately put the sound of a Brahmin moving as a stock sound so that it would bug me so that I would get it done. 

But actually, there was one which I forgot to change. And he sent me a message that says, "By the way, you forgot one." And the message is on Discord - 

[0:28:51] JA: It's still there, isn't it? Is it still there. 

[0:28:52] DMN: I did fix it. I tried to argue my case. It'd be great for just one [Name inaudible 0:28:56]. But I did fix it unfortunately. But their message was something like, "I swear I'm going insane. I'm going through the night. And I swear I had a cow moo from like the rooftops. Is my game bugged. I'm not able to tell where sounds coming from or whatever." And then [NAme Prowell inaudible 0:29:14] sent me a screenshot of that. He was like, "Mate, you missed one." And it was still there. 

[0:29:18] JN: I love that. Mostly because it confirms why I've had a long-held professional bias, which is the best way to get any designer, artist, anyone to do something, is to make a terrible first draft and send it to them and tell them you're going to use it. I absolutely love that as an approach. That's incredible. 

One last question I guess about the technical side of things before we move on to very interested in all things art direction on this. But I guess, Jordan, you mentioned version control. I'm a Git nerd. I need to know what was the version control situation. And particularly, again, the variety of team members, the fact it's all voluntary. Even though I love Git to pieces, it is a labor in any project to use it. And I can totally understand that wasn't the case. What did the team do in your situation? 

[0:29:59] JA: Well, you'd be very happy to hear that we used Git. 

[0:30:02] JN: Oh, perfect. Actually, there's a bit more to it. Going back, I'll kind of give you a little bit of a timeline. When we originally started, back in the old, old times, people were just sharing files on Discord. That had to go. 

[0:30:14] JN: Undersocre finder. Underscore V4. Yeah. 

[0:30:16] JA: Yep, basically. That actually caused a lot of errors to the point where the project was restarted. It was one of the reasons why the entire thing was scrapped after about a year and a half or so and then restarted. After that, people would move to Google Drive. When I started to do the build, we were still using this system. I insisted on getting that completely just thrown though. It was horrible. Everyone would upload files to a folder in a Google Drive and then that person would download them all. It took so long. I can't describe. 

If you were on slow internet - and I was at at the time. I was in shared accommodation or something. And that took just hours to even just download people's files, let alone upload it. But we had this common issue where, I'm sure you guys know, whenever you put anything on drive, it zips it, especially if it's like a whole chunk of folders. And what we needed was a whole chunk of files. It zips it. And we kept noticing some really weird bugs where we would download the next build and stuff would just be missing. 

And the person who uploaded it, then we actually had this revelation moment. Someone checked like the pre-uploaded file and the stuff was there. But the stuff that was being downloaded, it wasn't. I have no idea what happened. I don't know if people reached capacity on the drive or whatever. It was a nightmare. It causes so many issues. And that's when eventually I took it over and I said, "No, we're not using Google Drive anymore." Because this did mostly affect the 3D team. People's games were just crashing outright. Stuff was missing. You just spent two weeks building something and it's not there. 

I reached a breaking point of like, "No, we're moving to Git. We're moving to something that is not just deleting files." Because I still don't know what it was. I don't know if it was a bug. No idea. Eventually we moved over to Git LFS. Of course, why wouldn't we? It just made so much sense for us to do it because it's such a good tool. You really can't - in my opinion, I don't think you can beat Git LFS or just Git in general. The fact that you have this little folder. You can upload and then just download. Perfection. Absolute perfection. 

[0:32:22] JN: Just briefly for folks who haven't done putting criminally large binaries into Git LFS, is it large file structure? 

[0:32:28] JA: Large file storage. 

[0:32:30] JN: Yeah. It's the extension for big stuff in Git rather than text files. Cool. And was that through a GitHub or GitLab? 

[0:32:37] JA: GitHub. GitHub itself. Yeah. We all use the GitHub desktop app. 

[0:32:42] JN: Nice. 

[0:32:42] JA: There are other programs we have to use as well. The built -in version control for the Creation Kit is Perforce. 

[0:32:48] JN: Oh, God. Okay. 

[0:32:49] JA: Oh, God. Yeah. You see? I heard it right there in your voice. I still use Perforce. We'd use it for the Papyrus scripts. The actual scripting language of the game itself. 

[0:32:59] JN: That's a really interesting way around. I guess this clip is built into Creation Kit. But it's funny to be using Perforce for the text files and Git for the 3D objects. 

[0:33:10] JA: It's almost reversed in a sense. But you'd think of using Git, you're using that for all the text files as scripts. No. It was in reverse for us. But again, we just didn't have a better way of doing it. We wanted it to be on GitHub. You got redundancy. It's always there. We don't have a local server. If my house collapses and destroys it, all of our work is gone. It's fast. It's really, really fast. If you have good internet, damn, it's fast. Someone downloaded I think 60 gigs in about 10 minutes. And that's unheard of in terms of what we were doing before. They would have been spending three days downloading everything. Yeah.

