Fallout: London with Daniel Morrison Neil and Jordan Albon

0:00Fallout London is a 2024 Total Conversion mod developed by Team Fallon. 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 Alban 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.

0:47Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Gary's mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

1:10Daniel and Jordan, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? Yeah, really well, thank you. 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. So I was very excited to see this mod's 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 so Daniel do you want to kick us off?

1:36Yeah so I'm Daniel Morrison-Neil and I was the lead of audio so everything to do with like the music composition, audio design and implementation as well as leading the voice acting department. Perfect and Jordan? Yeah hello I'm Jordan Albin I am the lead 3D artist and build master of Fallout London so I'm in charge of anything 3D related managing the 3D team and all the stuff they create all the beautiful little things we put in the game and version control so the actual updates and redistributing it to the team keeping everyone up to date getting everyone's files together perfect build master 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 to 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 so I guess in a nutshell what is Fallout London Daniel do you want to start yeah so Fallout London's a complete total conversion mod which has been worked on over the past like 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.

2:56Everything's pretty much brand new in it and you know everything that's been designed for it has got like a kind of lovely British London twist to do with it. A reassuring shade of grey and a little dingy of everything is terrible but we like it that way. So I guess the important thing that I want to cover as well at the start is I guess the nature of it being a mod and the team because and this is something I want to ask you all about a bit later as well but like the possibly like the high end of pr i've ever seen for a mod in terms of the pickup from like so many games publications reviewed it as a game which i've not like 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 yes all voluntary yeah perfect and can you jordan i guess since you interact with it was 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 oh lordy so 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 you know bring fallout to london as for the team though yeah so it's a mixed bag so we have essentially there's no commitment to say submit anything if that makes sense everyone's hobbyists they will work in the free time there's you know there's no contract or anything like that so it's basically whatever you can chip into the project and what kind of naturally happened was after the lockdown from covid hit we found that there was a few characters two of us sitting in here who actually i don't i can't remember if he was there then i feel like he was i just joined at that point that's a bit of a funny story but yeah so it's all a burnout 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 were on the team you know ranging from 2d artists 3d artists level designers scriptors you name it any department eventually i will actually include dansky's department in that as well that eventually went into a whole audio and media department as the PR picked up close to release and when audio you know 90 ,000 lines of dialogue I think it's actually more than that now when all of them had to be edited it was like Dansky team go so 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 Dansky which is brilliant so 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 you know 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 you know 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 like so many games came out like 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 so you know that sorry this does link into the pr as well so that it's 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 i missed yeah the way that all of it was kind of structured was i think modern's like quite a unique kind of avenue of game development i would say because you're already working with like pre-existing material and it's based on changing something so generally what happens with this kind of community building aspect is it's lots of people want to change a game or like what their ideal version is or create some type of story avenue from that.

