Could you give us a short introduction to Decadence?
The story of Decadence takes you into the near future, to a world where governments are scarce and survival is all that matters. Various attempts to grow food have lead to poisonous chemicals flowing through bodies of water, and plants growing in ways never thought to be possible.
The game pits two teams against each other fighting for territorial control. Each map is designed in stages to offer a more compact and action- filled experience that puts focus on teamwork and strategy. Teamwork is an essential part of Decadence since the teams consists of only two players with their own set of weapons and abilities, and you need to work together and organize your attacks in order to successfully win the match. To fully take advantage of what turned out to be quite a personal relationship with your follow team mate, we have a couple of features to help you on your way. Such features as the possibility to revive each other, voice acting and weapons that complement each other to offer a wide range of strategies for the players.
Since you are using the Source Engine, what makes your game different from Half Life 2 and other shooters?
Even if we use the Source Engine to build our game, we always wanted to make a total conversion to get rid of everything “Source” and Half-Life 2. It’s a hard thing to set out to do, but we do get a better result out of it. We’re trying to tell a story with our characters, they all have their unique background story and a reason to why they fight, voice acting and weapons. This way of thinking is also applied to our levels. All levels takes place in the same city and each level are divided into three different stages taking you across the city in a coherent way. Both teams start out in one part of the city and by taking over the Water Node in that area, this Water Node is used to pump fresh water around the city and this is the reason why they fight. When a Water Node in one area is captured, they need to move out to an adjacent Water Node and try to capture that. The first team to capture all of the Water Nodes in the series is the winners of the match. It’s a kind of tug-of-war battle between the teams.
What does you development team look like?
All of the eight people in the core team are students at the University of Skövde and the game development program. It’s a great opportunity for developing a game when everyone, except our lovely programmer, is living in the same house. Not to mention our little office at university where we can sit as a group and work all day and night (until Security comes and kick us out, that is). In addition to these eight core members, we got a couple of contributors mainly in the sound and music department. All in all, 15 people have had their hands dirty with Decadence at some point in time. The management style for keeping all this together has been rather unconventional in a healthy project like this, we rely on total chaos and anarchy in our decisions… well, might not be that extreme, but we do not have any leads or project leaders to steer the project how they see fit. Everyone in the team has their say in decisions so you got to have a good idea or make a good case in point in order to persuade the rest of the team to be on your side. This works well for us, since we’re a rather small team and we all know each other well. I wouldn’t recommend this way of working though, since it’s very easy to make mistakes or break the whole thing if the chemistry isn’t there.
What tools are you using to create Decadence, and how have they been working out for you?
The tools provided by Valve aren’t the best for the Source Engine. I don’t know how Valve does it but we have to rely on many third-party plug-ins for importing and compiling textures and models. For level design, we use Valve's proprietary tool Hammer. For environment art we use programs like Maya, Mudbox and Photoshop, your standard program suite for these sorts of things. We were more or less forced to use XSI for animation since Valve uses it for their games and we didn’t want more problems with exporting. The free modding version of XSI works very well though, so it’s not really a problem anymore. We got a pretty solid pipeline right now without any major bumps, so things are coming along nicely, it’s just that initial setup can be hard to do with engines like Source. It’s no Unreal Engine, that’s for sure!
Why did you decide to make a mod using the Source engine?
Valve games have always been strong in the modding aspect of things with a good, strong and big community. This together with previous experience with the Half-Life modding community of some members of the team set us up for Source. A couple of members in the team are avid Unreal players and modders and they have been having some laughs at our expense for picking Source when they saw how Valve go about doing things, but we kept going! However, I must agree that the Unreal engine seems much easier and streamlined to mod for.
What is you design philosophy?
We make everything we do with gameplay in mind. Gameplay is king. We design prototypes for levels in very rough blocks with grey and orange textures to try to find what kind of layout works best for Decadence. We have gone through countless of prototypes to end up where we are right now, but it’s all worth it. When we find a layout we think is good and fun to play on, we move on to make it pretty. It’s very important to get all the gameplay tested before you start render it beautiful because it’s miles easier to make changes to the layout when it’s still just orange and grey boxes. So when the level reaches the “make pretty” stage the map is pretty much done, except for the graphics.
What has been the most difficult part about developing Decadence, and do you have any tips for other SGA developers?
We had a relatively long pre-production where we just tried to get everything set up and reverse engineer the things Valve didn’t explain to us. That was a period of trail and error which we are very thankful to have seen the other side of. Now when we’re in full production we are faced with other problems. I’d say that the most difficult part now is getting all the small things correct, like balancing the weapons for instance. It’s very tedious work but it has to be done. We also had the problem with a weapon secondary fire being perfectly fine, but not excellent. It works, but it doesn’t offer very much depth in terms of gameplay or room to improve your skill. So sometimes you need to do radical changes even though you’re on a tight schedule. It’s either hit or miss in a situation like that, but that’s what makes game development fun. So my tip would be, get your pre-production right and “kill your darlings” if you have to, don’t waste time fiddling with tiny percentages in hopes of making it fun. If it’s not fun, change it.
What are your 3 favorite games and your most hated game? And how have these games influenced you and Decadence?
I can only tell you my personal views on the matter, but I think it’s kinda obvious that inspiration for Decadence came from Gears of War. It’s an excellent game, so it’s not something we sweep under the rug. We’re all avid FPS players and the user base we’re going for are the Half-Life 2 and the mod crowd which mainly consist of FPS players. So the most ideas come from the experience gathered from all those years spent playing FPS games.
It’s hard to make a list of your three favorites and even harder, the most hated one. All I can say is that I think Tim Schafer makes wonderful games, Grim Fandango especially, so he’s always close to my heart. I do like what Valve does though, and I’m really looking forward to Half-Life 2: Episode Three and whatever comes after that.
Any last words or shoutouts?
You can find more information about the game on our webpage: www.decadencemod.com, we try to update it as regularly as we can, but it’s more fun working on the mod than trying to get stuff together for an update so we might forget about updates sometimes but keep watching the site! We keep a close eye on our forums so if there’s any questions, hit us up on the forums and we’ll get back to you!
I just have to give a shoutout to the one and only Orvar Säfström, tell him Echo says hi, he’ll understand.
Thanks for having us, and we’re really hyped to go to SGA, whether you want us or not!
A big thanks to Decadence for the interview! We look forward to seeing more of their work, and hope we get to play the game soon. Check back at the SGA site for more news and spotlights in the future!
