Merritt Gaming sat down with the staff over at Point of Existence, one of the MOTY award winners, to show everyone what the modification is about and their opinions on their success!
Here is what they had to say:
Thanks Seigman for taking the time in doing an interview with Merritt Gaming, a sister company of Merritt and Company. To start off I would like for you tell us a little about yourself and your team. (Background experience, names, how long you’ve been in the business, previous mods you worked on).
My name is Andreas Johansen, 24 years old, living in Norway. I’m currently a 2nd year student at NITH Bergen where I’m taking a game programming and design course. I’ve been playing around with making games (simple platform games, etc) for ages, but it wasn’t until I came across the concept of modifying games back in 2002 that I started to work on higher level things. I was playing in the 21CW Desert Combat tournament at the time and everyone was yelling at everyone about balancing issues and the like (the usual stuff for any gaming tournament) and I started looking into how that game (Battlefield 1942) and the mod (Desert Combat) was put together. Within a week or so I had managed to get a new handweapon into the modification, and from there on I was hooked. We started a minimod team at 21CW and I worked on that for quite some time. After a while I grew tired of just modifying a modification, and went out looking for people to make a modification with. In late 2003 I found a team that called themselves Point of Existence that was going to make a modification on the yet unreleased game Battlefield: Vietnam. I quickly joined up as I already knew the core game workings from Battlefield 1942 (Vietnam was just barely a modified version). Since then I have been a part of the coding team, and I’m now acting as the lead coder for our BF2 version. Our team consists of people from all walks of life, and from all over the world. From Australia to Canada, a retired army soldier to an artist in a big game studio. It really makes it an interesting team to be in. We have a few people working in the industry of game development, and some hoping to get into it (including me).
What made you choose BF2 as your core game of your modification?
We had already made a modification for Battlefield: Vietnam (Point of Existence) and knew the game working pretty well. However we weren’t completely satisfied and were looking to move to a different engine like Source. However, we heard great things about BF2 before its release such as the python scripting language that was pretty much going to replace the old bf.con scripting language from our understanding. That’s not how it turned out, but we’re still satisfied as this game is probably the best out there for the type of game play we were aiming at.
