Fall from Heaven is a dark fantasy Civilization IV mod, built by a team headed by Derek Paxton. The first version was released on December 16th, 2005 and last month – exactly three years later – the “gold” version was uploaded. The project is the most successful Civ4 mod yet created, with hundreds of thousands of downloads and positive nods from critics like Tom Chick. I recently had an opportunity to interview Derek and his team on the final release of his the mod, which is available for download here. (Note: Fall requires a fully patch version of Beyond the Sword to play.)

Soren: How do you guys handle communication and source control? Are there private development forums? Have any of the members met or talked in real-time?

Derek: Thunderfall, admin of CivFanatics, was good enough to give us access to a public forum and a private team forum.  To date, the team forum has over 16,000 posts and the public forum has about 150,000 posts.

Although I may exchange occasional private messages or emails with a few team members, 99% of everything we do is done in the team forum.  It allows people to participate in the discussion as their schedule allows and for everyone to openly talk or discuss ideas.  Since all the messages are retained, it makes it really easy to go back and pull out ideas that may not have worked well at the time (okay, I’ll admit it, to go back and get ideas that I didn’t like at the time but finally realized that the team knew better than I did).

Source control isn’t a problem since I’m the only one with with access to the source code.  Art and writing assets are posted, and I cut them into the mod.

I don’t think any of the members have met in real-time.  I did talk to Woodelf on the phone once and took remote control of his computer to check out a problem he was having on Vista. I also sent everyone on the team a copy of “The Ultimate History of Mythology” and “History of Ancient Civilizations” books for Christmas one year.  As they correctly figured out, it was actually a homework assignment to help generate ideas.

William: Stephan and I were on the verge of meeting when we were in England at the same time a year ago, but unfortunately it didn’t pan out. I suspect it might be easier for us European contributors to meet as we’re all concentrated in Northern Europe. (Sto is in France, but – with the motorways – that shouldn’t be a problem.)

Soren: How do you keep a group this large organized? I noticed that there are twice as many “content creators” (artists, writers) as “system creators” (programmers, designers). Do you think that this type of ratio is a sign that getting programmers to work together harmoniously is a lot harder than getting artists to do so (who can work on separate assets in parallel)?

Derek: The second greatest risk to a mod is the “unfixable” error (the first being abandonment by the creators who burn out or go on to other things).  A lot of how we work is based around trying to mitigate that risk.  One way we do that is by forcing all code to go through me.  It’s not that I am any kind of standard bearer for proper programming – Chalid, Talchas and Sto are all better programmers than I am – but it’s important that one person understand all the changes in the mod.  That understanding has to be at the code level.  The reason is that issues will come up.  Issues that occur in a given function are easy to troubleshoot and fix.  Issues that occur between functions (the way two separate functions interact with each other) are much more difficult.  Unless a common person understands both of those functions, it multiplies the difficulty, especially when one of the functions has no apparent relation to the other.

Occasionally, I’ll even ask Talchas or Sto to provide simpler versions of their code before it’s added.  Or I’ll rewrite it in a form that I understand but may not be as efficient or full featured as their version.  They gradually teach me more advanced programming, so I improve, and the code for the mod stays relatively simple, which is one of the reasons I think others like to mod it.

Artists and writers are much easier.  I keep an updated to-do list for them, and they produce assets as it appeals to them.  Though they do a lot of work maintaining internal consistency either in the background or in the art style, it isn’t as critical as it is with code.

Soren: One of the biggest benefits of having all of Civ4‘s game/AI code in a separate project for the SDK was that it was always very clear where the line was between my code and the rest of the team’s code. With the exception of some of the utility stuff – like the XML parsing and the python glue – I wrote every line in the SDK, which gave the code a certain internal consistency that cut down on a lot of bugs. It looks like Fall has a similar philosophy in that all code changes need to pass by a single set of eyes. This level of consistency is very important for modders, I believe, as the code develops its own type of distinct grammar. When you pursued this strategy, were you just trying to keep the project manageable, or did you hope to build your own modding platform to enable “mod mods” based on Fall?

Derek: Just trying to keep it manageable.  I wanted to minimize the cost of losing any member.  There are too many mods that have great ideas but wait for a programmer, get one and do a bunch of good work until the programmer goes on to something else and leaves the project in limbo.  At that point, it’s hard for a new programmer to step in (or if he does you start to run into compatibility issues), and all the effort that went into getting the mod to that point is largely wasted.