[0:33:47] JN: Nice. 

[0:33:49] JA: Mixed bag. 

[0:33:49] JN: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, in terms of the spread of the team, the skills in the team, the backgrounds of the team. I think, yeah, being able to use GitHub desktop is an ideal solution. 

[0:33:59] JA: We did have a bit of a structure to it though. Because, of course, you had the freedom to have like multiple repositories. We had like - if people are interested anyway. I don't know how interested they will be. We had the master data repository. That was the one that everyone - I built into that. And people downloaded that. And then every week, you'd start a new file. And then everyone else had their own personal push repositories. That's what we called them. And you just go on there and you put your work in it every week, every Sunday. And you push. To me, I download it. Merge it all together. 

[0:34:31] JN: Wow. Okay. You didn't have anyone else doing pull requests into the main. You were doing all of that. They would just send you the changes and then you were doing - wow. Okay. Really, truly the build master.

[0:34:40] JA: Yeah. There was a few occasions where I just said to people like, "It's going to be way easier for you just to push to the main." And they did. I think Saffron was probably the only one. She's the lead 2D artist. And there was one time she converted all of the textures just to clean them up and scale them down a bit. Because, otherwise, the mod was going to be like 80 gigs, which we didn't want. And yeah, that required her pushing to the main. That was just no way about that. 

[0:35:06] DMN: I have very warm memories of spending many a late night with Sonny. Every Sunday, it was part of my routine to join in with him and just see him merge everything and everyone's in a while. I would see something in my Fallout 4 edit, or F4 edit, or whatever and something would show up red. And then he would zoom into it and go, "What is that? What is that? Why is that there?" And then having to go back and manually changing all the values and the plugin file again. 

I mean, Sonny's a bit of a hero with all this. I mean, he would get all of these plugin files. And sometimes it would just break just because. I mean, if you move something or done anything individually, you would overwrite other people's work, or this, or that. And you don't want go Sunday's merge day. It's like 11 at night. Do you mind redoing some of this? Then Sonny would go in and manually change everything in the file and revert small little things back to normal and everything and then merge it. And it was on to the next one of like, "How many people were pushing?" It was like 30? 

[0:36:08] JA: Yeah, the maximum was I think actually 28. We had 20p. I remember one merge. Sorry. We call it the merge. But that is when we build everything. I remember one day I clicked - I opened up the GitHub desktop app thing and, oh my God, I just remember seeing all these little down arrows. I kind of just put my head in my hands and was like, "No. No. No. No." Because there's just 28 of them little white arrows. And if anyone's ever used it, you know what I'm on about. And I was like, "Oh my lord." 

[0:36:37] JN: Yeah, that's just not the format you're working with. You don't get a diff either. You don't know how a model has changed in the GitHub UI, right? Like you should have to take it on faith. It's the correct one. 

[0:36:47] JA: Yes, exactly. The only real way is to compare the size of files. It does read the Papyrus source scripts. That will show you the actual - the changes in Git itself. And once everything's compiled though, yeah, no, there's no way of telling what it is at all. 

[0:37:04] JN: Well done. That's a heroic effort to keep everyone just focusing on the work they want to do and not juggling the project structure. I mean, on to - we have two members deeply involved in the asset creation of this mod. Obviously, I have to ask you about the art direction. And I'm really interested in - you've got something that needs to feel Fallouty. And by all accounts, it seems like it very much does feel Fallouty. The amount of people who are saying this could be an official release is awesome. But also, the Brit vibes are a big part of the reason for London. And, obviously, you've also then got the creative expression of everyone on the team. How did you go about juggling those when you were deciding on the art direction? 

[0:37:43] DMN: Oh, that's a big question. There are so much that went into all of that concept art and all sorts. I mean, all the heads of department kind of all had a unifying goal and understanding of having similar humor offerings from still game, to legend, to Doctor Who and everything else. That all kind of bleed in. 

[0:38:07] JA: We're all massive Fallout fans as well. Every single one of us, especially the old ones, Fallout 3. If you ask it, I think [Name Prowell inaudible 0:38:14] is the only person to say Fallout 4 is his favorite. Everyone else is like, "New Vegas. Fallout 3." Wolfy sitting there like, "Fall Tactics." Everyone scoffs him for that one. 

Yeah. Fallout London being set when it is. It's set in 2237. Essentially, just before or in between the events of the original games and then the newer - if you look at the chronological order of the games, it's set in between the originals and the newer ones. Something that we absolutely wanted to do was pull in more inspiration from the original games, being Fallout 1 and 2. Black Isles, Fallout. If you're a hardcore fan, you know what I'm on about. Not Bethesda's Fallout. Very different. In my opinion, they're very different. 

And I'll come back to this point. I think this is really important for Danski. On the 3D side of it, our main goal was to really try to capture Bethesda's art style so things fit in. When we originally started, it was just a mishmash of different 3D assets to kind of work as placeholders whilst the 3D - the level designers could just go in and place down, I don't know, a water cooler or whatever they needed, and then it'll get replaced in the future with something that was far more fitting. 

