Atlantis: Fight for Earth interview

Atlantis was one of the many modifications that entered Phase 3 of the Make Something Unreal Contest. The mod depicts the battle between Humans and Atlanteans, an extra-terrestrial race trying to re-establish themselves as the dominant species in our galaxy. You choose either team, after which you engage the enemy with a variety of futuristic and alien weaponry.

We abducted Raven, the Lead Beta Tester, webadmin, and PR-man, to get some top secret information about Atlantis : Fight for Earth.

To start of with, could you tell us something about yourself and what your position in the Atlantis team is?

My name is Matt “Raven” Lemmon, I live with my parents, I have a kick ass computer, a laptop, a 62” big screen TV and lots of games! I’m the Atlantis Lead Beta Tester, Webadmin, and PR dude; I also do the kick ass videos you see for Atlantis. Did I mention I’m single? ;)

Not counting yourself, how many others are working on Atlantis at this moment?

Uhhh… actually working? Or on the team? ;)
We have a total of ten people on the dev team, along with six on the beta team. We're hoping to get more soon because of future plans. If you want to help, please send myself an e-mail with what position you want to try out for as the subject line. We need mappers, coders, modellers and animators at this moment, please try to include links to previous work if any.

Could you give a short description of what Atlantis is all about?

Well, the Readers Digest Condensed version is something like this:

“The Atlanteans and humans are two races on opposite ends of the technological developmental cycle that find themselves battling each other for control of one planet, Earth. The Atlanteans are trying to re-establish themselves as the dominant species in our galaxy after thousands of years of isolation from their home planet. The Atlanteans went into hibernation after their defeat by the hands of the "Endes" a race more ancient than the stars themselves, as legend goes. After 3000 years of a deep hibernation they re-woke to find Humans the dominant race on their once great military planetoid known to them as "Etu-Gaia" or loosely translated “Earth”. The Humans are a close future representation of us. Each team has specific strengths and weaknesses, along with genetic traits that give them advantages on the battlefield. One example would be this: Gumans can’t hold their breath for very long. But the Atlanteans can hold their breath an extremely long time given their aquatic lifestyle.”

There are further differences and we think we’ve balanced them pretty good. First time players won’t see that, but after they play for a bit they will understand each team’s abilities and flaws.

Atlantis was originally planned for the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine but the community had to wait until Unreal Tournament 2004 came out to see the first public release. What was the main reason for this delay?

Well… besides visual effects, and engine strengths/upgrades, it is the dominant Unreal game for this time and like most people I never start up UT2003 anymore (mainly because I don’t have it installed anymore…). But UT2004 is UT2003 with a lot more polish and things to offer to the community. Those reasons and because I, along with the rest of the team, didn’t want to release a buggy/half done game to the public and expect them to stay with us while we fix the bugs. When we were considering releasing on UT2003, UT2004 was just two weeks away from hitting the stores. We figured that would have been a bad time to release because people would ignore our mod in favour of playing ONS or Assault. So we delayed and with that delay we found more bugs and implemented more items and finally moved to UT2004. Makes sense huh...

The Unreal engine isn’t the only good game engine that is available at the moment. Why did you choose it above any of the other engines?

Well probably because we started this mod way back on UT99 (long dev cycle we know…) and when UT2003 came out we just took what we had done and moved it along (mind you it wasn’t much). But games like Battlefield 1942 and Half-Life 2 weren’t around/announced yet. Plus we already had a very strong staff base in the Unreal Community, and we didn’t want to worry about finding different people that were familiar with the new engine. We like UT, so we just figured… let’s stay! ;) (Plus all our work on UT2003 transferred relatively easily…)

The first public Atlantis release has a very balanced gameplay, although this isn’t very obvious because of the big difference between the two species. Will the further developments to the mod keep this balance intact?

Well, of course we will try to keep this balance in existence. This is the optimal balance (we think) for our mod. With new weapons and maps planned in the future we think it will be increasingly hard to keep this balance. But we will always strive for it. Not all people notice that there is a balance to the gameplay. You have to understand the capabilities of each of the teams and use their equipment properly to get the full effect. If you haven’t ever played before I suggest being a spectator for one match and watch some of the more experienced players while they play.

One thing to point out. The Atlantean weapons are much more powerful than the human weapons even though the human guns fire much faster. But the Humans blend into their surroundings with their camo and therefore are hard to hit/spot, we realised this and gave the Atlanteans a heartbeat sensor (among other things planned) to detect the Humans and see where they are. But in a future release we’re discussing the making/design of a “false heartbeat” machine that can be equipped in your items and set as a trap for the Atlanteans.

What else can we expect to see in the future? Could you reveal any of the plans to our readers?

Yah I could… but I would have to kill them all afterwards…

Well… I guess something couldn’t hurt… we will have a very loosely limited class based system for the weapon/armour load-out in the next full release. I can’t tell you the specifics, because they're not all ironed out yet. But I can tell you that you will be able to choose whatever armour you want in whatever class you want, but each armour has disadvantages (speed/manoeuvrability) and advantages (more ammo/inventory slots) but the weapons available will be the same for most of the classes, certain weapons (for example, mortar launcher/mini-gun) can't be used by certain classes (for example, a belt-fed mini-gun can't be used by the scout class, mortar launcher can't be used by infantry/ranger class)

The background story of Atlantis could provide a great setting for a single player campaign. Are there any plans in this direction?

Well to be perfectly honest JackOneill does want to make a single player campaign with the storyline of Atlantis. But nothing is final and nothing is set in stone at the moment. This version of Atlantis is still on the drawing boards and therefore we don’t know anything about it ;)

Atlantis is taking part in the Make Something Unreal contest. What is your opinion about this contest? Do you believe it can contribute to the modding scene?

Well to be honest we’re only competing in this contest because we thought we were ready to release. And it just happened to be that the Make Something Unreal deadline for phase 3 was that close. I really don’t care about this contest, I don’t care about the prizes (although they would be nice to have…). We're just doing this for the fun and experience of it, along with creating a very fun and exciting alternative to boring games. Would it be nice if we won something? No doubt about it. Do I expect to win something? Nope, I couldn’t care less. We enjoy doing this and we will continue to enjoy doing this until the day we die.

And yes, I think it can contribute to the modding scene, if it was done in the right way. But what I think it does is brings every greedy little developer out into the sun for his fifteen minutes of fame when he releases his mod, has it downloaded a few thousand times and then everyone realises it took this guy forty-five minutes of work to make this mod and they wasted their bandwidth to download crap. Which I know isn’t the case for 99% of the mods out there. All of the ones I have played (eight mods total) are excellent with a few minor bugs/gameplay issues that are normal for a first/second release. And I expect nothing less from a contest looking to bring out the best in a community. Believe me I could go on about this topic for pages, but I don’t think you want to read that.

I seem to have ran out of questions. Is there anything else you’d like to add to this interview?

Well a word to the mod devs reading this: Please take your time with your mod, perfection is never near, because there’s always something you want to add, or a bug you can’t squash. But don’t let this discourage you. Do your best, do quality work, have fun doing it and most importantly listen to the fans. They are what drives your mod and make it desirable. No amount of corporate backing can do that for you. Some mods are over hyped and then fail to deliver, but some are under hyped, but they deliver more than what they promised. Which would you want to play?