I was surprised to see people using Fall as a base for their own mods.  People ran into problems using it because we had hard-coded so many things in the source code.  So for example if we wanted something special to happen when a unit entered a plot with an Ancient Forest in it, we had that right in the code.  It was quick and easy to program and worked fine, until a mod mod removed the Ancient Forest from their version.  At that point, they would get crashes.

When Beyond the Sword was released, we decided to rewrite Fall from the ground up.  I didn’t just copy-and-paste the code over; I started with an empty mod and began adding features from scratch.  I had learned a lot about programming since the project began, and this time we did it the right way.  As we progressed, we removed all hard coding from the mod.

Soren: So, in essence, Fall went through a similar transformation as Civ did, in that much of the open platform philosophy we adopted with Civ4 came at the request of our modding community for more openness. Where do you think modders will take Fall in the future? (For example, I wasn’t entirely surprised that a fantasy RPG mod became one of the most successful Civ4 mods as the XP/levelling system we added to the base game for promotions certainly suggests a classic RPG structure.)

Derek: I suspect “more of” mods to be created.  More units, more civilizations, more of everything.  Fall is particuarly rich for this because the development has been open, so people have access to all the mechanics and ideas we tried.  This makes it particularly easy for them to reimplement things we cut, especially if they can implement them in a way that solves the reason we cut them.  I also wouldn’t be surprised to see modmods based on popular fantasy sources, like Tolkien.

There is a lot of backstory in Fall, and I’d be excited to see if people developed mods based on the Second Age (age of magic) or the Fifth Age (that comes after Fall‘s timeline).  It would be cool to see others take on those time periods.

Soren: By the way, the XML parsing and python glue were late additions to the SDK. I found myself fiddling with that code a lot, so I figured modders would need to as well. How important were those chunks of code? What did we not expose that you wish we did? Were you able to get some of these with Warlords and Beyond the Sword?

Derek: The great thing about releasing that part of the source code is that you allowed us expose things ourselves.  So we created our own XML files, and we exposed our own python functions.  We weren’t limited to just the things you planned for us to be able to mod.

However, the source code doesn’t include everything.  The only parts that I often want to mess with and don’t have control over are in the graphics engine.  Alex Mantzaris, lead developer of Beyond the Sword, was good enough to add civilization-specific unit art to BtS.  Before that, since an art definition was applied directly to a unit, we were carrying hundreds of units in the mod just for their art changes (if, for example, we wanted a Lanun scout to look different than a Malakim scout). He also added a function for the unit art in the source code for BtS version 3.13 so that I could add some code to have promotions effect the units model.  Thus, an orc warrior would look differently than a human warrior regardless of what civilization it belonged to.

I would still like to have more control of the height maps (for creating canyons and cliffs), lighting effects, dynamic ground fog, dynamic scaling and a bunch of other graphic interface functions that aren’t in the source code.  That’s about the only area where I wish we had more access.

Soren: Let’s talk about some actual work figures here, so people can get a sense of what it takes to work on a successful mod. How much time, weekly, do you spend working on Fall? How much time – on average – would you estimate that the rest of the team spends working? How has your team been able to find this time for a fully voluntary project?

Randy: Does playing count as work? Probably, as we are often the first line of defense as far as play-testing goes. I wouldn’t call most of what I do as work, compared with scouring code for hard-to-find bugs or implementing new features as Derek does. But between playing, discussing things on the forums, and creating content, I probably average about five hours a week over the time I’ve been contributing – although oftentimes, that much in a day as well.

Tom: I’d hate to add up how much time I “worked” on this mod.  In the beginning, I played 20, 30, maybe 40 hours a week.  I still playtest over 10 hours a week on average and will continue doing so even after we wrap up Ice.  Who knows how much time I spend on the forums or daydreaming about FfH.

Derek: I spend about 15-20 hours a week on Fall from Heaven.  Multiply that by 3 years and you have a little over 3000 hours.

The initial investment of time was easy because my work sent me to Europe for 3 months to work on a project.  Away from my family and friends, I spent most of my free time working on Fall from Heaven and made significant headway during that period.  Our first version of Fall from Heaven II was released at the end of those 3 months.  Outside of that, even though 15-20 hours a week is a lot of time, I really try to make those hours as productive as possible.  My first major project for the mod back during those 3 months in Europe was in creating an editor that allowed me to easily manage the XML assets of the mod.  Although it took a lot of time to initially setup, that has been a great time saver in the long run.