7:11And it actually allows for like the facilitation of like actually having like leads of department, actual departments. Now there's this kind of mixture of role playing as a game studio as well. I mean, we did model ourselves as close to, you know, getting stuff done and everything with all of that, but it's common amongst like any kind of mod group to approach it from that way where you have a leader department things are like 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 so like like a 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 you know so that's like a really good entry point for people to start working with pre-existing material and it's more about learning how to change something rather than create something completely from scratch so it's like a really good entry point for building portfolio as well 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 quote-unquote early career in terms of you know being recent grads and that kind of stuff so i'm really interested in how that's influenced your directions but just sticking with i guess the workflow and the team that you've patterned for 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 you know normally well not normally but like quite often a mod even in fallout 4 for a bethesda game is like you know i want to make this aspect of the game better i want to change this one thing and like it's very easy for me to conceptualize the volunteer work there right like you know 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 like i mean i guess just how was that work organized i imagine there must just be someone who's just like looking through the map and going there's a blank space there that needs something that's a ticket give it to the team like how does that work as a as i guess you as you said daniel there's like 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 to everyone to do it in this scale just seems absurd to me but maybe i'm being pessimistic about volunteering projects the example you just gave there was actually really good to kind of pull from you know 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 pro 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 know some people might see pressure in that but no it's i think it's really good for people but like i said the example you gave with there's this little spot that that was what really worked well when it came to getting the quests and actually the level design finished we saw people going oh where's this little empty spot on the map use that and it was just constantly being done and i feel like it you know it's like an empty whiteboard and they kept spodging out marks and that sort of thing until it was all filled out i don't know if you want to say anything about so i know a bit about those kinds of things probably not the most overall but i do know like for things like level design or whatever you know they were creating a lot of london from google maps or whatever and that's that's a way to descend and to just keep designing and designing and designs but they but they all love doing that as well it was almost because i mean level designs 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 Wolfie and Prill 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 says like you know a TARDIS could go here this would be a cool little bit for that it kind of worked very naturally with that so a lot of it was quite level design focused for a lot of things as the playground and that 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 you know it was either we need enemies here we'll put them there or you know stuff to do with let's make a fun little reference to something to do with British history so 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 I think it really depends on the department as well like certain departments had it's not that I had like a great load of work but the work was almost more nitty-gritty whereas there were certain processes like I would say for example Dansky with the audio editing he nailed it like the dialogue editing you know he had everything the engine you can export everything out into spreadsheets and it's all really organized right from the get-go whereas with the 3d art it's just kind of bonked together and same for level design like we ended up creating google sheets to track stuff because there's no way you can really track it in the engine and do you feel like that really did play into how things got completed as an overall you know how everything got completed and put together really right well so 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 so i know a little bit about bethesda game modding i know about the creation kit and i when i was looking at the creation kit in preparation for this episode i was like and i you know 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 did Did you?

12:51Was that the tooling? Was that the base? It was all the official creation kit. Yeah. So of course the 3D, not as much audio. No, certain things absolutely not. But yeah, the core modding. Yeah. So 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 little at all. It's like 250 megs, nearly 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 space is and all the information is stored you know this is where that character stands this is the pose that they're doing whereas you know the assets and everything are kind of localized outside of that they're completely different files the really big asset files so i guess could you tell us a little bit about the creation kit and how it would compare to i guess a more i don't say more typical but like a commercial engine like unity or etc like what tools are you working with there yeah so things with like unity and unreal they'll package everything into their own asset formats whereas of course with a creation kit they use proprietary or quite outdated stuff being the knit immerse game formats you know game brio if anyone's ever heard of it that really goes back it was a really old multiplayer engine from i think 95 1995 and that's what eventually was used to build morrowind and you know 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 cry engine the amount of game engines you go what's game is this game engine using or whatever and it's like oh it's a fork of cry engine okay you know it really goes back but yeah the creation kit's quite archaic it's old but it's really user-friendly it's definitely built for speed and you know 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 you know 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 and as dansky was saying earlier with people almost or even yourself with people coming out of university graduates etc i would say for someone who wants to get into game design the creation kit's 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 kind of two sides to that coin being you know fallout falls based in boston which has a lot of you know new england architecture which absolutely helped us a lot a lot of the architecture just fall in place never thought of that fascinating okay so again like the scale thing so i know 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 since you went with GOG, right?

15:45That you couldn't upload it to Nexus Mods. Yeah, yeah. So some of the, I'll get a bit more technical if you like. So 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. You know, it's a pretty awesome format. Very good compression, quite lossless in 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 were just like yeah we'll put it on the nexus we didn't even question whether they would take it or not you know that's me speaking honestly when it was early days and then when it came to the 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 like official manner we had to go through steam and bethesda and that quickly became a juggling game of like you know mummy and daddy fighting who 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 you know we ended up having to look oh no we need to build launchers installers we need to get permission from bethesda itself which is quite harder than people think you know 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 you know 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.