Probably the most skilled, I personally would say is Edge. He really nailed the art style of the vehicle. He was our vehicle artist. We had various artists who were very specific of what they did. And he absolutely nailed the Atompunk style of the Fallout setting, but bringing in British cars. He made the Mini Cooper look Fallouty, right? He was really, really strong on that front. 

And for the rest of us, it was a case of, "Well, how do we replicate the star, but also give it this British twist? How do we bring in this feeling of it being unique? It's new, but it's also going to fit in and not just look like it sticks out like a sore thumb?" And that's kind of where more of my work lies. I tried to just give things a little bit of a weird - a lot of inspiration I took - sorry. I actually go into a little bit. More than 40 hammer - Warhammer 40k. The kind of gothic. There's a specific name for it, like diesel punk style. I really tried to apply that to the angel faction. Because, of course, Warhammer's huge in the UK. People love Warhammer. And it's very - 

[0:40:36] JN: That in itself as a Brit vibes reference. 

[0:40:38] JA: Yes, exactly. And I tried to feed that into the angel faction. Whenever you interact with that faction or one of their labs, you'd put your hand into the hand scanners or whatever it is that you do. It almost has this Warhammery feel to it. That's what I was trying to nail on that front. 

We said it in our videos, from the smallest things plug sockets to things like giant animated set pieces, we tried to really bring in these inspirations from British culture but try to almost mimic Bethesda's art style. Not perfectly, I'd say, because we're all different artists. Again, this links right back to the beginning of us being hobbyists. We're not expecting or I wasn't expecting all the 3D artists work to be consistent. That was just never going to happen unless we're paying them a salary, right? You can't expect that level of work from hobbyists. But we absolutely tried to keep it all together in the same lane. I think it ended up working really well. 

What I wanted to bring back to Danski though was the music. I remember when Danski first joined and we had a proper deep conversation about where should we take the music or what kind of music do you like the sound of? And for me, Fallout 1. I'll let him go for Fallout 1 and 2's music. 

[0:41:59] JN: But just to briefly jump in before you start talking, Danski, was this like from a cultural influence perspective? Obviously, Fallout music, Bethesda's Fallout music, the rockabilly, the jazz, the I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire. Really iconic, but very placed in the US. How did you go about - I guess it all comes down to the divergence point in the history of the Fallout games, right? What's the influence for the London music? 

[0:42:23] DMN: A lot of the London radio tracks and everything where people would put forward ideas that were all inspired by old British bands and things, obviously the Beatles, Rolling Stones, all of these kind of things. And a lot of that just kind of all worked really well I think for a lot of it. We didn't want everything to just be just old tracks, because there is a lot of issues with stuff like the licensing of not only the music itself, but the recording as a material itself that could have issues as well. People would record a bit of what they want. And there's a little bit of 80s in there as well. And I think, actually, a lot of that works quite well. 

OST-wise, we wanted to emulate a lot of this stuff from Fallout 1 at least as the kind of starting point. We wanted to make it sound as depressing as it possibly could. It should feel like a survival game ultimately, which I think for starting for something like this a really good kind of role-playing game in my opinion as you are playing as a character that you decide who they are and who they're going to develop into and what they're going to become. What choices they're making and everything. And for me, something that hums at home is then they're coming into this world of London. It's all broken. It's disheveled. There's something that's kind of breaking the fourth wall that people are going recognize all of these locations because they are almost one-to-one in some locations but things are broken. There should be something that should feel quite scary for them as a player. But also, by extension, the character themselves. Waking up from a vat and being in this location that they have no idea who they are. Where they've come from? People, there's all these factions around making jokes about them and calling them lab rat and all the rest of it. 

For a lot of it, I think it was just that and going into the kind of scariness. A lot of Fallout 4 soundtrack was quite hopeful as well and quite heroic, which [Name inaudible 0:44:18] music is fantastic. And the music that he self-releases as well was wonderful with all of it. But in order to make that kind of diversion from that kind of world, there was a lot more stringed instruments. There was more harpsichord involved. Lots of tubular bells to simulate. Like Ben, lots of references to the protect and survive stinger and everything. All of these kind of little points, if overplayed, become saturated in a bit. A cultural joke. This was meant to actually make it sound. That's how that world should sound. Everything to like the combat music as well. 

[Name inaudible 0:44:56] combat music, really good in everything. But it's got lots of strong melodies. Whereas I thought how we would displace sound if people were playing with pots and pans? I would literally sit there and play music in odd time signatures and all of this kind of stuff to try and make it seem like it's a bit off wall kind of thing. 

[0:45:16] JN: Yeah. That's amazing. I have seen - I think it was a Reddit thread actually that was like Fallout London is a horror game. You've obviously nailed that. And I have heard the all aspect for the first act as well. Definitely, it feels more like a survival game to play than - I haven't played Fallout 1 or 2. But even the Bethesda Fallout games definitely is - 

[0:45:35] DMN: Absolutely. It was the thing that we agreed with a lot, Sonny and myself, because there was a lot of love for like love crafting horror and everything. The times folks based from what they call the deep one. 