We also have to be careful about where we spend our time.  There are lots of things we could do, but each has to viewed against the time to create.  Some very good ideas have to be left behind because their value in comparison to the implementation time just isn’t worth it.  I try to be even more conservative when I’m asking for other peoples’ time, such as a cool idea that would require the art team to create a bunch of new unit models.

Soren: Can you go into more detail about what your XML editor lets you do? Have you released it for other people to use? If so, have other people expanded it? I find it interesting to hear that you made the upfront investment to create one because we had a on-going internal debate trying to decide whether or not to build one for our modders. For Civ3, we did build an editor which handled everything that could be modded, but it became a major resource bottleneck because everything we needed to expose required editor/UI work, which ultimately limited the number of things we could expose to modders. More importantly – and this is something we couldn’t really admit in public – we didn’t think we could build as good an editor as our modders could because we would be build for a theoretical spec whereas they would be building an editor to meet their specific and concrete needs.

Derek: Its an XML spreadsheet with Visual Basic macros written to write the xml files based on the spreadsheet data.  I did release a version to the community that doesn’t have any Fall from Heaven attributes in it (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=231917).  It worked out well for some people, but it doesn’t make modding Civ4 easy, which is what a lot of people want.

This is the dilemma between providing powerful modding capabilities with your game, or making it easy to mod.  Those are two very different goals.  To be easy to mod, the game needs to make most of the assumptions for the modder, allowing the modder to change a few thing and have the game be smart enough to work out all the details.  Each of those assumptions the game makes limits the modder.  The most powerful modding tools don’t make any assumptions and allow the modder to handle all of the specifics on his/her own.  That way, they can do things the game developers never intended, but they have to really understand all of the nuts and bolts of the gaming engine to do it because they have to put together all the pieces themselves.

An editor like you describe would have allowed people an easy first step to get into modding.  A front end that allows them to tweak and customize a bunch of set parameters.  It would have been a great tool for “casual modders,”  but it wouldn’t have been any value to total conversion mods like Fall because of how much we customized the game.  I know that the first step into modding is a big one, so I can’t say how much a Firaxis-created utility would have helped grow the community.  Even though modders can create editing utilities on their own, the problem is that most modding begins in isolation – someone playing around with their own game.  A typical modder won’t go out and grab modding tools for a game he doesn’t know how to mod; he will stop when he can’t find a way to do it himself.  An editor may have been a good first step to allow someone to create a basic mod, then come into the community to find out everything else that is out there

Soren: By the way, what is your day job? And do they know about your extra-curricular activities?

Derek: I work for a business software company in support.  I’m assigned to a few major accounts, and it’s my job to quickly resolve problems they have and to make sure problems don’t happen in the first place.  I work from home, or occasionally on-site, if someone has a specific need, and I’m on call at all times.  My schedule is largely determined by my customers needs – if an issue comes up, I may be working on it non-stop for that day or over the course of several days.  That makes it difficult to plan my life, but it’s the perfect job for modding.  I need activities I can tinker with when I have a few hours free and then drop if I get a call.  I could never play online games where other people are expecting my help at specific times or pursue a career as a costumed crimefighter with any sort of elaborate costume that I would have to get into and out of if I got a call.

Because of my job I have a very support-focused mindset to modding.  My code is not complex, partially because I’m just a beginning programmer, but also because my job is to help my customers remove the risk and complexity from their systems.  One of the amazing things about the Civ4 source code is that it is so simple and readable, even for a guy with no programming experience.  Simple systems working together in complex ways is the foundation of Civilization, and that was reflected in the code as well.  I tried to maintain that in our additions.

A few people know I made a mod for Civ4.  Everyone has their hobbies though, to be honest, since I don’t go into an office, I don’t have the watercooler moments like I had in former jobs.  So, it’s a pretty small group, but I occasionally hear from people I know in real life who ask me if I’m the Derek Paxton from Fall from Heaven.  Usually, as a result of them googling my name and finding the IGN interview about Age of Ice.  In real life (as compared to my virtual Fall from Heaven teammates), my family is very supportive and has endured endless hours of brainstorming and ideas over meals, walks or drives.  To their credit, they always offer good ideas and really think about what I’m saying, which is probably better than I do when my wife starts talking about something in which she is interested (note to self: be nicer to my wife).