17:29I simply remember that was the case. They did reach out, yeah. 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 a lot of 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 and oh i didn't actually know that as in cd project red yeah yeah i had no idea they were linked okay yeah well they're essentially the same company then they're not they are not gog is separate but they're very closely interlinked like i don't know how much i can say on that front yeah no no i guess it's like yeah at one point i got sent a drive link to upload stuff and it had like all the cdpr like team on it and i was like oh the joys of nested corporate structures they always blur the line somewhere yeah i knew them as like the drm free games place or the retro games place but like yeah i had no idea they're related that's really interesting okay so yeah sorry to interrupt yeah 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 i think i've just looked it up they're wholly owned by cd project red so you've you're correct i was right brilliant yeah sorry i just realized what happened there excellent i have like vague memories of people saying they were based on them so it's like okay yeah in the moment we 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 hobbyist modders and you have these really humble people who are absolutely lovely and you know that they make great games as well like come on guys like Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk particularly in the genre you're modding for right like open world RPGs yeah exactly but that's the thing they 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 you know 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 is and it's again this is why we really was a match made in heaven the fact that their platform is drm free they have no obligation to keep the games updated you know 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 will know it will just force update you can manually get around it but it's not you know you don't want to ask your average user to go on to go into their steam files and set things as read only and all this other stuff compared to gog drm3 just being like oh you click the button And then you have that version of the game.

20:43So there was lots of things happening there where I think it couldn't have gone any better. We couldn't, 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. Yeah, so 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? Yeah, so I don't know if Dansky can clarify. I think it was two days before our intended release date of April 23rd. Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, I think it was, yeah.

21:19Yeah, so I had been keeping a close eye on the Steam database. So 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.

22:18That's not entirely true. It pretty much broke everything. It did, didn't it? Yeah, so 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 were completely in the dark, basically. We just knew something bad was going to hit us. And it just, you know, 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 tests, they updated to test the next gen.

22:52Everything 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 remember their name right now but they're an absolute star they found out that the face gen this ancient technology that pathos to use 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 so and that still isn't fixed by the way and 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 you also had i don't know if it's accurate to call the script extender a mod but you also had things you were using downstream that were broken as well by this right there yeah it was all relying on other people fixing those kind of things and you know that's dependencies so those 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 know you can link it straight to that correct version of the game and everything so yeah worked dope for that which is ideal for folks who you know it's great that Bethesda is still supporting the game 10 years after release but like 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 yeah like 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 you know 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 full at 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 with updating dependencies that these guys are like the absolute stars of the community they are the magic men of the community right they're 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 it some of them did a lot of them did i think in the end we was waiting for two plugins to get rebuilt but because you know we had this kind of weird flip-flop stage where it was like are we gonna 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 as well i've been testing for 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 yeah that makes sense so i mean i guess that's another interesting aspect of a project like this which is i've seen rumbling so are you i still intending to put our next gen version is that a thing that's happening no i don't think that's going to happen it's i mean it depends on a lot of other things but i mean but then you know we're creating updates we're adding things as well so you know 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 you know if we keep working on it and then actually make it work with next gen but probably not i mean that makes total sense because my question was going to be and i guess this even goes now for like patching and doing stuff after that as you said a big part of having the deadline was you know you're doing this free there needs to be an end point 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 as have new teams formed with deadlines daniel can you talk on this a bit yeah we i mean the community has been really good about it with reporting any type of bugs or you know things that were 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 you know we just have a big list and we work through it now which is actually kind of nice you know rather than having to come up with new solutions to fix various things it's we've now got everything all logged like on discord and everything it's a case of going through all of it it's 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 like bigger fixes that need done there was actually one where um pro so we were finding ways of like trying to get like ambient audio to kind of work a bit better and pro came up with this genius idea where you would um 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 like bits of rubble all together they'd be kind of like kit bashed with different things and you can load that as like a preset thing like here's a certain amount of rubble or whatever and we wanted a bunch of ambient audio for everything and he unfortunately put sound of a brahmin mooing 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 of that says by the way you forgot one and the message was on discord saying it's still there isn't it is it still there i did fix it i tried to argue my case it'd be great for just one embram and moon 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 you know i swear i had a cow moon from like the rooftops is my game bugged am i not able to tell like where sounds coming from or whatever and then pro sent me a screenshot of that he was like mate you missed one mostly because it confirms my 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 so i absolutely love that as an approach that's incredible so one last question i guess about the technical side of things before we move on to you know very interested in all things art direction on this but i guess jordan so you mentioned version control i'm a git nerd so i need to know what was the version control situation and particularly again the variety of team members the fact it's all voluntary you know even though i love git to pieces it is a labor in any project to use it and i you know can totally understand that wasn't the case so what did the team do in your situation well you'd be very happy to hear that we used git oh perfect so actually it's there's a bit more to going back i'll kind of give you a little bit of timeline so when we originally started back in the old old times people were just sharing files and discord that had to go underscore final underscore v4 yeah yep basically that actually caused a lot of errors to the point where the project was restarted is 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 so when i started to do the build we were still using this system.

