NightFall feature

Don’t we all bleed red blood?

When asked about story, Nigredo Studios can really talk about the plot and themes they are bestowing on the single-player Half-Life 2 series NightFall, their unique take on Valve’s mythology. In what this writer considers an extremely good sign, when asked about their gameplay they do the same. NightFall has Half-Life 2 to provide its mechanics. It is the telling of its story that occupies the minds and time of its developers. Following a dramatic collapse and rebirth, the first NightFall episode, Initiation, is currently well into production. What better time to delve into this murky, uncertain and downright disturbing new world?

If episodic Half-Life 2 releases sound familiar, rest easy. Nigredo are taking City 17 in a very different direction; that of psychological horror. NightFall places us in the shoes of John Dalton, a pre-Freeman rebellion fighter who is more than a little spooked—“not the sanest man on Earth”, as project lead Taychin ‘Kremator’ Dunnvatanachit puts it—and significantly more than a name for NPCs to refer to the player by. It’s just as well, because NightFall’s all-important plot eschews the standard gun-toting hero fare and concerns itself solely with Dalton’s personal voyage of “redemption”, and his discovery of his “past and purpose”.

They are Big Ideas, ones quite possibly unprecedented among FPS mods. Their inward focus leaves Dalton far from the centre of regional events, and you can expect separating what is relevant to his troubles and what matters only to those of the wider rebel group’s to form a sizeable slice of the fun. Mind-bending twists that make you reinterpret everything you thought you knew are most definitely on the cards.

If you need any more proof that NightFall is taking story seriously, non-player characterisation shows the same signs of mould-breaking. David Sangster is an ex-7 Hours War commando who travels with Dalton for most of Initiation, still wearing his decade-old military uniform. Twitchy and bitter at the loss of his entire squad during the Combine’s initial invasion, he will not hesitate to kill Dalton—or anyone else—if he considers them a liability.

AS-189 is the only name by which we know Initiation’s other major character, a Combine assassin and “femme fatale” with “vague purpose”. Is it madness to try to add character to a Combine implement? Perhaps—we will find out soon enough, Kremator teases. That the morality of NightFall’s various characters, perhaps even Dalton’s, will be “questionable” is his one and only mysterious guarantee. “The lines”, he says, “are grey”.

Such relative specifics are rare however, and most of the time Nigredo speak only in theme and theory. “With Half-Life 2 there were only sparse periods where the player felt scared, felt that something wasn’t quite right”, said prominent mapper Pete ‘AcX’ Cook on the team’s overall goal. “We’re trying to sustain that feeling throughout [NightFall]. We have planted subtle psychological elements throughout the game which by our observations do a good job of unnerving players”. Exactly what those ‘psychological elements’ are remains tightly sealed behind the team’s lips—“trade secrets”, lead coder Matt ‘Wraiyth’ Stafford only half-jokingly claims.

Nigredo are more candid on the various locales we will travel to over the series, perhaps because there are so many that revealing four, City 17, an asylum, a lake, and a “Combine stronghold”, still leaves plenty for players to discover as the plot progresses. “We are going for an extremely large variety of environments” Wraiyth confirms. “Five locales and eleven maps in Initiation”.

Despite the team’s storytelling bias, those five hours will still offer new gameplay, weapons and opponents. Nigredo are putting their own twist on the classic HL2 formula, most notably with the implementation of a Halo-esque weapon limit: “you can’t carry around the thirty weapons that you normally do in a game”, Nigredo joint head Adam ‘amckern’ McKern explains. Don’t expect radical departures though, as the team consider their work a prequel to Half-Life 2 and do not intend to deviate from the basic gameplay too far, let alone break story continuity.

This self-imposed goal, of “staying true to Half-Life 2’s style” while “adding our own flair”, has tied the team’s creative hands, but they relish the challenge. Kremator gleefully drops story hints: “some of the events in NightFall will also explain or revisit locations and events in Half-Life 2” I am told at one point, raising questions of just how pre-Freeman Dalton’s tale will be.

As if all this isn’t unusual enough for a Half-Life 2 mod (and arguably a mod full stop), there is the clincher: it’s happening without zombies. Because ask yourself honestly, when was the last time a headcrab zombie frightened you into more than jumping a little? “We don’t use them much”, Kremator intones. “In some locations it is suitable and logical for a zombie to exist, though, so I wouldn’t go as far as to say ‘There are no zombies in NightFall, period’”. All the same, yet another tired cliché has been unceremoniously dumped.

Everything is under control

Last May, things were not looking good for NightFall. Its international team had ground to a halt as internal strife, incommunicado leaders and a lack of focus slowly tore it apart from the inside. Tempers flared as members drifted away and the web domain expired. It hardly helped when co-lead Cr4ig disappeared without warning from the internet, never to be seen again. For two weeks the project was abandoned entirely—why?

Nigredo are not shy about admitting their failings. Creating a narrative-based game is a far greater organisational challenge than producing a multi-player equivalent, Kremator believes, and NightFall’s demise was indeed due to a common managerial issue: too narrow a chain of command. Kremator spoke directly to the department leads, who then spoke directly to their skills-based teams. The team expanded over time, but the hierarchy did not.

“The team grew so large that I alone was no longer sufficient to maintain control”, admits Kremator. He relates how the various departments began to quarrel over design issues, with nobody able to fully reconcile the various factions, and then the arrival of the killing blow as real life intervened to send him from his native Thailand to America for a year of study. “It was very hard to keep everyone on track and ensure they had something to do”, AcX concurs.