Soren: It’s interesting to read that a couple members are using Fall as a pathway into the “real” game industry. How much of a motivation is that for modders in general?

Stephan: Right now, I am writing my diploma thesis in Chemistry, but a year ago, I have been considering finding a job in the gaming industry as an artist. I was seduced because I discovered this passion for 3D art, painting textures, etc. and everything felt so easy to learn. However, I think it is a bit dangerous because if there had been an offer from someone, I would have dropped my studies (3 years of chemistry) and moved.

While modding, you have endless freedom, which makes it so much fun. With a mod like Fall, you also have something like “semi-professional” status, with fans, publicity, etc., which gives the whole work another level of excitement. But you can´t compare this to the pressure one has to withstand in a professional company, influenced by publishers, monetary thoughts, etc. Most skills a modder have are self-taught, which is amazing if you think about it. However, to keep up in speed and quality with someone who had professional training and a degree in arts/programming is a challenge.

So I think hiring a modder will give you certain benefits – he has already proven that he is willing to learn a lot of stuff by himself to achieve what he wants. He will come with a variety of other attributes and knowledge not related to gaming (because he usually does gaming/modding in his free time, not as a primary course of study). He will most likely show a good degree of creative thinking and self-organizing skills. The major drawback is that he is lacking professional education and might be overwhelmed with new tasks, which require a profound understanding of all the details taught in professional 3D modelling/programming classes, and the routine developed in the course of working the whole day in this field (and not in a lab, an office, etc.).

Tom:  From the moment I played Fall, I wanted to try and contribute graphically somehow.  I had never touched a 3D modeling program, or GIMP for that matter, but that didn’t stop me from ‘skinning’ some ugly hellhounds and turning Great Prophets into wizards.  With the help of some very talented members of CFC, I finally learned how to model, texture and put my own custom work into Civ4.  Without Fall, I don’t think that ever would have happened.

I don’t have any plans on quitting my day job to join the gaming industry, but it is nice creating stuff and instantaneously being able to see it used in-game.

Soren: I’m curious where you guys got some of the static assets for the game, such as the leader portraits or some of the extra music. How much stuff have your “plundered” vs. built yourself?

Derek: Almost all of the 2D art and music is copyrighted material that we are using without the artists permission.  If any artist ever disliked how we used their work, I would remove it from the mod.  These artists are more than filler, they inspired the D&D game it is based on, and the art of Justin Sweet, or the music of Cirque du Soleli, inspired the Mod.  So I have great respect for them, and I hope the mod highlights their talent.

The artists, like Jason Engle, that have returned our requests, or that I’ve had the pleasure to talk to, have allowed us to use their work.

For music, we’ve drawn the line at only including small samples (10-15 seconds) of copyrighted music.  Anything longer will only be included if the artists gives us their permission or the artist makes it freely available on their website.  We’ve been particularly lucky that Joseph Vargo, leader of the group Nox Arcana, has been kind enough to allow us to use their music.  It’s an amazing mix of Gothic fantasy music that fits Fall well.

See also Part I and Part III…

Fall from Heaven is a dark fantasy Civilization IV mod, built by a team headed by Derek Paxton. The first version was released on December 16th, 2005 and last month – exactly three years later – the “gold” version was uploaded. The project is the most successful Civ4 mod yet created, with hundreds of thousands of downloads and positive nods from critics like Tom Chick. I recently had an opportunity to interview Derek and his team on the final release of his the mod, which is available for download here. (Note: Fall requires a fully patch version of Beyond the Sword to play.)

Soren: Perhaps a good place to start is to talk about the current reception of Fall from Heaven. What is your fanbase? Do you have a sense of their size and what type of players they are? Who have been some of your most important public champions?

Derek: Fall has been distributed on the CD/DVD of 4 gaming magazines, and it is hosted by numerous sites.  The most popular of these, CivFanatics, has recorded 200,000 downloads and over 150,000 posts about Fall.  Fans have hosted their own forums, including those in Russia, Germany, Israel and Japan.

Our target audience is the guy who loves Civilization IV, but wanted more.  Since these are the most likely players to go out looking for mods it was a good fit.  Because the players already knew Civilization IV, we were able to create a game whose complexity would have been overwhelming in an original title.  In essence, we piggy-backed on Civilization IV‘s learning curve.