[0:45:46] JA: Yeah. The Innsmouth. The townsfolk of Innsmouth. That's it. 

[0:45:49] DMN: Townsfolk of Innsmouth. And there's a love for that kind of scary otherworldly kind of horror, which lends itself quite well to like the wasteland kind of area of everything. 

[0:46:02] JA: It's in a lot of the original Fallout. They got the Dunwich offices in Fallout 3, for example. It's all based on Lovecraft. It's American. Yes, Lovecraft's very American. But I love that side of it. And we kind of implemented it. It is definitely a big thing we focused on is everything is something that the artists anyway very much agreed on. And I say the artists specifically, because they're the ones who really wanted to implement and push for this. This game needs to be scary. It's a Fallout game. It's a post-apocalypse. It's based in London. 

And personally, if you look at like old historic London, it's kind of spooky, right? It's foggy city and Jack the Ripper kind of horror stories. And I think we really wanted to bring that back. A lot of us have memories of being quite terrified of playing older Fallout games. I mean, the first time I found a ghoul in Fallout 3, I absolutely - yeah, I ran away. I closed the game. I was like 14 at the time and I heard it could do its horrible screech. And I went, "No." Close the game. That was a horror experience for me. 

[0:47:06] JN: Sticking with the sound stuff for a bit. This might be going into an area that won't resonate for US audiences. But I have to ask how John Berkow happened. For folks who aren't aware - actually, Daniel, do you want to explain who John Berkow is? 

[0:47:18] DMN: Pearl just reached out. Says, "Would you be up for this?" Said, "Yes." Said, "The script." And then he sent it back. He pretty much sorted all of that. And then it was originally me that was going to be the voice of the house and everything. But then I got replaced by John Bercow. So at least I can put that on like my LinkedIn or something. Was replaced by John Bercow at one point in my life. 

[0:47:43] JN: I mean, for US listeners, you may have seen scenes from UK House of Commons with the speaker, the person who runs the proceeding, shouting "Order. Order." The most famous speaker who has done that particular thing they managed to get, which is awesome. Alongside some other like Neil Newbon, obviously, is huge. Very cool that he stepped up for the project. You kind of produced a lot of this under perfect storm conditions for any game development. Pandemic lockdowns, volunteer run team, building on top of someone else's property. But for the voice acting in particular, with 90,000 lines of dialogue, famous actors sending stuff in, John Berkow, who does not come from the world of voice acting, how did you manage that process? 

[0:48:24] DMN: It was kind of a mixture between me, [Name inaudible 0:48:27] and Callum for a lot of it. There was a lot of organization for everything. We planned quite far in advance for everything. There was a lot of kind of structural things that we had to put into place as well. Things to do with conditions of certain voices having potential generic lines for factions and all of this kind of stuff. 

I think from the kind of beginning part, we wanted it to be as optimized as possible, which is how it has. We wanted to make sure that people weren't recording more lines in what is needed. But just the right amount that they have a good representation in the mod. And I kind of pushed that for quite a lot. Because they're volunteers. And for them, they probably do. They do a lot of the work that, I mean, they carry the story and everything like that. But when they record, it could take three weeks. And that's kind of that. They're kind of putting time in and joining a project with no kind of promised return or anything other than potential small portfolio thing. 

From the beginning, we wanted to make sure that everybody was represented at least somewhat fully as possible. Giving people multiple roles or working out all of these different sections with generic characters and things. We had like vagabond male 01 kind of thing. But they would play multiple small roles and everything. Because there are many characters and may only have like 10 lines. And then that's them. They're gone for the game. Their whole purpose in the story is to go that way or something. 

We had made sure from the beginning of setting all of that up. And then it was a case of a casting call. And then once all of that was kind of sent out, I remember me and [Name Prowell inaudible 0:50:08] before that got sent out, we were going, "This has got to be rubbish. We're going to get 10 applicants and they're all going to voice 40 characters or whatever." I don't know why we're thinking that. Because I think sometimes we get a bit shocked because we work in an echo chamber almost because we're just sitting here. And we're not in an office. We're in our place and we're sitting on Discord and everything. We send that out and then I had everything all linked up so that we get to like an Excel and everything so it would all generate all the names and everything like that of who's applied and everything and link their portfolio. And I was like, "Oh, my God. We have like -" how many was it? Was it like 800 or something? 

[0:50:52] JA: It was over a thousand at one point, if I remember. 

[0:50:55] DMN: I think it was. Yeah. 

[0:50:56] JA: It was crazy. 

[0:50:57] JN: What kinds of people were applying? Was it people who were trying to build up a portfolio? Was it people who were in the community and thought they'd give it a go? I mean, obviously, there were, as we mentioned, famous voice actors or who have hands in the work also jumped in. But in general, at that stage in the project, how were people hearing about it? And why were they applying? If that makes sense? 

