An announcement from the Combat/Xenoswarm team
MCMLXXXIV
Join Date: 2010-04-14 Member: 71400Members
Join Date: 2010-04-14 Member: 71400Members
Today we have a big announcement to share with you. We’re very grateful for what UWE and their engine and the NS2 community at large have done for us and it's been an exciting year making games we love. But we feel that we have learned a great deal and are now in the process of moving away from modding on Spark to trying branching out and making our own games. As a group we've achieved more than we ever thought we could already so it's with great pleasure that we announce that we're forming a new game studio: Faultline Games.
This decision wasn’t easy for us, as we've loved working with Spark, but with the recent pace of major changes to the engine and to the SDK we've been spending all our time fighting fires with Combat and Xenoswarm and the Steam Workshop rather than delivering new features and concepts. Over time it has become increasingly difficult for us to make real progress with the limited time we can put into our projects (all of us have jobs and other commitments) and this has just proved too frustrating for us as a team.
During our time together we have learned many things about game development and met many talented people that have helped us along the way or joined us for the ride. We're still solidifying ideas about what our first game will be like but we already have a prototype engine, based on Unity, which we'll be using to create our next game. We're developing in two-week sprints and this process has yielded good results so far. The current development plan is to prototype all the game elements in a sandbox project, and then to create a top-down cooperative shooter meeting somewhere along the lines of Alien Swarm, Joss Whedon's Firefly and Xenoswarm, with unique character design, gameplay and weapons, but the end result might turn out to be vastly different! Our development team has always been open to new joiners and is run in a consensus model, our ambition limited only by our free time and individual abilities.
We highly respect UWE’s decision to continue supporting and adding new content to their game long after release, and they remain an inspiration for how to create an indie game with a passionate community and make it all work. We aim to emulate UWE's original principles of 'open development' as much as we can, and we hope that by being open and inclusive about our decisions we can keep the support of the NS2 community we know and love.
What does this mean for Combat / Xenoswarm?
While we have always done what we can to keep our mods running, update after update, and after sinking countless hours of our own free time into developing first Combat, then Xenoswarm, and in keeping our mods working as much as we've been able, we are now officially stopping active support for both Combat and Xenoswarm. Unofficially we might make the occasional update but we are hoping that a few of the more active members of our passionate community or even UWE themselves will step up to the plate and keep the mods running, to add new content and to repair them as they break between updates. By releasing our source code (and promising to offer guidance to anyone who is looking to make updates to our mods) we hope that they can continue to be played by avid NS2 gamers well into the future.
Combat Source Code
Xenoswarm Source Code
We would like to thank the entire team at UWE and all the people who helped us along the way by contributing feedback, maps, models, servers and everything else that made Combat successful and of course you our fans for sticking with us on this journey.
You can follow our progress here:
FaultlineGames
Sincerely,
JimWest, MCMLXXXIV, Jibrail, Mr P, Evil_Ice, Lt. Dan, odkken, Batman
The Combat dev team
Faultline Games
We would also like to thank everyone who has ever helped us with Combat and Xenoswarm! If you'd like to get involved on our new project you need only ask!
This decision wasn’t easy for us, as we've loved working with Spark, but with the recent pace of major changes to the engine and to the SDK we've been spending all our time fighting fires with Combat and Xenoswarm and the Steam Workshop rather than delivering new features and concepts. Over time it has become increasingly difficult for us to make real progress with the limited time we can put into our projects (all of us have jobs and other commitments) and this has just proved too frustrating for us as a team.
During our time together we have learned many things about game development and met many talented people that have helped us along the way or joined us for the ride. We're still solidifying ideas about what our first game will be like but we already have a prototype engine, based on Unity, which we'll be using to create our next game. We're developing in two-week sprints and this process has yielded good results so far. The current development plan is to prototype all the game elements in a sandbox project, and then to create a top-down cooperative shooter meeting somewhere along the lines of Alien Swarm, Joss Whedon's Firefly and Xenoswarm, with unique character design, gameplay and weapons, but the end result might turn out to be vastly different! Our development team has always been open to new joiners and is run in a consensus model, our ambition limited only by our free time and individual abilities.
We highly respect UWE’s decision to continue supporting and adding new content to their game long after release, and they remain an inspiration for how to create an indie game with a passionate community and make it all work. We aim to emulate UWE's original principles of 'open development' as much as we can, and we hope that by being open and inclusive about our decisions we can keep the support of the NS2 community we know and love.