For the first year of development, this worked well and we continued to march forward implementing the items in our design document and adjusting them based on community feedback.  But as Fall become more popular we began to appeal to players who weren’t interested in posting in the forums and reading the thousands of posts about Fall.  Designing a game for the vocal die-hard fans and the growing silent majority forced us to consider both the benefit and the cost of our complexity.  In the end, we stayed true to our mandate, that we were making a game that was significantly more complex than Civilization IV, but we tried to find every available way to make that complexity as elegant as possible.  And certainly cut any complexity if it wasn’t providing enough value.

So now we have a mix of casual players that may play a game or two without reading the rules or even being that familiar with the mechanics of Civilization IV, the short timers who enjoy Fall for a few weeks and then go on to something else and the die hard fans who have been with us for years enjoying the development process.

Fall has had a lot of help getting the attention it has.  Most notably Firaxis allowed us to include a Fall from Heaven themed scenario in the Beyond the Sword expansion.  This really got us over the biggest hurdle mods face, just getting people familiar enough with your mod to try it out.  Thunderfall, the administrator of Civfanatics, has also been invaluable by allowing us to host our own website on his servers and granting us our own public and private development forum.  The media has also treated us well, especially the editor of fidgit.com, Tom Chick.

Soren: So, where did this all start? Did you first want to make a fantasy mod, or did you first want to make a Civ4 mod?

Derek: In my opinion fantasy is just the setting, it doesn’t make the game any more or less fun.  I choose the Fantasy setting because it was something different than Civ4 offered, and I had a fairly deep back story already developed from years of running Dungeons and Dragons games.  But what really excited me about the potential for a game on Civ4 was 2 of its new features, promotions (the ability to level your units and have them gain abilities) and religions.  Both features had a lot of potential and I wanted a setting that would let me really develop them.  Promotions and leveling was already a standard of fantasy role-playing games, and creating a fantasy setting allowed us to have a lot more fun with religions than we could in a real setting, where applying various advantages and disadvantages to real religions makes it hard to talk about the game over the political concerns. So I wanted to make a Civ4 mod first.  There turned out to be a lot of good reasons to make it a fantasy mod, not the other way around.

Soren: I often forget that the current version of Fall is technically a sequel. This can, I’m sure, lead to confusion at times. As probably much fewer people have played the earlier version, can you explain what are the biggest differences? And why did you guys decide to branch off into a sequel instead of just iteratively improving the first version?

Derek: The first was really just a proof of concept, to see what could be done.  It only involved a few minor source code changes that were used in the final version to clean up some issues.  By the time it was complete, we had a few members on the team, and we had a ton of great feedback from the community.  When we sat down to do the high level design for Fall from Heaven II, everything was reconsidered.  It really was a new project from the ground up, not just a further iteration on a common design.  I like to say that I designed the first version of Fall, but Fall from Heaven II was a team effort.

The biggest difference is that the original Fall from Heaven doesn’t have any unique civilizations.  They are either just the standard leaders/civilizations from Civ4, or some placeholder fantasy leaders that a fan made that use the standard Civ4 traits.  Not having access to the source code forced us to concentrate on a smaller prototype version for the first fews months.  In hindsight I think that was a very good thing.  We really played with the model and the game a lot before ever digging into the more technically challenging and time consuming parts of mod design.  I know professionals prototype their games, but it isn’t done very frequently in the mod community.  It really allowed us to develop the whole picture before delving into the details.

Soren: Could you actually give us a year-by-year timeline of the project, from the very beginning to present day? I’m interested in how the scope grew over time, and in what order you tackled the various game systems.

Derek: Civilization IV was released late in October 2005.  I loved the game and was excited by the modding capabilities.  At the time there was very little out there to tell us what we could or couldn’t do, so I sat down and wrote a design doc for a fantasy turn-based strategy game that I wanted to play.  I had no programming or art skill, so once I had a vision for what the final game would look like, I started to implement features as I learned how to do them.  The first version of Fall was released about 6 weeks later on December 16th  2005.  By today’s standards of what is happening in the Civilization IV mod community, that version would not have compared well, but at the time it was enough to stir up some excitement.

I found out early on that there were a lot of things in the design doc that I wouldn’t be able to do until Firaxis released the Source Code.  Those things were pushed to Fall from Heaven II, and we concentrated on what we could do without the source code.  I think it was very important that I originally designed without regard to what was possible, and when we got together as a team to do the high level design work for Fall from Heaven II, we kept any practical technical concerns out of the conversation.  There would be a time where we would have to drop or curtail features because of technical limitations but not in the initial high-level design.

