Fallout: London with Daniel Morrison Neil and Jordan Albon

Summary

Podcast Summary: Software Engineering Daily – Fallout: London with Daniel Morrison, Neil, and Jordan Albon

Introduction

In the January 15, 2025 episode of Software Engineering Daily, host Joe Nash sits down with Daniel Morrison and Jordan Alban from Team Fallon to delve into the ambitious endeavor of developing Fallout London, a total conversion mod for Fallout 4. The conversation offers an in-depth look into the project's inception, development challenges, team dynamics, and the future aspirations of the team members.

Overview of Fallout London

Fallout London is a five-year labor of love by Team Fallon, transforming Bethesda’s Fallout 4 into a post-apocalyptic rendition of London. Daniel Morrison introduces the mod's scope and vision:

Daniel Morrison [02:32]: "Fallout London is a complete total conversion mod... recreates the whole of London within the Fallout 4 universe with an entirely new story, soundtrack, and 3D assets."

The mod stands out for its rich British cultural influences, aiming to blend the iconic Fallout aesthetic with distinctly Londonian elements.

Team Structure and Workflow

Jordan Alban, the lead 3D artist and build master, explains the voluntary nature of the team:

Jordan Alban [03:51]: "It's all voluntary... everyone chips into the project in their free time without any financial commitment."

The team evolved organically, especially during the COVID-19 lockdowns, with dedicated members stepping up to lead various departments such as audio, 3D art, level design, and scripting. They established internal deadlines to maintain momentum, which also bolstered their public relations as the project gained significant attention.

Technical Challenges and Tools

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the technical hurdles faced during development. Jordan delves into the complexities of using Bethesda’s Creation Kit:

Jordan Alban [13:43]: "The Creation Kit is quite archaic... it's user-friendly for art and level design but becomes challenging with deep technical modifications."

To manage version control, the team transitioned from unreliable Google Drive sharing to GitHub with Git Large File Storage (LFS), orchestrated by Jordan:

Jordan Alban [29:58]: "We used GitHub Desktop app... moving to Git solved many issues with file distribution and integrity."

Despite these tools, managing large assets and the sheer scale of Fallout London posed continuous challenges, especially when Bethesda released a next-gen update that disrupted their work.

Art and Audio Direction

Daniel Morrison and Jordan discuss the art and audio direction, emphasizing the fusion of Fallout’s aesthetic with British cultural elements. Daniel highlights the inspiration drawn from classic British bands and the necessity of creating an evocative, survivalist soundtrack:

Daniel Morrison [42:22]: "We wanted to emulate Fallout 1's depressing soundscape using stringed instruments and tubular bells to simulate Big Ben."

Jordan adds that maintaining a cohesive art style was crucial despite the diverse backgrounds of the volunteer artists:

Jordan Alban [37:42]: "We tried to keep the art consistent by drawing inspiration from British culture and Bethesda's style, even though the artists had varied individual styles."

Voice Acting and Dialogue

The voice acting process was monumental, involving over 90,000 lines of dialogue. Daniel Morrison explains the meticulous organization required to coordinate voice actors, including notable figures like John Burkow and Neil Newborn:

Daniel Morrison [47:18]: "We had a casting call that attracted over a thousand applicants... ensuring fair and organized selection was crucial."

Neil Newborn, known for his role as Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3, contributed significantly to the project, bringing professionalism and a deep understanding of character development to the mod.

Release and Post-Release Issues

The mod's release encountered significant setbacks due to Bethesda’s unexpected next-gen update, which disrupted the mod’s functionality by two days before the intended launch:

Jordan Alban [21:06]: "Bethesda put out the next-gen update two days after our release date, which pretty much broke everything we did."

Despite their efforts to block the update, the team had to decide against proceeding due to performance issues, leading them to postpone a next-gen version indefinitely. Additionally, reliance on external tools like the Script Extender added layers of dependency that complicated post-release support.

