Chat Show Nicolas and Portal Prelude
The Chat Show takes us inside the mind of the modder, to interview some of the top level designers and scripters.
Nicolas "NykO18" Grevet is the leader of Portal: Prelude (Portal / Source), which was 3rd in the Mod of the Year Awards 2008. Nicolas talked with GamesModding.com about Portal: Prelude:
GM: Please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your mod.
Nicolas: My name is Nicolas Grevet and my nickname is NykO18, I'm a 22 years old french IT student and IT employee (at the same time, yes) who's playing with Valve's tools since the first Half-Life came out around 1998.
Also on the team is: Jérémy Barbe (nicknamed Capitaine Mousse) is a 17 years old french IT student who was making Portal maps since a few months when I asked him for help through some friends.
And Marc Bidoul (moroes), is a 24 years old belgian graphic designer specialized in video-games/level-design and working with Valve tools since 8 years (now hired at Ubisoft).
GM: What gave you the idea for Portal: Prelude?
Nicolas: At the beginning, the project was rather insignificant. It was not supposed to be a mod (modification of a game) at all, but just a succession of test chambers, without any real logic between each of them. I had no goal, I was just making maps as I saw it and never even thought it could be seriously released one day... And finally, when I reached a dozen of test chambers, I realized that I would be a shame to waste all this work by only releasing yet another map pack without any real story. There was a few map packs that were coming out at this time and none of them met my expectations in term of quality and challenge. This is where I began to write a whole new story and decided to follow the famous belief that prequels were somewhat popular at this time (STALKER, Hitman, Silent Hill, etc.).
GM: How did it feel to come 3rd in the Mod of the Year Awards 2008?
Nicolas: Hey, that's a good question. You know, when we made this mod, we honestly never though about the Mod of the Year Awards. It's just after the release, while I was talking with Ryan from the staff of ModDB.com, that he confessed me our mod could clearly be in the most popular mods during the Mod of the year Awards. That was a shock, because we never really thought of the "after-release", when feedback comes, patches follow and when everything goes stable again, there's awards. To be honest, I was confident and anxious at the same time. Confident because we made like several hundreds times more downloads that the most populars mods out there in a few months, but at the same time, there was so many harsh criticism that we were anxious. Finally, we won third place, which is really honest for what we did and we were really happy with the result. As I said on our website recently:
"I must say that I'm really happy with the results, it's kind of the best place ever for a little mod like ours that grew up rapidly from nowhere with a really small team but a really big motivation. It wouldn't have been fair to finish first or second regarding the amount of work and devotion put into some of the mods out there. Some of them who recreate everything from scratch and build something during years with sometimes hundreds of people. That's why I'm happy to be third!"
GM: How long was Portal: Prelude in development?
Nicolas: The development lasted 9 months (from January 2008 to September 2008). Then, we added one month to polish things up, publicize our work on the Internet and make the buzz grow.
That was not a 7-hours-a-day rythm, but I must confess that a few nights vanished during the development.
GM: Without giving too much away, what is Portal: Prelude's story?
Nicolas: Portal: Prelude is kind of "the early days" of the Aperture Science complex of Portal, when everything was still under control by real humans. The problem is that the same things are going on, and you'll quite quickly understand that GlaDOS was probably a better companion than the maniacs watching you progress from their observation rooms and cameras. They became maniac and disconnected from the reality because they were locked in this complex for too long. They kind of lost their mind and started to act strangely and dangerously during their experiences. Which can only lead to a catastrophe.
GM: What's you specialty in modding?
Nicolas: I can do whatever is needed at the time it's needed. I'm a quick learner. On Portal: Prelude I did pretty much a part of everything. I was leader, main level-designer, story writer, 2D artist, sounder, animator, videomaker, webmaster, programmer, tester, etc. The only thing I'm not good at is modeling and making textures. Jérémy made a part of the trailer, a few textures and 4 of the tests chambers and Marc made a few textures, models and gave us huge feedback. It's a kind of one-man-achievement, and these two guys helped me decompress on tasks I could not do myself.
GM: What is the most surprising thing you discovered while making Portal: Prelude?
Nicolas: That it lasted a lot longer than what I initially thought.
I mean, I'm making maps since a fews years already, and I know pretty much how long it takes me to build an entire level. But having mostly worked on multiplayer levels in the past, I never thought how different it would be to work on singleplayer ones. You must think of everything. In multiplayer maps, the gameplay is often fast paced and you don't have the time to focus on the environment. In Portal: Prelude, the player could stare at the same room for an hour, it had to be perfect. And at the same time, the Portal environment is pretty much boring and bland, it was a great challenge to build non-repetitive rooms when everything had to look the same. And finally, there was MUCH more playtests and problems discovered... because players managed to trap themselves or hijack an entire part of the level to achieve something that was not intended. That was definitely longer than what I thought.
GM: What are your future plans for Portal: Prelude?
Nicolas: To be honest, nothing's planned. We released the final (1.1.5) version a few weeks ago and are considering that things should stay as is. We know everything's still not perfect (the voices, the grammar, the difficulty), but we believe we put enough work in this mod and thus, this version should be the last one (except if something really bad happens). We don't have any plans on working on Portal anymore in the future, but I know there's a few "cross-overs" going on with authors that asked my permission to include parts of Prelude's content in their own adventure. I guess this is the beginning of exciting cross-adventures.