[0:51:15] DMN: The mod got quite a lot of traction and everything with everything to do with advertisements. I mean, I work in a university and there's sometimes students mentioning to me, "How's Fallout London going?" Like, "How do you know I work on that kind of thing?" Okay. Word seems to travel quite far, quite oddly and everything. But when all of them came in, it was from all sorts of backgrounds. People had done modding before. I would say that probably made like a good 10% to 15 % of the people, which is a big amount. They've done stuff with mods before and that was part of the portfolio. And then it was a bunch of people who were famous either through YouTube or part of the influencers sphere or actual established voice actors as well. And it was ranging all over the place. And I think it was just a kind of testament to just how much passion we put into it and tried to show that visibly with stuff. 

And people like [Neil Newborn inaudible 0:52:15] and everything coming on board and chatting with them. Actually, I've not met them in person. The whole teams met them in person apart from me because I had to go somewhere else and do something else for the team. I was like tasked with something. I would even love [inaudible 0:52:30]. I love him. He's fantastic. But I'm sure he would understand. 

But no, he's been completely brilliant. He took everything on board. And we had discussions about what the character should be like. And he was completely fine with everything. He was just so professional about it. I think that was something we kind of baked into it from the beginning as well, because it was me that went through each and every - what would you call it? Their portfolio and everything. And their takes and everything. And I deliberately made sure that I just downloaded all of that. Had it all numbered. Just went through all of them. Didn't look at the name. Didn't know who was who or anything like that. Didn't want to be influenced. Try and keep it as an even playing field for everybody. 

And I'm quite passionate about making sure people are represented fairly and being treated fairly and everything. So I, at one point, made it clear to everybody that even if somebody's famous, or an amateur, or a professional, or semi-professional. I spoke to everybody the exact same way. They would all get the same details, the same sheets, the same potential Zoom call or Microsoft Teams chatting about the characters or whatever. And I think It was quite important for me that everybody got the exact same experience. 

[0:53:51] JA: I remember you going through them applications and portfolios for months. 

[0:53:56] DMN: Oh, it wasn't months. I mean, maybe took like two weeks. 

[0:53:59] JA: I mean, thousands sounds like it could be months. Yeah. It's a lot. 

[0:54:01] JA: It was a long time. 

[0:54:02] DMN: It was two weeks. I mean, I went through it. I would listen to them all from the start to the finish. And to be quite cutting, there are some ones due to like microphone quality or just in terms of range of voice. They were asked to provide multiple different character approaches to stuff. How they would interpret for things. You can kind of detect what their kind of range for that would be. 

So then, you go through it from start to finish. And that would get you a yes and no. And then the next stage, I would listen from start to end again of that next stage and then start saying, "Who's a yes? Who's a maybe? Who's a no?" And then the stage after that, again, it was between the yes and maybes, and then fine-tuning that, and then sending out emails to folks. Because it did take me a wee-wyo and everything, because I wanted to get it done super soon and say sorry. A bit of delay and everything. You are shortlisted, which I just wanted to say for people. But some people didn't get it and some people did get it. But there was a lot of people to manage when people got in. Because we had like what - how many was it? It was like 80, 90 people eventually at the end of it? 

[0:55:13] JA: It was about 100 to start with. Yeah, it was in that realm.

[0:55:16] DMN: Yeah. 

[0:55:17] JN: I was just laughing. I remember a whole Neil Newbon story. Probably didn't know who he was. And he received this email from him.

[0:55:24] DMN: Oh, yeah. Like months and months in advance. 

[0:55:27] JN: I've seen Neil talk about this. Also, we should just mention for folks who don't know, Neil Newbon plays Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3 amongst other roles, perhaps what most people are known for. Casual Oscar-winning actor in your game lineup. But sorry, go on. 

[0:55:39] JA: Yes. It was really funny. Of course, you have to imagine the guy's getting like loads of emails anyway. And then he goes, "Who's this Neil Newbon guy?" And me and Wolfy, the lead level designer, we've been sitting there playing Baldur's Gate. And we went, "Wait, what?" This was just around the time of him getting all of them rewards for Baldur's Gate. I think it was just before. He's like, "Who is this guy?" We're just like, "You didn't leave him un read, did you?" And yeah, he had left Neil Newbon unread. And we were sitting there like, "Oh, my God. What have you done? You need to get him on." 

[0:56:12] JN: Yeah. Also, I realized that I said Oscar. I meant BAFTA. But yes, one of the most beloved characters of Baldur's Gate 3. And, yeah, plays a fantastic part in your game as well. It's very, very great part. I mean, even when you say it's a lot of people that manage like when you said like 90,000 lines of dialogue, that's a lot of dialogue. But it's a lot. It doesn't sound like a lot of people for that much dialogue. I guess there's a lot of lines for each person. 