Future Plans and Transition to Game Development

With the challenges faced during Fallout London, the team is now considering transitioning from modding to developing original games. Daniel expresses optimism about building a game studio:

Daniel Morrison [57:48]: "We're developing a company out of this... aiming to create opportunities and build scalable games."

Jordan emphasizes the importance of starting with smaller projects to master new tools and iterating based on learned experiences:

Jordan Alban [69:19]: "We want to make smaller projects or engage in game jams to learn and iterate before tackling larger endeavors."

Audience and Community Engagement

Fallout London has cultivated a substantial community, with around 87,000 members on Discord. Jordan notes that the audience extends beyond the Fallout modding community, attracting new players interested in their original content:

Jordan Alban [71:38]: "A good chunk of our Discord members are new to Fallout and are eager to see our future projects."

The team believes this diverse and growing audience will support their transition into indie game development.

Conclusion

The podcast offers a comprehensive glimpse into the complexities of developing a large-scale mod like Fallout London. Daniel Morrison and Jordan Alban highlight the dedication, technical expertise, and creative ambition required to bring such a project to fruition. Despite facing significant obstacles, including technical setbacks and team burnout, Team Fallon’s journey underscores the potential for passionate volunteers to create impactful gaming experiences. Their move towards establishing a game studio marks an exciting new chapter, supported by a robust and engaged community.

Notable Quotes

• Daniel Morrison [02:32]: "Fallout London is a complete total conversion mod... recreates the whole of London within the Fallout 4 universe with an entirely new story, soundtrack, and 3D assets."

• Jordan Alban [03:51]: "It's all voluntary... everyone chips into the project in their free time without any financial commitment."

• Daniel Morrison [42:22]: "We wanted to emulate Fallout 1's depressing soundscape using stringed instruments and tubular bells to simulate Big Ben."

• Jordan Alban [37:42]: "We tried to keep the art consistent by drawing inspiration from British culture and Bethesda's style, even though the artists had varied individual styles."

• Jordan Alban [21:06]: "Bethesda put out the next-gen update two days after our release date, which pretty much broke everything we did."

• Daniel Morrison [57:48]: "We're developing a company out of this... aiming to create opportunities and build scalable games."

Episode Timestamp Highlights

• 00:00 - 01:09: Introduction to the team and Fallout London.
• 02:32 - 03:05: Overview of the mod’s scope.
• 13:43 - 15:31: Discussion on technical tools and Creation Kit.
• 21:06 - 26:14: Challenges faced during the release due to Bethesda’s update.
• 37:42 - 45:16: Art and audio direction insights.
• 47:18 - 56:31: Voice acting coordination and community involvement.
• 57:48 - 71:38: Future plans for game development and community support.

This episode serves as an inspiring testament to what dedicated individuals can achieve in the realm of game modding, setting the stage for their forthcoming ventures in the gaming industry.

Transcript

[Daniel Morrison]

Fallout London is a 2024 total conversion mod developed by Team Fallon. The mod is Based on Fallout 4 by Bethesda Softworks and takes place in a post apocalyptic rendition of London. The project is remarkable for its ambition and scope with the small indie team delivering a fully realized open world rpg. Daniel Morrison Neil led music composition, audio design and the voice acting department for the project. Jordan Alban was the lead 3D artist and the build master in charge of version control. They joined the show with Joe Nash to talk about Fallout London and its development. Joe Nash is a developer, educator and.

[Jordan Alban]

Award winning community builder who has worked.

[Daniel Morrison]

At companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

[Joe Nash]

Daniel and Jordan, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

[Daniel Morrison]

Yeah, really well, thank you.

[Joe Nash]

Perfect. Well, so as I mentioned, we're here to talk about a mod which was literally everywhere at the start of this year. This wonderful Fallout conversion mod which hits a lot of beats for me, being from near enough London and living a lot of my life in Hackney. So I was very excited to see this mod's existence on a lot of stuff you've hit. And before we get into talking about the particulars, I think it'd be useful to introduce yourselves and what you did in the team. So Daniel, do you want to kick us off? Yeah.

