Instant Respawn

I was recently interviewed by Ryan Anderson, a huge contributor to Moddb.com. It turned out that we lived in the same province and so we decided to meet up and do the interview in person! Ryan was a really cool guy and we got along right away! It’s a small world and pretty cool how these sorts of things work out!

Ryan is launching an awesome new gaming news site which you can check out here at:

http://www.instantrespawn.com and you can check out the interview right here: http://www.instantrespawn.com/mods/making-of-out-of-hell/

The whole thing went amazingly well and I’d like to give a huge thanks to Ryan for the interview!

Interview by ‘Instant Respawn’

Out of Hell creator Long Nguyen tells us what it’s like to go to hell and back.

After experiencing the intricately detailed and moody environments of Long Nguyen’s debut mod release, Out of Hell, it’s of little wonder that he comes across as a developer focused on pushing the limits of atmospheric fidelity. 7 years in the making and built upon the gracefully aged UT2004 engine, Out of Hell has suffered many setbacks all in the pursuit of perfection.

Sometimes maybe going a bit too far, as Long himself laments on coffee cup models within one level, “The thing has so many vertices, because it’s so hi-poly, it casts a shadow on itself. It’s ridiculous- it’s so unoptimized. That’s still in the game and you know no one will ever notice that cup.” It’s a self-critical statement that shows Long may still not be totally satisfied with his work (and no artist really ever is), but he’s finally comfortable with releasing it to the world.

Out of Hell represents Long’s first steps into the world of game design. Minus the original soundtrack and minor coding contributions, he put the whole thing together by himself, going so far as to spend an estimated $5000 over the years. For all its flaws and hitches, Long’s first completed project still makes for one hell of a release.

It didn’t start out that way though. Originally, Long intended to only create his vision of the perfect weapon in games – the shotgun. Inspired by the arsenal showcased in other UT mods of the day like Night’s Edge and Infiltration, he wanted to try his own hand at a weapons pack consisting of shotguns only. Naturally, such weapons needed worthy targets and so he created some zombies as test subjects.

From there it gathered steam until it became a game all on its own with 100% custom art assets and its own story. This story may bear many similarities to the genesis of countless other mods and total conversions, but Out of Hell is unique in that its undertaking was a solo endeavor for a large majority of the project. Where others would specialize and recruit members to help in other areas, Long wanted to know about the whole process.

His motivation for this stemmed from his first experience within the game industry. “I was fresh out of computer animation school and had gotten a job at a local company as an environment modeler. I was scared to be honest because I didn’t feel that I knew enough. I knew how to model and animate (and not well, mind you) but nothing about the actual game-making process. When it came time for me to perform, I did so poorly and eventually was tasked with working on HUD elements for the project. Again, my inexperience and lack of knowledge really made things difficult and I was eventually let go. After that had happened, how could I apply at any other company with my level of skill where it was?” he explains, “This is why I took it solo, to force myself to learn it.”