30:33I 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 it. If you were on slow internet and I was at the time, I was in like 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 folders and 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 i 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 out right stuff was missing you know 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.

31:59Don't know if it was a bug. No idea. So 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, you know, it's such a good tool. You really can't. In my opinion, I don't think you can beat Git LFS. It's just Git in general. The fact you have this little folder you can upload and then just download. Perfection. Absolute perfection. just briefly for folks who haven't done any putting criminally large binaries into git lfs is it large file structure large file storage yeah yeah it's the extension for big stuff in git rather than text files cool and was that through a github a git lab a github github itself yeah so we all use the github that github desktop app nice there is other programs we have to use as well so the built-in version control for the creation kit is perforce oh god okay oh god yeah see i I heard it right there in your voice.

32:51I still use Perforce. We'd use it for the papyrus scripts, so the actual scripting language of the game itself. That's a really interesting way around. I guess this clip's built into creation kit, but it's funny to be using Perforce for the text files and Git for the 3D objects. It's almost reversed in a sense. You'd think if you're using Git, you're using that for all the text files and scripts. Yeah, 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 know, you've got redundancy. It's always there. You know, we don't have a local server.

33:26If my house collapses and destroys it, all of our work is gone. It's fast. Like, it's really, really fast. If you have good internet, damn, it's fast. Someone downloaded, I think, 60 gigs in about 10 minutes. You know, and that's unheard of in terms of what we were doing before. You know, they would have been spending three days downloading everything. Yeah. Nice. Nice bag. yeah absolutely i mean i think yeah i mean in terms of the spread of the team the skills and the team the backgrounds of the team i think yeah being able to use github desktop is yeah an ideal solution we did have a bit of a structure to it though because of course you have the freedom to have like multiple repositories so we had like if people are interested anyway i don't know how interested they will be so 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 would download it merge it all together wow okay so you you didn't have anyone else doing pull requests into the main you were doing all of that they were just sending you the changes and then you were doing wow okay really truly yeah yeah there was a few occasions where i just said to people people were like, it's going to be way easier for you to push to the main.

34:45Yeah. And they did. I think Saffron was probably the only one. So 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 she didn't want. And yeah, that required her pushing to the main. There was just no way about that. 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 every once in a while I would see something in like Fallout 4 edit or FF4 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 with 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 right and you don't want to go sunday's merge day it's like 11 at night do you mind redoing some of this so 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 only the next one out of like how many people were pushing it was like 30 yeah the maximum was i think actually 28 we had 20p i remember one merge sorry we 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 so i kind of just put our heads 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 yes this is a lot of the format you're working with you don't get a diff either like you don't know how a model has changed in the github ui right like you just have to take it on faith it's the correct one yes exactly so the only real way is to compare the size of files so it does read the papyrus source scripts that will show you the actual you know the changes in get itself and once everything's compiled though yeah no there's no way of telling what it is at all well well done that's a heroic effort to keep everyone just focusing on the work they want to do and not juggling the the project structure so i mean on two we have two members deeply involved in the asset creation of this mod so obviously i have to ask you about the art direction and i'm really interested in you know you've got something that needs to feel fallouty and by all accounts it seems like it very much does feel fallouty like the amount of people who are saying this could be an official release is awesome but also you know 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 oh that's a big question there's like so much that went into all of that but like concept art and all sorts i mean all the heads of department like kind of all had a unifying goal in understanding of having similar humour, things from Still Game to Legend to Doctor Who and everything else so it did all kind of bleed in We're all massive Fallout fans as well or every single one of us especially the old ones, Fallout 3 if you ask, I think Pearl is the only person to say Fallout 4 is his favourite everyone else is like, New Vegas, Fallout 3 Wolfie's sitting there like Fallout Tactics everyone scoffs at him for that one yeah so 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 or you know if you look at the chronological order of the games that's set in between the originals and the newer ones so something that we absolutely wanted to do was pull in more inspiration from the original games being fallout one and two black isles fallout you know if you're a hardcore fan you know what i'm about not Bethesda's Fallout.