[0:56:32] DMN: Yeah, we had about 10 dialogue editors or so working on it. And there was a lot of work. I mean, this was - I mean, for the voice acting kind of side of it. Because I had a day job and this. That was pretty much me for a full year just doing VA-related stuff completely. And I couldn't work on my music or anything else. Like collaborate with artists, this was me going to work nine-to-five, coming home. And then from like five until midnight or one in the morning, doing spreadsheets, organizing things, phoning voice actors, giving them direction, or editing the dialogue, which might be - it just depends on how long the lines are. But you're sitting there editing them and you have to go through and check to take and everything and exporting them all. I got really good at it. But I don't know if that's like something I'm super proud of. 

[0:57:30] JN: I guess that brings me on to onto some really too early, which is it's a volunteer projects, members of the team are fairly early in careers. You mentioned you have day jobs at the time. Has it paid off in terms of your career and prospects? You mentioned not being super proud of the work you got good at. Is that something you want to continue doing, Daniel? Or is that a side skill that you'll never touch again? 

[0:57:50] DMN: I mean, we're going to be - we're developing a company out of this. We're going to be building a games studio out of this. And we want to keep doing this. I think it's a shame that you don't have all of us here in the podcast. Because we're quite all together. We're quite strong personalities. And I'm quite a shy person overall. But I love all these guys a lot. I wouldn't want to work with anybody else. I'll still be doing other stuff with teaching. I teach like game audio and stuff like that now for them. But a lot of the focus is working on this. We want to build something. Potentially create opportunities for folk. Create really good games. And we have people that we can bring on in the future. We have ideas that we've worked on. We can translate this into something that could be scalable in the future. Definitely not lost. 

I would say the people that have learned the most though were the people who stayed up to the project in like the last eight months of development. Creating all of those things is not easy. Obviously, creating any type of graft kind of stuff. The most fun I had was composing music for me personally. But all the way up to release for like getting all the audio to work correctly, things not working, dialogue lines mismatch, make sure quests work correctly for Sonny. Making sure that 3D models are all properly optimized. Everything had to be fine-tuned the most. 

And I would say from that last kind of eight months, a lot of the team really were really passionate about everything as well as the heads of department. And that was the point where we were exhausted, but at least we were still almost whimpering to each other, "When this is done, we're going to make something out of this." Because it's really difficult to actually complete a project of this scale. It's easy to make it, but it's difficult to complete it, I would say. 

[0:59:46] JN: Yeah, it really shows the potential of the team to have gone through that. Yeah, how about you do it? Well, I mean, I guess you're involved in this new company effort as well, Jordan? 

[0:59:53] JA: Oh, no, no, no. No, I'm joking. [Crosstalk inaudible 0:59:55]. Actually, I'm not doing that at all, actually. It was definitely an ordeal. Some of us were - yeah, I probably gave up. I certainly gave up. I'll talk some about the sacrifices really, because it was six years for me. But one year out of that. About five or four and a half years of just working and then working. I sacrificed my health. I ended up actually sacrificing career over it. Time management was just - it reached a point of impossibility. 

Yeah. And I think a few sacrifices or a lot of sacrifices were made for people. And after five years, we really want to put that into something good for us all and move forward. Because, yeah, there's limitations behind what we're doing. Of course, it's all owned by Bethesda or ZeniMax at the end of the day, which is a bit sad on our front. But I think we really want to move forward with that. It's not just that the fact that they may own the assets or the engine and the game itself. The fact that we can't monetize it, essentially, that would really open up avenues for us to move into a new games company. But we've had crowdfunding, etc., the YouTube, which has helped us really forefront that. But even just like on a technological level, I think a lot of us are very done with the Creation Kit. 

[1:01:24] DMN: Oh, I can second that easily. 

[1:01:27] JA: Good point. Just I wanted to raise this earlier. We talked about a dialogue. At one point, we had so much dialogue, I thought it was the end of the project. 

[1:01:35] DMN: Oh my God, I remember that. Yeah, we were almost crying because we're running out of like form ID limit or something. 

[1:01:42] JN: You were just running out of IDs in the engine? Amazing. 

[1:01:46] DMN: Something like that. 

[1:01:46] JA: Yeah. There's 64-bit integer limit, which the engine hits a certain point. We're already way past what the engine itself can load. We have to use - 

[1:01:57] DMN: That's right. Because we have to actually strip Fallout 4 to actually load our thing, because we ran out of - 

[1:02:04] JA: The engine can only load two master files, and then it has a reference limit of two million. I can't remember the exact amount. It's a big number. We had to go into Fallout 4. Delete all of its world spaces. Delete all of its levels. Delete literally everything, so that you could load it as a master, but actually load Fallout London at all. And if you want to mod Fallout London, you have to do that now. But there was also a side of it where we had so much dialogue coming in, the game wouldn't load. There was about three months of development where we would launch the game to test something and it would take about five minutes to launch. 

[1:02:43] DMN: I mean, that was a good month for me. I mean, that was when I delivered like 12,000 lines or something. Sorry. A good week. 