By February of 2006 Fall was complete, and we started working on Fall from Heaven II.  Firaxis didn’t publicly release the Source Code until April of 2006, but I was fortunate enough to get invited to beta test it, thanks to you, a few months early.  That allowed Talchas and I to start doing proof of concept work for some of the more ambitious functions we had planned.  We needed to make sure that a Spell System was possible before we started Spell System design.  We needed to make sure we had the ability to really distinguish the civilizations before I asked the team for ideas on what to do with them.  Once we saw what was possible, it was time to invite the team to start design work, which happened on February 15th of 2006.

We came up with a huge amount of things that we wanted – too much to tackle at once.  So we broke all the features into 4 big phases and ordered them so that the game would remain playable throughout.  At a very general level, this is the list we came up with:

“Light”- The base 16 Civilizations and the spell system (on top of the FfH1 features that were maintained)

“Fire”- Infernal and Mercurians civilizations, the Armageddon Counter, Hell map, rituals

“Shadow”- Svartalfar and Sidar civilizations, equipment, 2 new religions, unique features and wilderness areas

“Ice”- Illian civilization and 18 Scenarios

This way, we kept the team focused on what we were doing at the time.  If ideas came up that fit better in a future phase, we just noted it in the thread for that phase and let it go.  This was important so that the game stayed playable, we had enough loose threads just in the phase we were working in we didn’t need active work on a few dozen features all at the same time.  It also allowed us to focus test since we changed only one part of the game at a time (at a very high level).

Also, in February, my work sent me to England for 3 months.  I was there without family or friends, but I had a nice little house to bounce around in, Internet access and plenty of time to mod when I wasn’t working.  This was the most time intensive part of the project for me; I learned how to program by reading the source code and copying what I saw (so if I have any bad programming habits, they are really your fault!).  By May 19th of 2006, I was in my final few weeks in England, and we released our first version of Fall from Heaven II.  As the phases went, that was the first version of “Light”.

Since then, we have been releasing new major versions every 8-10 weeks.  I wanted each version to feel like a significant upgrade, to help generate interest.  But it was really important that they were frequent because the best way to fight burn out is to get positive feedback form the community, and to do that you have to release.  Also, I didn’t want to make too many internal changes without getting some public play testing to find any new issues we had introduced.  The first version of “Fire” was released on February 16th, 2007.  The first version of “Shadow” was released on December 16th, 2007 (our 2 year anniversery), and the first version of “Ice” will be released on December 16th, 2008.

I always wanted to release frequently, and I’m very proud of the fact that Fall from Heaven II never missed a release date.  However, that was stacked in my favor.  I never announced a release date until I knew we were going to hit it, and release dates were never determined by having to have certain features, only that they would have whatever features were ready by that date.  We didn’t have a plan from the beginning on how long each phase would take or even when the project would be done.  I was pretty aggressive about pushing it forward – you could spend months perfecting any system but at some point you need to call it and move on to the next step.

Beyond the Sword was released in July of 2007.  That was the point where we needed to reevaluate everything we had left to do (we were just finishing up the “Fire” phase at that time), and if it was worth converting to the Beyond the Sword code base.  We decided to do it, and that was the first point where we really began to look at what was left, the light at the end of the tunnel, and started talking about a December 2008 end date.  Even though we didn’t have an end date from the beginning – because we just didn’t know how long it would take – we always had a vision for what the final version would look like.

That vision was so important to making sure every contribution was valuable.  One of the major requirements to becoming a team member is they had to understand the vision.  There are a thousand great games that could be made, its important that we are always moving toward making the same one.

Soren: Ha, I think I’ve heard that phrase before somewhere. We should spend some time talking about who the major contributors to Fall have been. Who are they, and what roles have the played?

Derek: Fall would not have been possible without the team.  They were all hand picked based on their talent whether as programmers, artists or writers.  And we often say that everyone on the team works on design.  There is no doubt that they are producing professional quality unit models and other writing and art assets.  They are doing it for free in their spare time, and most of them have been contributing for the entire length of our 3 year development.
The members are:

Derek “Kael” Paxton – Team Lead, I hadn’t done any programming before Fall from Heaven and started this project both to try to make a fun game and to teach myself a little programming. My chief contributions are in establishing the direction and organization of the project, making sure everyone knows what still needs done, so they can find things to do that interest them.  I also spend a lot of time in writing, designing and programming tasks.  I’m not an advanced programmer by any means, but with the help of guides and the members of the team with programming skill, I have gotten better.