38:53Very different. In my opinion, they're very different. And I'll come back to this point next. I think this is really important for Dansky. So 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 mishmatch of different 3D assets to kind of work as placeholders whilst the 3D... So 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.

39:34He really nailed the art style of the vehicle. So he was our vehicle artist. We had various artists who were very specific at what they did. And he absolutely nailed the Atom Punk style of the Fallout setting, but bringing in British cars, like he made the Mini Cooper, look full out at you right he was really really strong on the on that front and you know 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 you know 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 my work lies i try to just give things a little bit of a weird a lot of inspiration i took sorry i'll actually go into a little bit like more like 40 hammer um 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 a to the angel faction because of course warhammer is huge in the uk like people love warhammer and it's very that itself is a brit vibes reference yes exactly and that's i tried to feed that into the angel faction so whenever you interact with that faction or one of their labs you 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 to nail on that front so from you know we said it in our videos from like the smallest things like plug sockets to you know things like giant animated set pieces we tried to really bring in these inspirations from british culture and but try to almost mimic Bethesda's art style not perfectly I'd say because we're all different artists we're you know again this links right back to the beginning of us being hobbyists we're not expecting it I wasn't expecting all the three 3d artists work to be consistent that was just never going to happen unless we're paying them a salary right you just not you can't expect that level of work from from hobbyists so 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 dansky though was the music so i remember when dansky first joined and we had a proper deep conversation about where should we to take the music or you know what what kind of music do you like the sound of and for me fallout one i'll let him go for fallout one and two's music but just to briefly jump in before you start talking to dansky it was like from a cultural influence perspective obviously fallout music like fallout but first is fallout music you know the rockabilly the jazz that i don't want to set the world on fire like really iconic but very placed in the us like how did you go about you know i guess it all comes down to the divergence point in the history of the fallout games right like what's the influence for the london music so a lot of the like london radio tracks and everything where you know 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 you know could have issues as well so 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.

43:01OST wise we wanted to emulate a lot of the stuff from like Fallout 1 at least as the kind of starting point I wanted to make it sound as depressing as it possibly could like it should feel like a survival game ultimately you know which I think for starting for something like this a really good kind of role playing game in my opinion you know 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 make and everything and you know for me something that hams at home is then you know 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 to recognize all of these locations because they are almost one-to-one in some locations but things are broken so there should be something that should feel quite scary for them as a player but also by extension you know the character themselves waking up from a vat and being in this location they have no idea who they are, where they've come from.

44:00People, there's all these factions around making jokes about them and calling them, you know, Lab Rat and all the rest of it. So, you know, for a lot of it, I think it was just that and going into the kind of scariness. A lot of Fallout 4's soundtrack was quite hopeful as well and quite heroic, which Eno and Zur's 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 you know there was a lot more stringed instruments there was more harpsichord involved lots of tubular bells to simulate you know like big ben lots of references to like the protect and survive stinger and everything all of these kind of little points if overplayed become saturated and a bit you know like a cultural joke this was meant to you know actually make it sound like that's how that world should sound everything to like the combat music as well you know in Zoro's combat music's really good and everything but it's got lots of strong melodies whereas I thought how would this play sound if people were playing with pots and pans so I would literally sit there and play music in odd time signatures and all with this kind of stuff to try and make it seem like you know it's a bit off-wall kind of thing that's amazing I have I have seen I think it was a reddit thread actually that was like fallout london is a horror game so you've obviously nailed that and i have heard the survival aspect for the first act as well is definitely it feels more like a survival game to play than i haven't played fallout one or two but even the bethesda fallout games definitely is absolutely it was the thing that we agreed with a lot of me and myself because there was a lot of love for like lovecraftian horror and everything so like the thames folks based from what they called the deep one yeah the innsmouth the townsfolk of innsmouth that's it townsfolk of innsmouth and you know 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 it's in a lot of the original fallout so they got the dunwich offices and fallout three for example it's all based on lovecraft was 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 i think it's 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 like this game needs to be scary it's a 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 uh you know 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 and i remember the first time i found a ghoul in fallout 3 absolutely yeah i ran away i i closed the game i was like 14 at the time and i heard it could do it's horrible like screech and i went no close the game that was a horror experience for me so 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 Burkow happened.