GM: How difficult was this project for you?
Nicolas: Terribly difficult. I mostly gave up once every week. You know, besides the mod, I'm also a student in Master of Engineering and an employee in the IT industry. That didn't left a lot of time to live during this period. It was a "school-work-prelude-sleep" rythm that almost made me become crazy. I was doing something like 16 hours of work a day and that's one of the reason why we nicely rushed the end of the development and gave up on voices and dialogues. That was way too much pressure.
GM: What do you wish you had known before starting making Portal: Prelude?
Nicolas: That it would become a critically acclaimed mod and that it would be played and reviewed worldwide.
We NEVER made this mod with this idea in mind, and dedicated our work to all the hardcore gamers who thought Portal (and videogames in general) are way too easy and insipid. When we released it, and realized that our mod was played by people we never thought would ever hear about it (some of them had never played Portal), we began a desperately long jouney, crossing a jungle of insults, harsh criticism and mockery from all over the world. Mainly because people playing it were not among the players this mod was aimed for. It was waaaay too difficult for them and they decided that the game was too hard and that is was a failure because they sucked too hard at videogames (honestly, it was not that hard, but indeed way harder than most modern games). That's a shame in fact, because we initially thought our target audience would congratulate us for making a decently difficult game. That's why we decided to alter the difficulty a few days after the release. This time, hardcore gamers were shocked that we bent over the criticism of "newbies". Finally, we understood we could never please everyone and stopped modifying things.
GM: Was Portal your first foray into modding?
Nicolas: For me, yes. It was probably the first time and the last time. It's way too much pressure and work for a single man, and I don't like working under someone's orders when I'm doing non-professionnal work =D I'm the leader of a new project, but that's not a mod.
Marc was already in several mod teams, including the Insurgency team.
GM: What do you consider the most challenging part of modding to be?
Nicolas: Definitely assuming a dozen of jobs at the same time. If your team is small or if you are the leader, you have to be good in a lot of domains, because you have to give orders and advice to everyone. So... when you're a small team and the leader at the same time, it's a nightmare. You have to do everyone's job and it's difficult to focus on one task at a time. Mostly because every time you start something, you encounter something left unfinished a few weeks ago, and you finally never progress the way you want. Besides this, you're also always delayed because you have to learn new things.
GM: Any advice to people new to modding?
Nicolas: Think about everything BEFORE, keep everything secret until it has decently progressed and be prepared to lose your hairs.
The tools provided by game developers are not always as documented as they should be nor functionnal in the way they said it should be.
Gain experience before, and learn to do things yourself. Shouting in forums pretending you're a leader looking for slaves to do your work is not the good way to start.
GM: What’s your favorite part of the Source modding community?
Nicolas: It's a mature community, people know what a mod is and how to install and play it.
There's tools, websites, documentation, plenty of people to help you and a great "competition".
And the best of all, there's a lot of players!
GM: Are you interested in pursuing a career in game development?
Nicolas: Yes and no.
I'm not an artist and never followed any courses to become one, I'm fully autodidact and don't want to turn my favorite hobby (level-design) in something mandatory to gain money each month.
On the other hand, I'd like to work on the project management side, deciding things, leading people, and stuff.
And because I'm basically more of a programmer than an artist, I'd prefer to work as a videogame programmer if everything else failed.
GM: As a modder, what do you think your greatest strength is? Weakness?
Nicolas: As a modder, the greatest strength is the ability to do everything and nothing at the same time. As I said before, you must be good in a lot of domains and you shouldn't be afraid to learn a lot of useless and/or uninteresting things to understand how the underlying game works.
As a modder, the greatest weakness is the lack of experience, ambition and patience. A mod is not something one can achieve alone, working a few hours a week between other things. You have to know what you're going to do before you do it if you don't want to waste all your efforts a few months later. You should know that making a mod requires a pretty long research period when you basically do nothing for the mod.
GM: Do you have a fondest memory of modding? Can you share it?
Nicolas: When I got reviewed by the magazine I'm subscribed to.
It's so awesome when you open the magazine you're reading for years and realize that profesionnals of the game industry noticed you and liked what you did.
I was a milestone in the project, where we stood up from the small personnal project to the independant production.
GM: Name 3 mods currently on your harddrive.
Nicolas: I don't play a lot of mods, but I do have some of them on my harddrive or some I already played and had fun.
I'd say the Garry's Mod, The Hidden Source and D.I.P.R.I.P. (each one for Half-Life 2) because that's the ones I played the most during the last years.
GM: Anything else you’d like tell us?
Nicolas: I'm very fond of interviews, because it allows me to explain what we did and why we did it this way. That's one of the reasons we decided to add some developer commentaries in the mod. Game developers should really try to do things this way a bit more. People like to know what you did, how you did it, and more importantly why you did it. It's like bonuses on DVDs, except DVDs are still cheaper than videogames unfortunately.
Thanks for asking me those questions, and I hope my english is not too flawed. I know I made some significant progress in english since the release of the mod (replying to thousands of emails), but I'm still not a perfect english speaker.
Great thanks to Nicolas for his time to answer the questions and providing the many new screenshots to go with this article.
Website: Portal: Prelude
ModDB: Profile