Ben “Talchas” Segall – Programmer, Ben is the lead programmer for Fall.  The first version of Fall had very minimal programming.  I had written a design document for what I wanted in Fall from Heaven II but there were some things on the list that were well past my capability.  At the time, Ben was making his own smaller modpacks (mods providing new functions to be used by other modders instead of being played).  His work was so far ahead of the rest of the community at the time that no one really knew what to do with his designs.  He was the first member I invited to the Fall from Heaven II project, and for a few weeks, he and I just worked through some early prototypes to see if what we were considering was even possible.  Ben was able to provide functions for everything I needed to do, allowing us to invite the rest of the team and get to work on the specific design work.

Stéphane “Sto” Nadry – Programmer, Stéphane is our newest member.  He is a programmer who has been creating external resources for Fall for a while and was invited to join the team after programming a mini-game that we wanted to add to the mod.  Since then he added a Trophy system to the game that will be the core of the upcoming scenarios.

“Chalid” – Programmer/Artist, Chalid created our most challenging monsters, including the Dragons and Giant Spider, as well as programming several key features and modeling other units.

Eli “Loki” Markham – Designer, Eli is the guy we go to when we are out of ideas.  A typical request to him is that we feel an area is lacking, and we need a few ideas to improve it. He usually provides 20-30, so we are never at a loss for ideas.

Tom “Woodelf” Snyder – Designer, Tom is our resident play tester.  He was the first person I invited to the team and probably one of the few people that has played every version of Fall.  He has also worked on several other mod teams and plays a huge amount of mods, making his feedback invaluable for what can be improved and ideas from other mods that may work for Fall.  He understands Fall in and out, and his instincts on what will be fun or not fun are always dead on.

Jon “Corlindale” Duus – Writer, Jon was our first writer and started the process of creating a voice for Fall by adding flavorful tech quotes to the mod as well as creating the backstory for several of the leaders

Randy “Niki’s-Knight” Miller – Writer, Randy took the scattered fragments of back story that we had written and tried to smooth it into one consistent story.  He matched up people quoted in various areas with great people in the mod and wrote background entries of his own to tie together sections or fill out parts that captured his interest.

William “Wilboman” Nordan – Writer, William was one of the early members to join the team and has been contributing stories, entries, quotes and other writing assets ever since.

Michael “AlazkanAssassin” Hall – Artist, Michael developed the “Puppet Mastery” technique that allowed us to easily use models from other games, such as Pirates!, in Fall.

Philippe “C.Roland” Côté-Léger – Artist, Philippe was our first artist and took an interest in Fall well before anyone had figured out how to create new art assets.  He developed and shared many of the processes he pioneered.  Philippe is currently attempting to get a job in the gaming industry as an artist.

Martin “Ploeperpengel” Zutz – Artist, Martin is the lead developer of the Warhammer mod, which was our sister mod, and is a talented modder and artist on his own.  He does a lot of our animation work and has created some very unique units for the mod.  Martin recently got a job in the game industry.

Stephan “seZereth” Weiß – Artist, Stephan is our lead artist.  He has contributed more art assets to Fall than anyone else and is responsible for making sure that Fall maintains a consistent, unique and interesting visual style.  There aren’t many original art assets left in Fall as Stephan has redone the units, terrain, and the interface to really give Fall a unique look.  Stephan came to Fall with the goal of making every civilization visually distinctive.  So that an Amurite warrior didn’t look like a Grigori warrior.  With the amount of units in Fall and 21 different civilizations, I honestly didn’t think it was possible.  But he has been slowly chipping away at the art list and amazing everyone with both the quantity and quality of the work he has produced.

Ilia “White Rabbit” Draznin – Artist, Ilia developed many of our early special units such as the werewolves and worked extensively with us on the Age of Ice project for Beyond the Sword.

Dave “Hexagonian” Sobotka – Artist, Dave joined us on Age of Ice specifically to develop some storyline slide shows for the project.  He also went on to create media for the main Fall mod that kept that distinct style for the creation of wonders and the founding of religions.