47:13For folks who aren't aware actually Daniel do you want to explain who John Burkow is? Pearl just reached out says would you be up for this? Said yes sent 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 Burkow so at least I can put that on like my LinkedIn or something. I was replaced by John Burkow at one point in my life. 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.

47:50The most famous speaker who has done that particular thing they managed to get, which is awesome. alongside some other like neil newborn obviously is huge very cool that he stepped up for the project what was you kind of produced a lot of this under perfect storm conditions for any game development you know pandemic lockdowns volunteer run team building on top of someone else's property but for the voice acting in particular like with 90 000 lines of dialogue famous actors sending stuff in john burkow who does not come from the world of voice acting how did you manage that process it was kind of a mixture between me prill and callum for a lot of it so there was a lot of organization for everything we planned quite far in advance for everything there's a lot of kind of structural things that we had to put into place as well things to do with like the 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 so we wanted to make sure that people weren't recording more lines than 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 you know they're volunteers and for them they probably do they do a lot of the work there i mean they carry the story and everything like that but they're not you know when they record it could take like three weeks and that's kind of that so they're kind of putting time in and joining a project with no kind of promised return or anything other than potentially a small portfolio thing so from the beginning like we wanted to make sure that everybody was represented at least somewhat fully as possible so giving people multiple roles or working out all these different sections with like generic characters and things so we had like you know vagabond male 01 kind of thing but they would play multiple small roles and everything because as many characters might only have like 10 lines and then that's them they're gone for the game their own their whole purpose in the story is to go go that way or something you know so 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 that me and pro before that got sent out we were going you know this is going to be rubbish we're going to like get like 10 applicants and they're all going to voice like 40 characters or whatever you know like 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 you know and you know we're not in an office we're in our place and we're sitting on discord and everything we send that out and emma had everything all linked up so that it would get to like an excel and everything so it would all generate all the names and everything like that of it was applied and everything and like their portfolio and it's like oh my god we have like how many was it was it like 800 or something it was over a thousand at one point if i remember i think it was yeah it was it was crazy 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 you know there were as you mentioned like famous voice actors or who are fans of the work also jumped in but like in general at that stage in the project how were people hearing about it and why were they applying if that makes sense the mod got quite a lot of traction and everything with everything to do with the advertisements i mean it was i mean i work in a university and there's sometimes students like mentioning to me how's fallout london going how do you know i work on that kind of thing you know 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 percent of the people which is a big amount you know 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 that influencer sphere or actual established voice actors as well and it was ranging all over the place and I think it was just a a kind of testament to just how much passion we put into it and you know tried to show that visibly with stuff and you know people like Neil and Yubon and everything coming on board and chatting with him I've actually not met him in person the whole team's met him in person apart for me because I had to go somewhere else and do something else for the team so I was tasked with something I don't even love he really wanted to meet you 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 you know 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 you know making sure people are represented fairly and you know being treated fairly and everything so i at no 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 you know 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 that was quite important for me that everybody got the exact same experience you know i'm sorry i remember you going through them applications and portfolios for like months oh it wasn't months i mean i maybe took like a thousand thousand sounds like it could be months yeah it was two weeks i mean i went through it so i would listen to them all from the start to the finish and it to be quite cutting there are some ones due to like microphone quality or just in terms of like range of voice so they were asked to provide multiple different character approaches to stuff how they would interpret for things so 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 the start to end again of that next stage and then start saying you know 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 in because it did take me a wee while you and everything because i wanted to get it done super soon and say sorry there's a bit of delay and everything and you are shortlisted which i just wanted to say for people but you know some people didn't get it and some people did get it but you know it was a lot of people to manage when people got in because we like what how many was it was like 80 90 people eventually at the end of it it was about 100 to start with yeah it was in that realm yeah so i was just laughing there because i i remembered the whole neil newborn story probably didn't know who he was and he received this email from him oh yeah like months and months and i've seen neil talk about this as you also we should just mention for folks who don't know neil newborn plays a starian in baldersgate 3 amongst other roles that's what most people know him for casual oscar-winning actor in your game lineup but sorry go on go on yes it was really funny so because you have to imagine the guy's getting like loads of emails anyway and then he goes who's this nil newborn me and wolfie the lead level designer we've been sitting there playing boulder's gate and we went wait what like this was just around the time of him getting all the rewards for boulder's gate or i think it was just before he's like who is this guy and we're just like you didn't leave him on red did you and yeah he'd left nil nubon on red and we were sitting there like oh my god what have you done you need to get him on yeah as i realized just said i said oscar meant bafta but yes yeah one of the most beloved characters the ball just gave through 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 to manage like 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 that's a lot of lines for each person yeah we had about 10 dialogue editors or so working on it and it was a lot of work but i mean this was i mean for like the voice acting kind of side of it because that was 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 like work on my music or anything else or 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 you know or editing the dialogue which might be just i don't it just depends on how long the lines are but you're sitting there editing them and you're having to go through and check take 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 i guess that brings me on to something we alluded to earlier which is you know it's a volunteer project members of the team are fairly early in careers you know 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 that or is that a side skill that you'll never touch again i mean we're going to be you know we're developing a company out of this so we're going to be building a games studio out of this and you know 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 but you know and i'm quite a shy person overall but i i like love all these guys a lot so you know i wouldn't want to work with anybody else i'll still be doing other stuff with teaching like i teach like game audio and stuff like that now for them but you know a lot of the focus is working on this we want to build something potentially create opportunities for folk create really good games you know 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 so definitely not lost i would say the people that have learned the most 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 time of graft kind of stuff like 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 you know dialogue lines mismatch makes sure quests work correctly for sunny making sure that 3d models are like all properly optimized everything had to be fine-tuned the most and i would say from that last kind of eight months you know the team 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 says 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.