[Daniel Morrison]

So I'm Daniel Morrison, Neo and I was the lead of audio. So everything to do with like the music composition, audio design and implementation as well as leading the voice acting department.

[Joe Nash]

Perfect. And Jordan.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah. Hello, I'm Jordan Alban. I am the lead 3D artist and build master of Fallout London. So I'm in charge of anything 3D related, managing the 3D team and all the stuff they create. All the beautiful little things we put in the game and version controls so the actual updates and redistributing it to the team, keeping everyone up to date, getting everyone's files together.

[Joe Nash]

Perfect. Buildmasters is a cool title. That's a good one to have. And we'll come to what's. That's a very divergent process going from 3D asset creation to being the version control steward. We'll come to that in a bit. But I guess to start for folks who aren't super familiar or who missed the news, I think it'd be great to talk a little bit about what Fallout London is and what it includes. So I guess in A nutshell. What is Fallout London? Daniel, do you want to start?

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah.

[Daniel Morrison]

So Fallout London's a complete total conversion mod which has been worked on over the past, like, five years. And it seeks to recreate the whole of London, or at least a condensed version of London within the Fallout 4 universe. And pretty much entirely new story, new SoundTrack, all new 3D assets. Everything's pretty much brand new in it. And, you know, everything that's been designed for it has got that kind of lovely British London twist to do with it.

[Joe Nash]

A reassuring shade of grey and a little dinge of everything is terrible, but we like it that way. So I guess an important thing that I wanted to cover as well at the start is I guess, the nature of it being a mod and the team because. And this is something I want to ask you all about a bit later as well. But, like, the possibly, like the high end of PR I've ever seen for a mod in terms of the pickup from, like, so many games, publications reviewed it as a game which I've not, like, seen from a mod before, which is really impressive. And I know that did lead to some confusion and folks not necessarily realizing that y'all did this in your free time, Right? This is a volunteer effort.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah, it's all voluntary. Yeah.

[Joe Nash]

Perfect. And can you, Jordan, I guess, since you interact with or as the buildmaster, can you tell us a little bit about the team and I guess the structure and how you work together on it?

[Jordan Alban]

Oh, lordy. So I was there since the start and I can tell you now, the team has changed a lot from what it originally was. The whole project changed from what it originally was, but the goal never changed. That was, you know, bring Fallout to London. As for the team, though, yeah. So it's a mixed bag. So we have essentially, there's no commitment to, say, submit anything, if that makes sense. Everyone's hobbyists, they will work in the free time. There's, you know, there's no contract or anything like that. So it's basically whatever you can chip into the project. And what kind of naturally happened was after the lockdown from COVID hit, you found that there was a few characters, two of us sitting in here, who actually Dansky, I can't remember if he was there then I feel like he was.

[Daniel Morrison]

I just joined at that point. That's a bit of a funny story, but, yeah.

[Jordan Alban]

So it's all a burnout. It's a while ago we had a few characters who just were there all the time, and these became the heads of departments. They were probably the most capable to run all of the other modders and people who are on the team, you know, ranging from 2D artists, 3D artists, level designers, scripters, you name it, any department. Eventually I will actually include Dansky's department in that as well. That eventually went into a whole audio and media department as the PR picked up close to release. And when audio, you know, 90,000 lines of dialogue, I think it's actually more than that now. When all of them had to be edited, it was like Dansky team, go. So it's collecting a whole bunch of people together for that as well who were previous members. One of them was a 2D artist and then he started doing the dialogue editing with Dansky, which is brilliant. So I wish I could put a bow tie on it, but it's quite complicated. Like I said, there's no commitment from people, but you have to kind of gently urge people to get things done. Some people have various ways of handling that. But you know, from the start we said, here's our deadline, we want to get it done by then. Which I think really helped us because we could be voluntary, unpaid. There's no commitment financially to basically go, oh, we can do this forever. And I think a lot of us quickly realized the Fallout 4 modding scene was, you know, from being very popular, each mod would get millions of downloads. It reached a point where that was really starting to slow down because of course, like so many games came out like since its release, a lot of the community had moved on, which is completely understandable. And I think we quickly realized that as a team and was like, boom, deadline, let's hit it. So you know that. So this does link into the PR as well. So that it's. We had this whole thought of this is our internal deadline, why not make it public? And that was our first initial release date. That's when we wanted to be done. And a few hiccups then happened, but yeah, that's the best I can give you on that, really. Is there anything I missed?

