¶ Dev Spotlight on Ruinedworld
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Settlement Design 2D Graphics Textures Animation and Building Design |
History with the Team
- Custom Skill Magazine Art and Newspaper header in Industrial Revolution
- Settlement Design, Textures in Rise of the Commonwealth
- Logo Design, 2d Graphics & Animation and Building Design for Sim Settlements 2
- Vault Boy Animation for Chapter 2
Dev Q&A
¶ Where are you from?
- USA, more specifically Pittsburgh PA region, the zombie capital of the world!
¶ What other hobbies do you have?
- I am a fulltime artist, and graphic/web designer. So I do a lot of that on the side as well as modding and gaming. So my work and hobbies mix, how cool is that?
¶ What other games do you play?
- I am currently addicted to Elder Scrolls Online, and 7 Days to Die. You can usually find me in most co-op and solo survival/building games. That’s essentially what brought me to Fallout 4. It just ticked all the boxes for me.
¶ What is your favorite thing to work on for SS2? and why?
- I have been on the team since before it was really a team. It’s been a long time! I think we had two or three other people when King brought me in for Industrial Revolutions. So I have worked on every incarnation of Sim Settlements, including my own addon packs. I have moved around a bit to work on a bunch of different parts of the mod during that time and loved all of them. I was originally brought in for magazine artwork for industrial revolutions, and I also did some texture work. I have also worked on level design and plot design. I created the logo for SS1 conqueror, and all the logo work for SS2, and now I am mostly working on the flash animations for the quest icons which is probably my favorite so far, because it’s a big part of the mod, and if people don’t notice the icons, then I did my job. We really want the quests and the mod overall to feel like vanilla content.
¶ What was the most difficult thing you worked on in SS2 and why?
- Visualizing the quest animations without really knowing what's going on in the story! For the most part, I get a very brief description of what the quest animation should look like from Sirick. Then I work to make that happen BUT I really have no idea what the background story is or what’s going on in the storyline. I am not in the writers’ meetings, and I prefer it that way, as I get to find out the whole story when I play the mod myself. Which is ultimately why we are all modding the game, because we love Fallout 4 and want to play the mods we make.
¶ Do you have a story about working on SS2 that you'd like to share?
- We doubled our dev team during Rise of the Commonwealth, but we were still a rather small team for what we wanted to do. One of the largest tasks was building those massive GPU melting settlements that shipped with RotC. We were trading around settlements as we did our finishing passes on them so the next person could look at them to see if anything was missed, and add or change things as needed. So technically every person on the team touched every settlement in the game in a relatively short amount of time. So everyone was pretty much losing it as we went into the final crunch just before launch. This involved exporting every all the settlement levels again for the final merge. We literally worked till launch, and everyone was scrambling for screenshots and all the other information we needed to put on the page, and it all came together literally at zero hour! King pushed the publish button and we were all in voice chat celebrating. I believe the drinks were flowing or we were all just punch drunk from doing all-nighters to get everything done in time. Most of those people are still on the team, so we didn’t learn our lesson, or we just really like what we were doing!
¶ What's next for you?
- Chapter 3 is the largest to do on my list currently, but I have been approached by other mods looking for quest animations for Fallout 4. So, I guess more Fallout 4 mod work. I have a bunch of ideas I would like to build out for my addon pack, and maybe other future items depending on what direction chapter 3 goes. Or some new standalone mods. There are also a number of games I have my eye on for possible future Bethesda games, Starfield might be my next destination, but we will see!
My Links to Share
My In Game Art and Plot Designs