What does this mean for Combat / Xenoswarm?
While we have always done what we can to keep our mods running, update after update, and after sinking countless hours of our own free time into developing first Combat, then Xenoswarm, and in keeping our mods working as much as we've been able, we are now officially stopping active support for both Combat and Xenoswarm. Unofficially we might make the occasional update but we are hoping that a few of the more active members of our passionate community or even UWE themselves will step up to the plate and keep the mods running, to add new content and to repair them as they break between updates. By releasing our source code (and promising to offer guidance to anyone who is looking to make updates to our mods) we hope that they can continue to be played by avid NS2 gamers well into the future.
Combat Source Code
Xenoswarm Source Code
We would like to thank the entire team at UWE and all the people who helped us along the way by contributing feedback, maps, models, servers and everything else that made Combat successful and of course you our fans for sticking with us on this journey.
You can follow our progress here:
FaultlineGames
Sincerely,
JimWest, MCMLXXXIV, Jibrail, Mr P, Evil_Ice, Lt. Dan, odkken, Batman
The Combat dev team
Faultline Games
We would also like to thank everyone who has ever helped us with Combat and Xenoswarm! If you'd like to get involved on our new project you need only ask!
Comments
I suppose I better get rid of this signature, there are not a lot of the Mod Beans left..
I'm assuming I'll see you guys in the greenlight or indie section of Steam in the far away future, good luck with it all and thanks for NS2:Combat.
Good luck guys! I will definitely play your game!
Best of luck for the future. As has already been said, this is both a little sad but also a piece of good news in a way, too. Shame you aren't going to use spark for your first game, though
Hopefully ns2 won't lose combat. Was always fun to play it now and then...
I second this motion!
Predictable due to no modding framework. NS2 might be moddable but with each patch breaking mods why bother?
I wish you all the best for the future. Xeno swarm on source?
=> Alien swarm.
I know this is meant to be a generally positive thread so all ill say is uwe let us down with modding support and they don't appear to even care, you know something is wrong when combat the most popular mod calls it a day, i guess when uwe makes it hard to keep things running and hardly anyone plays them it's not worth the work, if only something had been done back around when modjam was running, they've focused on the wrong things and made some silly mistakes since the beginning which has lead to a game that's nowhere near as popular as it should be, i remember thinking around release how great it would be a year on but here we are, such a shame.
You are not that far off, that is all am gonna say ;D
I really enjoyed Alien Swarm, so I'm hoping for the best
its not a momentous step! because UWE's lack of love for mods they are leaving and starting their own game not good news at all Hugh....
YOU ARE LOSING YOUR BEST MOD HUGH not a good thing ^^;
This. The team behind your best mod is leaving because they can't reliably mod an engine that was specifically designed for modding.
Dude will hype anything.
This is quite true and sad, are they so oblivious to what's going on or simply don't care? At this point i guess it doesn't matter, ns2 is going to slowly die from here on, sure it will idle along with a few hundred players but is that good enough for mods or the community at the end of the day?
I don't think so, get your act together uwe before it's too late, although i think it probably is so carry on doing what you are, im sure your next game will be just as big a success!
I'm sorry but I can't see that happening, you see we already patched it a couple of times since we switched to Unity and every time in our internal meeting we say this is the last and still we kept doing it, so we just gotta stop it no matter how painful it is both for players and for us
@Snipo
as stated by OP its the difficulty of maintaining things but we also want to branch out, since we moved on from Spark our group have grown to 10 members, we would like to stay that way and by creating games, characters etc that we own the rights to (unlike Combat) we can at least monetize that at some point and hopefully soon get ourselves and those people paid for their work, everyone got to make a living so why not do it with something we love and enjoy doing anyway.
So UWE have nothing to do with it, it was our choice to move on and it was gonna happen at some point eventually.
@Zali
You make it sound a bit negative when you put it that way, I'm curios do you have experience with spark?
To be fair he is not hyping it and I'm definitely not saying this because I'm on the dev team, the mod got incredible support from the community we got lots of maps and other cool stuff made for it, there was a good amount of servers ( more than any other mod out there ) dedicated to only running Combat, even UWE re-tweeted us when we put out patches and Hugh have done multiple Combat videos so yeah in that sense I'd say its one of the best mods out there for NS2.
Anyway I'd like to remind you to follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/faultlinegames at some point after we reveal what we are working on we are planning to blog and even stream some of our stuff, for now hang in there!