59:42It's easy to make it, but it's difficult to complete it, I would say. Yeah, really shows the potential of the team to have gone through that. Yeah, how about you? I mean, I guess you were involved in this new company effort as well, Jordan. No, no, no, exactly. No, I'm joking.

59:57So actually, I'm not doing that at all, actually. It was definitely an ordeal. So some of us were, yeah i i probably gave up i certainly gave up i'll talk some about the sacrifices really because it was six years for me you know but one year out of that so about five or four and a half years of just working and then working so i sacrificed my health i ended up actually sacrificing career over it i could just time management was just it reached a point of impossibility yeah and and i think a few sacrifices or a lot of sacrifices were made for people and we after five years we really want to put that into something good for us all and and move forward because uh yeah that there's limitations behind what we're what we're doing so you know of course it's all owned by bethesda at the end of the zenimax at the end of the day it's it's which is a bit sad on our front but But I think we really want to move forward with that.

1:00:58It's not just that, like the fact that they may own the assets or the engine and the game itself, the fact that we can't monetize it, essentially. You know, that would really open up avenues for us to move into a new games company. But we've done, we've had crowdfunding, et cetera, 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. oh i can second that easily like a good point just i wanted to raise this earlier you're talking about dialogue at one point we had so much dialogue i thought it was the end of the project oh my god i remember that yeah we were almost crying because we're running out of what like the form id limit or something you were just running out of ids in the engine amazing yeah the 64-bit like integer limit which the engine hits a certain point it we're already way past what the engine itself can load we have to use them that's right because we have to actually strip fallout 4 for actually loads ever because the engine can only load two master files and then it has a reference limit of the two million i can't remember the exact amount it it's a big number we had to go into fallout 4 delete all of its wild 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 so 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 i mean that was a good month for me i mean that was when i delivered like 12 000 lines or something or sorry like a good week single-handedly ruined the game yeah and everybody pulled the game and everything and started loading up says why is my game taking like 20 minutes to load it would just black screen you it would just go to a black screen at one point 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 done something stupid with the creation kit so when it reached this point we essentially it's just the loose files that the game can only load a certain amount of loose files and of course the maybe 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 like this is it we've reached the limit of what we can do we're just gonna have to release a half finished thing but no there was a fix fortunately it was just archiving it all we were like eureka moment of it's not broken we can continue yeah yeah 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 yeah so i think dansky and callum the lead writer who probably prefer unity i feel like they both have more experience of unity from what they've said yeah definitely prefer unity yeah yes whereas i myself uh wolfie the lead level designer preller we've all used unreal engine so i've used unreal engine back to like 4.00 back when it first came out so i kind of really pushed that because we have a lot of experience but there's good you know there's good things and bad things about both was it part of the trailer was made in unreal something was made in unreal right yeah i made the logo in unreal so the the fallout london logo did all that in unreal how did you hear about that wait what i couldn't tell you i was surprised before these shows i don't think that's ever been said about how that's a bit nuts if a guest has said anything on the internet i can guarantee i'll have read it okay well maybe i did say it in like a previous interview or something i have no idea just the logo everything else are recorded in game xbox controller moving the camera so unreal engine definitely moving forward i think i think for like in terms of like how far we're on what we're 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 modeling off something else this has to be something that's built up from scratch that actually is fully functioning you know and has a good grounds to then build up from it so you know like we have meetings very regularly we're currently you know have ideas for games but it's very much this is all conversational this is where you know 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 you know 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 like easily like 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 and that takes time to do that you know 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 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 