[1:02:51] JN: And you single-handedly ruined the game. 

[1:02:52] DMN: Yeah. And everybody pulled the game and everything and started loading it up and says, "Why is my game taking like 20 minutes to load?" 

[1:03:01] JA: It would just black screen you. It would just go to a black screen at one point. 

[1:03:04] DMN: I couldn't even run it. I gave up. I was actually scared to tell you. Either you were going to ridicule me because I broke my computer or I'd done something stupid with the Creation Kit. 

[1:03:15] JA: When it reached this point, we had so many - essentially it's just the loose files that the game can only load a certain amount of loose files. And of course, it may be something specifically to do with the sound or audio, the dialogue files themselves, that stop it from loading properly. But we reached a point of like, "It's over. This is it. We've reached the limit of what we can do. We're just going to have to release a half-finished thing." But no, there was a fix, fortunately. It was just archiving it all. Eureka moment of, "It's not broken. We can continue." Yeah.

[1:03:48] JN: So you're done with the Creation Kit. I guess how far along with the new effort are you? Do you know what technology you want to be working on? Is there a preference in the team? 

[1:03:56] JA: Yeah. I think Danski and Callum, the lead writer who probably prefer Unity, I feel like they both have more experience of Unity from what they've said. Am I wrong? 

[1:04:05] DMN: Yeah, definitely prefer Unity. 

[1:04:08] JA: Yes. Whereas I myself, Wolfi, the lead level designer, [Name inaudible 1:04:12], we've all used Unreal Engine. I've used Unreal Engine back to like 4.00. Back when it first came out. I kind of really pushed that because we have a lot of experience. But good things and bad things about both. 

[1:04:29] JN: Was it part of the trailer was made in Unreal? Something was made in Unreal, right? 

[1:04:33] JA: Yeah, I made the logo in Unreal. The Fallout Londo logo, I did all that in Unreal. How did you hear about that? Wait, what? 

[1:04:42] JN: I couldn't tell you. I read a lot before these shows. 

[1:04:42] DMN: What? I'm surprised. I don't think that's ever been said about how that would be made. 

[1:04:48] JA: Yeah, that's a bit nuts. 

[1:04:50] JN: If a guest has said anything on the internet, I can guarantee I'll have read it. 

[1:04:55] JA: Okay. Well, maybe I did say it in a previous interview or something. I have no idea. Just the logo. Everything else are recorded in game, Xbox controller, moving the camera. Unreal Engine definitely moving forward, I think. 

[1:05:09] DMN: I think for like in terms of how far we are on with everything, I mean the most important thing about setting up something new like that's a totally different kettle of fish. You're no longer you know working yourself or modelling off something else. This has to be something that's built up from scratch that actually is fully functioning and has a good grounds to then build up from it. We have meetings very regularly. 

We currently have ideas for games, but it's very much this is all conversational. This is where it actually turns more about business and the sense that everything that gets discussed in terms of actually creating or facilitating the creation of something is something that should be taken seriously because it actually has risk involved. And that shouldn't be something that's taken lightly. 

Of course, we'll chat and have ideas and everything like that. But that's like at a stage where we will bring everything forward and we'll start to actually think about what the best outcome is for us personally as well as like actually creating a business as a whole. And I think that's something that we would be good at actually kind of managing all together. We're not going to be jumping into it saying, "We've made a mod. Mod was successful. Let's quickly make a game." That absolutely needs to be done right. Because that's easily the textbook thing of something that can easily fall apart, you know? 

And I think we strongly understand that as we've been really strict about having formal conversations from the beginning and saying, "Let's make this properly." And that takes time to do that without even thinking about anything game related. But we've all got our tasks and everything that we're doing. We come together. We chat about how stuff's going. But maybe sooner than you expect. 

[1:06:56] JN: Yeah. I mean, I guess that's one good aspect about the mod taking six years. And I guess even to an extent, the volunteer aspect of it is that you've had the - in terms of the business reality and the real time investment and how much risk you put them on the line by saying, "Okay, we're making the game." That could be five, six years of investment just in time, let alone the cost of that. You've had that experience and you know what that means, right? I guess that must be a useful place to start versus - I guess it's a less naive place to start this kind of endeavor from, right? You know everyone has a picture of what that means. Very interesting. 

[1:07:28] DMN: Thing that's quite curious about all with that because we're all going to be working remotely for a fair bit of time. To find our ways of being able to collaborate in a really kind of exciting environment. And I think I don't know much about really that or anything they particularly express. I just think that that's an interesting point to think about. How do you have innovative space to be able to design and foster creativity in an online remote environment I think is quite challenging. And I think we're quite aware of that as well. 

[1:08:00] JN: It's also interesting to hear that you still consider it challenging after producing all of the assets and the art and the 90,000 lines of dialogue in a completely remote environment that that's still daunting to you. Is it because it's completely fresh and you need the whiteboard space as it is? 