Philippe: Just a precision, I am not attempting to get a job in the gaming industry (I don’t consider myself ready for this). I’m only considering a 3D modeling program for my study. This is a career that I never thought of before joining the team, and I must say that Fall from Heaven is the thing that revealed to me the passion I have for gaming art and all the digital art industry.

Soren: That’s a pretty diverse list. How have most of them joined the project? Were you recruiting them, or did they come and seek you out?

Derek: I recruited every member of the team.  Although we have been fortunate enough to receive offers to join the team from many people, we have never accepted anyone like that.  If you have the talent and drive to contribute to a project like this, you are probably already doing so (Fall from Heaven has an active community already modding for it).  There are a lot of major contributors who aren’t team members and haven’t been invited just because at some point, having too many people on the team makes it more difficult to manage.  We want a team big enough to spawn good ideas and discussion but small enough that everyone can stay focused on a common goal.

See also Part II and Part III…

I recently received the following question from reader Kevin Edwards:

I’ve been a Civ fan for awhile but ever since I bought Civ4 I have always wondered about something. Why didn’t they use the actual countries’ flags for the game? America is a blue banner with a white star???? What was that all about?

There is, in fact, a very specific answer to that question. Can anyone guess why we didn’t use actual country flags in Civ4? To help narrow down the set of possibilities, I’ll add that the answer doesn’t have anything to do with political correctness or historical sensitivity. Here’s screenshot to demonstrate what Kevin is talking about.

(UPDATE: The answer is now available in the comments.)

The Stanford Class of ’98 Ten-Year Reunion was last weekend, and I got a chance to catch up with Christopher Tin, composer of the Civ4 theme song, “Baba Yetu.” We couldn’t help but talk some about the piece’s remarkable run. Since its release three years ago, the song has taken on a life of its own – you can even buy sheet music now!

I don’t think we’ve ever told the tale about how the song came into being. It actually all started at the Five-Year Reunion, which was, of course, five years ago! At the Class Party, I bumped into Chris – we were roommates at Oxford my junior year – and he talked about his work so far as a composer, and I talked about the early days of Civ4. We thought a little about how great it would be if we ever got to work together on the same project but left it at that, essentially.

At the same time, I was looking at intro music for our Civ4 prototype to help give it the right “feel.” I chose a track from a CD Chris had given me long ago – a Talisman album called After Silence. Talisman is a Stanford a capella group that specializes in African and African-American music, and the track, “The Rainmaker,” was perfect for them. A sweeping Hans Zimmer vocal epic from the movie The Power of One, the piece has a spectactural climax that I edited to emerge as soon as the sun crested over the Earth on the into screen. The piece just fit perfectly, establishing the game’s tone. Everyone on the team knew immediately that we needed a piece just like it.

My first instinct was to just get the actual piece itself, so I e-mail Chris, who was the producer on After Silence. He said that the group would love to let us use the piece, but that geeting approval from Zimmer would be very difficult as he doesn’t generally license his music to video games involving war. The next step was obvious – why not have Chris write a piece of music for Talisman inspired by “The Rainmaker” to be Civ4‘s new theme song? The rest is history, I suppose. Chris decided on his own to use The Lord’s Prayer in Swahili and to add an orchestral accompaniment. My only contribution was encouraging Chris to put in a bridge, which I though would help frame the song’s peak. Needless to say, Chris did a masterful job.

On the game’s release, “Baba Yetu” was a stand-out moment for the product, receiving positive mentions in many reviews. The song’s popularity grew when Video Games Live began using it as a standard part of their repertoire. Here’s an early example from the Hollywood Bowl:

Since then, videos have been consistently popping up on YouTube of choirs performing the song all around the world. Here’s an excellent version from the Valencia High School Choir (and Orchestra!):

The Veritas High School Choir does a solid version:

This version from the Worth County R-3 Choir is quite pretty:

Hillcrest Christian High does a good job too (and looks like they’re having fun!):

Wake Forest Rolesville High School Master Chorale adds a couple dancers:

Spokane Valley University High School does a big version with some good soloists:

This intimate version from a Berkeley A Capella group named For Christ’s Sake is a nice, alternate take:

Ditto for the Horace Greeley High School Madrigal Choir:

My favorite version, though, is by Värmlandskören from Sweden. I love how they really lean into the piece – not the standard tempo, but it works:

Of course, let’s not also forget the piano version. Or the interpretive dance. Or the half-time show!