Here is the condensed form of my introduction:
- Abilities ranked best to worst: level design, visual scripting, infrastructure management, project management, 2d artist, 3d artist, programming. Level design skills on par with a decent mod team. No industry experience, but many years of casual hobby experience.
- Games and game development have interested me since I was young. See below…
- Half-Life, System Shock 2, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Dead Space 2, and various strategy and building games like Space Engineers.
- I like helping with things that are bigger than myself.
- I like that this is a nonprofit with long term goals.
For those interested in reading the long version, click on the spoiler button below.
I began my journey into hobby game development when I was 11. Half-Life and its mods were a huge passion of mine, although my first knack at level design was with the JED editor, nothing will ever surpass Half-Life for me. And looking back, if anyone accused me of thinking of Valve as a patron saint for supporting the mod community and enabling independent developers to bypass publishers, I would be guilty as charged.
Outside of Half-Life, my favorite games of all time would be System Shock 2, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Dead Space 2. I would say certain strategy games, like Space Engineers, were a big-time sink for me, but they didn’t leave lasting impressions like the others did, which I found to be far more immersive. As far as aesthetics goes, Alien Isolation is very high up there, but the gameplay left more to be desired in my opinion. As you can see, I like immersive scifi and horror shooters with a story. My favorite science fiction universe is Aliens.
Half-Life, though, was truly a life raft for me for multiple reasons. At a young age, I became very ill and was eventually diagnosed with a serious autoimmune disease. I withdrew from the real world and preferred to immerse myself inside the Worldcraft editor instead. Life was simpler there. And I could escape into my imagination.
I began as a mapper. Lighting a good scene was a challenging aspect of level design that I often enjoyed. I dabbled in other aspects of game design, such as making custom menus and textures. And, for a while, I began creating a single player continuation of the Half-Life series, which I never intended to finish past the tram ride scene.
As time passed, I moved on from my single player project, having lost interest after finishing the tram ride and the introduction level. I crave immersion and without help from other developers, I wasn’t able to change up the combat in ways that felt fresh. So continuing its development felt stale and I moved onto other things. As a result of realizing my solo limitations, I joined a few small mod teams, while following a few others. But one of the common themes I continued to notice, which wasn’t a rare experience, was the eventual dissolution of the mod teams I followed.
Developing a game isn’t easy. There are a lot of factors involved. Everything from the technical challenges, the skill required, team politics, and daily life continually interfering with a project’s progress often came into play. For me, dealing with health issues has always been a major hurdle of mine. I often found myself without the energy to continue with something as much as I would have liked.
For one of the mod teams I helped with, the hurdle we faced was the project’s lead, who was also the programmer, never making backups. Catastrophe struck with the failure of his hard drive and we lost all of our code. He never told anyone about the lack of backups. And nobody thought to ask. So, in a way, you could say the entire team was at fault. But that’s not how everyone felt.
On an even darker note, another team I followed closely ended up closing following the suicide of the founder. And unfortunately for everyone involved with the project, he took the server down with him and even sabotaged the backups. The team tried to salvage the pieces, but the loss was too great, and they disbanded. It was sad, especially since the mod was very promising and their screenshots showed they had real talent. Despite the mod getting within the top five on moddb at its peak, to this day, ‘just another failed mod’ is a theme of the project’s comments, with few ever knowing the true context.
Perhaps those reading this have had their own similar experiences, which were hopefully not as extreme as the last example. Unfortunately, it’s all too common for game development projects to become abandoned. I imagine the majority of those reading this have projects that sit in the dustbin of their unfinished accomplishments. And if it’s not something that you’ve experienced personally in your journey within game development, I’d be surprised if you were more than one degree of separation from someone who has.
After contemplating my own experiences, and the shared experiences of others, I came to the conclusion that it’s probably more useful to brainstorm something new than it would be to continue on the same path of joining another small hobbyist team that, by all probability, will eventually disband after having released nothing.
At first, I started looking for something similar that already existed. After all, being a pragmatist, I would rather join in others endeavors than reinvent the wheel. I’ve always preferred to be the person who stays in the background. But in my efforts of searching, I found nothing.
It wasn’t that the scene was devoid of developers, they were still easy to find. But to myself, it appeared as if the hobbyist game development community had gone through a culture change. With increasing frequency, more and more projects seemed to be focused on the desire to become the next new indie studio.
Perhaps this was because game development was becoming increasingly more difficult. Maybe releasing a free project wasn’t as appealing to as many anymore. Or perhaps it was a cultural shift with the next generation. Or maybe everyone just observed what happened to most of the late 90’s and early 2000’s mods. They never materialized. I still don’t know the reason. But it definitely appeared that the community experienced a major cultural shift by the late 2000’s and the 2010’s. It was hard to find a team that didn’t have plans, secret or not, to have an eventual commercial release.
That left me without a place, and without the same culture like I experienced in the late 90’s. Back then, it seemed like everyone was releasing things for free. And they did so because of either a desire to build a resume for a job in the industry, or as a hobby like myself.
In retrospect, I suppose it wasn’t even a realistic possibility to have a commercial release back then. You’d need some serious capital. Online distribution didn’t exist yet, publishers still controlled everything, and engine licenses were the price of a yacht. In a way, that hurdle probably brought everyone together. It really wasn’t even possible to profit off of a mod, unless you were the lucky few blessed by Valve.
With that context in mind, I should return to the topic at hand. Can anything be done about the seeming post-90’s cultural shift that occurred within the hobby game development community? I figured if I couldn’t find a community that was a good fit for me, maybe I should start building one instead of hoping someone else would. After all, I’ve always been someone who has tried to navigate the starkly contrasted line between being realistic and idealistic. Perhaps I should make a hobby of the endeavor and see where it ends up.
That’s the motivation behind Metahusk. This place is rooted in a desire to return to the older days of hobby game development, where we build things because it interests us, not because we have the goal of finding money or success. I went looking for a nonprofit development project like this, and I couldn't find one. And if you know of one, please let us know. We would like to reach out.
So at a slow pace and when I have the health and energy, I've been helping get the ball roll down the hill over here. And that’s what I like about it. This is a place where I can put my creative energy, when I have it, and where I feel like what I’m doing matters in ways outside of myself.
Ultimately, this is a place to learn and share as you create, governed by a nonprofit structure, with the long term goal of building a physical location that will provide a place to help the next generation enter the world of game development in the same way the old 1990’s mod forums did for the generations in the past.
Thank you for reading all that. And hopefully it provides better context into my motivation for being here.