[Daniel Morrison]

Yeah, the way that all of it was kind of structured was, I think modern's like quite a unique kind of avenue of game development, I would say, because you're already working with like pre existing material and it's based on changing something. So generally what happens with this kind of community building aspect is it's. Lots of people want to change a game or what their ideal version is, or create some type of story avenue from that. And it actually allows for the facilitation of actually having leads of Department, actual departments as this kind of mixture of role playing as a game studio as well. I mean, we did model ourselves as close to getting stuff done and everything with all of that, but it's common amongst any kind of mod grip to approach it from that way where you have a leader department. Things are like delegated as tasks throughout the week and everything. And people kind of enjoy that because it's an easy way for like portfolio building, for example. So like, like a writer for a game or whatever, if they're working on something. It's difficult to get into writing for games without having a game to work with, you know, so that's like a really good entry point for people to start working with pre existing material and it's more about learning how to change something rather than create something completely from scratch. So it's like a really good entry point for building portfolio as well.

[Joe Nash]

Yeah, absolutely. And I definitely want to come back to that point later because I know a lot of the team are, I guess, what you'd call, quote unquote, early career in terms of, you know, being recent grads and that kind of stuff. So I'm very interested in how that's influenced your directions, but just sticking with, I guess, the workflow and the team that you plan for now, because I think it's such a fascinating choice of game and also doing a total conversion to have gone for as a target because you know, normally. Well, not normally, but like quite often a model, even in Fallout 4 for a Bethesda game is like, you know, I want to make this aspect of the game better. I want to change this one thing. And like, it's very easy for me to conceptualize the volunteer work there, right. Like, you know, how everyone kind of knows what they're doing. Whereas when you're saying we're going to recreate pretty much all of zone one and two and then we're going to populate that and make it feel like a living place. So we're going to have all these things in it. Like, I mean, I guess just how is that work organized? I imagine there must just be someone who's just like looking through the map and going, there's a blank space there that needs something that's a ticket, give it to the team. Like, how does that work? I guess as you said, Daniel, it's like tasks being doled out, but it just seems like a monumental effort with so much space and so much that needs doing, that actually getting an idea of what needs doing and getting it farmed out to Everyone to do it in this scale just seems absurd to me, but maybe I'm being pessimistic about volunteer projects.

[Jordan Alban]

The example you just gave there was actually really good to kind of pull from. You know how you said there's a sort of blank space on the map and use it. I would say that most organization came from. I'd say pro. He is the project lead. He was the one who really drove everyone to kind of keep going in a way, like, what are you doing today? Right? And it's like, oh, no. Some people might see pressure in that, but no, I think it's really good for people. But like I said, the example you gave with, there's this little spot that. That was what really worked well when it came to getting the quests and actually the level design finished. We saw people going, oh, where's this little empty spot on the map? Use that. And it was just constantly being done. And I feel like it, you know, it's like an empty whiteboard and they kept spodging out marks on it sort of thing, until it was all filled out. I don't know if you want to say anything about Danske, so I know.