you know in terms of the business reality and the real time investment and how much you know how much risk you're putting on the line by saying okay we're making the game that's 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 like you know everyone has a picture of what that means very interesting thing that's quite curious about all of that because we're all going to be you know working remotely for a fair bit of time so need 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 it's also interesting here that you still consider it challenging you know 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 like completely fresh and you need the whiteboard space as it is or 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 you know for establishing that you understand what somebody's saying as well as like you know anything else that comes with that the trust factor and then what other meanings might be heard with that something that you know you just get from something in person and like it's just important to be aware of everything like that of course when it comes to making things that'll all be fun we'll be sitting on discord and everything but you know starting something from scratch again has to be done correctly especially if it's purely remotely don't know if somebody has any thoughts on that no and yes i think you're right probably it's probably a bit daunting at the minute so i don't know how much i can really say but i feel like i feel like we should just say we i think we want to make some kind of small project together something not on the same scale because we really need to learn how to use the new tools i personally i think two others agree two others disagree i don't know how much they disagree or agree but i'm fine with unreal i'm totally fine i just know how to use unity it's more the scope more the scope oh i see the next thing i think a big fear that i i personally have and i'll voice it i'll be quite vocal about it anyway that we We don't want to just finish Fallout London and go, yeah, we're going to make Fallout London 2.

1:09:39Because, you know, that's just not in the realms of possibility yet. Yet, you know, from a financial point, from a skill set point as well, that's just not happening. So I think we'd really like to make something of a small scope or even just throw away game jams, right? Let's spend two weeks, just make something. Oh, it was crap. But at least we learned everything we could from it. Throw it away. Next game jam. maybe you know there's various ways we could approach that yeah smaller games definitely allow you to test things and then you know it's like an iterative process with making more games and everything so we'll be able to like 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 exactly literally we can't afford it we could spend you know a certain amount of money developing something and then have to reset it after a year that would be tragic whereas you know 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 like multiple projects at once in the event that one falls through or you know maybe they're all successful i think that's really important for us to do as well yeah strange scaffold are big for doing this at the moment he's yeah relatively well-known indie now but he's always running a ludicrous amount of projects with his indie and that's exactly why so yeah i think that makes a lot of sense and i think that starting smaller scale it makes a lot of sense so 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 and 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 modern 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 i think i won't 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 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 before 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 that you know they maybe they played it on xbox or playstation years and then they wanted to to play fallout london so 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 a good chunk's going to be from the fallout for modern 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 want being what we released i think we would be okay i'd hope we'd be okay i think we should definitely be okay i think things are going to change and everything but this is like the crossover between you know what is fallout london and what is team full on because they're completely separate and that kind of transition at least on the public face and front is really important as well to then say you know we are going to be making something at least with the same you know 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 you know from Callum the way of developing assets to the texture and with SAF all with that kind of stylistic kind of choices as things that you know yes was influenced by fallout but you know everything that went into that was a lot of experimentation and developing a voice and playing about with how stories and characters develop and even like the music as well eventually went straight those are all things that we'll be carrying to future projects and we're just hoping that people following us see that aspect of it rather than it's a re a remodeled fallout game because it is more than that at least for us 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 all right thank you