“The different time zones made it even harder to communicate with the department leaders, and the lack of a base design document to take my place while I was busy or gone made another large contribution”, Kremator recalls. The team’s demise was both assured and imminent, and soon enough the fragile house of cards had collapsed.

Yet scattered as they were, enough of those cards remained on the table to start again. Nigredo’s plan was to shuffle the deck with a stripped-down team, a new design, NightFall’s lovingly-crafted assets, and lessons learnt. Codename White was to present the same horror and suspense themes as NightFall, but it too collapsed—this time because of the uproar amongst the community of gamers waiting on Nigredo’s opus. The new team was created, but the new mod was not. NightFall lived on.

Now streamlined from thirty-odd members to just the fifteen most dedicated, the team have learnt from their mistakes. The inflexible hierarchy that once brought the project to its knees has been dropped entirely, and paradoxically it is a flat structure, with departments but no particular leaders, that is now boosting productivity. “Working on Sapphire Scar with fifty members and then on a large-scale HL2 mod has taught me that close teams are best”, amckern reveals, and the rest of the group echo his sentiments. New internal forum software and a fully-fledged design document are at last bringing the team’s ideas together and giving the project direction, without dependence on any one person.

But this is not to suggest that nothing had been done before the mod’s collapse. The move to episodic had in fact come a month prior to NightFall’s week-long visit to the morgue, in the hope of revitalising the team with a smaller and more focused workload and earlier release. It failed, of course, but paved the way for today’s post-reform workflow.

Tantalisingly, the team leaders also toyed with following further in Valve’s footsteps by converting to the Cabal development system: splitting the team by gameplay segment, not profession. “Cabals were one thing we were tossing up when the size of the team peaked, but we decided against it”, Wraiyth reveals. “The team was pretty shaky, and we really couldn’t have relied on everyone on the team to hold up their end”. Although Kremator feels that the revitalised team is ready for Cabals, he also considers its small size to nullify their benefits. A shame—a mod-level attempt at the process would be superbly instructive for us all.

Nigredo Studios

Like John Dalton, Nigredo Studios isn’t just a name. An Australian company founded by Kremator and McKern, it comprises both the bulk of the NightFall team (its ‘mod department’—though as they are keen to make clear, NightFall is not a commercial project) and a number of professional developers drawn from the ill-fated Stargate SG-1 project once under production at fellow Australian developer Perception.

“I have been involved in games development for a while, starting with mods in my spare time back in ‘98”, McKern explains. “I moved up to the Gameboy Advance using Catapult in late 2003, and mid-2005 I did some contractual work for mainstream developers. Moving up to leading my own team has been my goal for these past few years”.

There are at least two titles being planned at the studio, both built on Source after the fall-through of McKern’s Unreal Engine 3 licensing negotiations. The first of these is Prime, a sci-fi squad tactics game inspired by Peter Hamilton’s 2004 novel Pandora’s Star. Offering what is only described as a “brand new look” for a science fiction work, Prime’s expansive environments will rely heavily on whatever landscape rendering technology Valve have up their collective sleeves for Half-Life 2: Episode Two’s countryside setting. The second project, originally intended for Unreal Engine 3, remains an enigma.

Do the NightFall team feel overshadowed by their professional colleagues? Far from it. “I would say that NightFall has some of the best people involved in custom content for Source working on it”, McKern boasts: a bold claim indeed in the face of twin behemoths Nuclear Dawn and NeoTokyo. The rest of the team are more cautious. “We definitely feel we’re fairly professional in what we’re striving to achieve”, intones Wraiyth in slightly less brazen fashion.

There is professional however, and there is profitable. Steam has opened up a mods-to-riches route for successful teams—its potential becoming manifest at this very moment—and the development community is split between those who see it as a reward for years of dedication and those who feel that it threatens mod community values to the point forcing out any last vestige of innocence that is still clung on to. Whichever side you take, there can be no doubt that selling an unlicensed mod and receiving exactly half of each purchase’s revenue is both a new and very attractive entry path to the industry for independent developers. Although they have chosen the licensed route, how does Nigredo feel about selling mods through Steam, or other, similar platforms?

“It’s a touchy topic”, answers Wraiyth. “You can really see it from both sides—as a gamer, I wouldn’t like to see my favourite mods sold over Steam—just look at some of the outrage over Garry’s Mod. From the other side, if I were to get an offer from Valve? You wouldn’t turn down something like that. If we were made that offer for NightFall though, I’d push to turn it down—albeit regretfully—simply because NightFall has always been something I’ve spent my time on for it to get out to the world as a fun, free mod for anyone to enjoy”.

A project built for sale from the off is fair game however, and Steam is a likely outlet for Prime.

“I think the face of the mod and game industries will change a fair bit over the next few years”, Wraiyth continues. “We’re seeing more and more high quality mods—just look around at your Nuclear Dawns, Dystopias and NeoTokyos. Gems like Garry’s Mod, Red Orchestra: Ostfront and Alien Swarm: Infested have been given a chance to shine in a commercial domain that’s pretty hard to break into these days. While I think modding is getting more difficult with next-generation engines and content coming around, modders are definitely rising to the challenge, producing higher quality work than even the game that they’re modding.”

“Talent like this becomes too good to ignore, and with distribution systems like Steam and EA Downloader popping up, we’re seeing cheaper and better alternatives to be able to easily push good products out to the masses (for example Darwinia). And with commercial developers standing to only gain from this sort of thing I can’t see any good reason why we won’t see unlicensed engines and better distribution options for smaller teams”.

View today's NightFall media release in full at the new official website or here at ModDB!

NightFall: Initiation will be released later this year.