[1:08:14] DMN: It's a space to know that we're communicating and we're very clear. Because, I mean, social interaction is quite an important thing especially for establishing that you understand what somebody's saying as well as like anything else that comes with that the trust factor and then what other meanings might be heard with that. Something that you just get from something in person. And I guess it's just important to be aware of everything like that. 

Of course, when it comes to making things, that'll all be fun. And we'll be sitting on Discord and everything. But starting something from scratch again has to be done correctly, especially if it's purely remotely. I don't know if Sonny has any thoughts on that. 

[1:08:54] JA: No and yes. I think you're right. It's probably a bit daunting at the minute. I don't know how much I can really say. But I feel like, definitely, we should just say it. I think we want to make some kind of small project together. Something not on the same scale. Because we really need to and have to use the new tools. Personally, I think two others agree, two others disagree. I don't know how much they disagree or agree. 

[1:09:20] DMN: I'm fine with Unreal. I'm totally fine. I just know how to use Unity. 

[1:09:24] JA: It's more the scope. More the scope of the next thing. I think a big fear that I personally have and I'll voice it. I'll be quite vocal about it anyway, that we don't want to just finish Fallout London and go, "Yeah, we're going to make Fallout London 2." Because that's just not in the realms of possibility yet from a financial point, from a skill set point as well, that's just not happening. I think we'd really like to make something of a small scope or even just throw away game jams, right? Spend two weeks just make something. Oh, it was crap. But at least we learn everything we could from it. Throw it away. Next game jam. Maybe? There's various ways we could approach that. 

[1:10:08] DMN: Yeah, smaller games definitely allow you to test things. And then it's like an iterative process. We're making more games than everything's will be. But we expand from that, learn from that. If you do something that's just one large game, you're always internally learning and stripping things away or resetting the project like Fallout London did and everything, which of course is part of the learning and making of something. But not really possible now, I don't think. And probably not. 

[1:10:36] JA: Exactly. Literally, we can't afford it. We could spend a certain amount of money developing something and then have to reset it after a year. That would be tragic. Whereas, I think it's really important as well for people starting up companies or even just companies in general. You see this everywhere. They'll be running multiple projects at once in the event that one falls through. Or maybe they're all successful. I think that's really important for us to do as well. 

[1:11:03] JN: Yeah, Strange Scaffold are big for doing this at the moment. He's relatively well-known indie now. But he's always running a ludicrous amount of projects with his indie. And that's exactly why. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think that makes more scale. It makes a lot of sense. I guess last question before I let you both go. Because I know we've gone over time a bit. In terms of new studio releasing new games, do you feel like you've got an audience ready to follow you now from Fallout London? Or is that the Fallout 4 modding communities audience? Like to what extent is that people who are just into Fallout and you're part of that community and that's why they're there? And to what extent is that audience like come for you as developers now? 

[1:11:41] JA: I think I might say with certainty, because I won't be able to give you an exact answer on it. But I definitely say a good chunk of people on our Discord, especially even from the bug reports, we've had people who are completely unaware of things that happen in Fallout 4. It's quite obvious a few people hadn't actually played a Fallout game for it. A lot of people saying they're buying PCs to play Fallout London. A lot of people buying Fallout 4 for the first time. 

The GOG numbers told us that as well. There was people who didn't even own the game. Or maybe they played it on Xbox or PlayStation years and then they wanted to play Fallout London. I think the answer to that would be there is a good chunk. I think right now we've got somewhere in the realm of 87,000 people on our Discord, which, yeah, good chunk is going to be from the Fallout 4 modding community. But I would say quite confidently a good chunk of that is people who probably want to see us move on. 

I think from any kind of donations we've got, most people have been saying stuff like, "We really want to see what you do in the future." Even from comments on our YouTube or comments or reviews on Google, GOG, wherever it is, people are saying, "I want to see where they go. Because, clearly, they're capable of creating something that we've want," being what we released. I think we would be okay. I'd hope we'd be okay. 

[1:13:02] DMN: I think we should definitely be okay. I think things are going to change and everything, but this is like the crossover between what is Fallout London and what is Team FOLON. Because they're completely separate. And that kind of transition, at least on the public face in front, is really important as well to then say, "You know, we are going to be making something at least with the same -" we don't want people to be thinking the newer games are Fallout London. They're absolutely not. The style and everything in terms of writing style from Callum, the way of developing assets to the texturing, all with that kind of stylistic kind of choices is things that, yes, was influenced by Fallout. But everything that went into that was a lot of experimentation and developing a voice and playing about with how stories and characters develop and everything. Even like the music as well. Eventually, when I started, those are all things that we'll be carrying into future projects and we're just hoping that people following us see that aspect of it rather than as a remodeled Fallout game. Because it is more than that at least for us. 

[1:14:12] JN: Perfect. Well, that seems a good place as any to wrap this up. Daniel, Jordan, thank you so much for your time today. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, thanks for joining us on the show. 

[1:14:20] JA: All right. Thank you. 

[END]