[Daniel Morrison]

A bit about those kinds of things. Probably not the most overall, but I do know, like, for things like level design or whatever, you know, they were creating a lot of London from Google Maps or whatever, and that's a way to descend. And he'd just keep designing and designing and designing. But they all love doing that as well. It was almost because, I mean, level design's like, to an extent, you get a load of assets like LEGO bricks, and you're essentially building a big level yourself and having fun with it and with a lot of that, because there was so much world space, which was led by Wolfie and Pryl doing all of that. And they pushed for all of that to happen, all those kind of blank spaces and everything, because of the things to do with British culture, whatever says, like, you know, a TARDIS could go here, this would be a cool little bit for that. It kind of worked very naturally with that. So a lot of it was quite level design focused for a lot of things as the playground and that. I think that's a testament to how they'd done everything because it meant spaces had to be filled or else it would be empty. But of course, it wasn't a case of having to always create something, always new, all the time with everything. You know, it was either, we need enemies here, we'll put them there, or, you know, stuff to do with let's make a fun little reference to something to do with British history. So it was really quite natural, more so than, oh, we need to fill this space out or we need to design that or this kind of thing. It kind of flourished. Quite natural, at least from the way that I'd seen it all work.

[Jordan Alban]

I think it really depends on the department as well. Like certain departments had. It's not that I had like a great load of work, but the work was almost more nitty gritty. Whereas there were certain processes, like I would say, for example, Dansk with the audio editing, he nailed it. Like the dialogue editing, you know, he had everything. The engine, you can export everything out into spreadsheets and it's all really organized right from the get go. Whereas with the 3D art, it's just kind of bonked together. And same for level design. Like, we ended up creating Google sheets to track stuff because there's no way you can really track it in the engine. And I do feel like that really did play into how things got completed as an overall, you know, how everything got completed and put together, really.

[Joe Nash]

Right. Well, so you've both said things in that past bit that have triggered me to bring into our next topic because we've hit the engine and we've hit the term world space. So I know a little bit about Bethesda game modding. I know about the creation kit. And when I was looking at the creation kit in preparation for this episode, I was like. And you know, I was watching videos, people using it and I was watching it like chug along trying to load some stuff. And I was like, there is no way they've done the work of this scale, this mod, purely in the creation kit. Did you. Was that the tooling? Was that the base? It was all the official creation kit, yeah.

[Jordan Alban]

So of course the 3D. Not as much audio. No, certain things. Absolutely not.

[Joe Nash]

But yeah, the core modding, yeah.

[Jordan Alban]

So there's two kind of discerning things. I'd say one of them is the master file. The master file is this little file. It's not little at all. It's like 250 megs. Nearly 300 now. I remember when it was like 15 megs. Anyway, that master file is what the game goes, oh, hi. That's where all the world spaces and all the information is stored. You know, this is where that character stands. This is the pose that they're doing. Whereas, you know, the assets and everything are kind of localized outside of that. They're completely different files. They're really big asset files.

[Joe Nash]

So I guess you tell us a little bit about the creation kit and how it would compare to. I guess more. I don't want to say more typical. But like a commercial engine like Unity or etc. What tools are you working with there?

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah, so things with like Unity and Unreal, they'll package everything into their own asset formats. Whereas of course with a creation kit they use proprietary or quite outdated stuff. Being the knit immerse game formats, you know, gamebryo, if anyone's ever heard of it. That really goes back. It was a really old multiplayer engine From I think 95, 1995 and that's what eventually was used to build Morrowind. And you know, it went from there to Fallout 3 Skyrim. They kept updating it. And I think that is something really interesting about the games industry is, you see, I try to find a game engine that isn't based on CryEngine. The amount of game engines you go, what game is this game engine using? Or whatever. And it's like, oh, it's a fork of CryEngine. Okay. You know, it really goes back. But yeah, the creation kit's quite archaic. It's old but it's really user friendly. It's definitely built for speed and you know, everything's on the screen. Everything you need is there. Unless you start doing something really quite deep and technical. Then you really need to start, you know, rubbing brain cells together like, oh God, what am I doing? But yeah, when it actually comes to I'd say the art, the level design, building the world, it's really intuitive to use. And as Dansky was saying earlier with people almost, or even yourself with people coming out of university graduates, et cetera. I would say for someone who wants to get into game design, the creation kit's brilliant for it. It's a really kind of user friendly thing to use and you start it with millions of assets to just jump in and build something which I think is great. That definitely helped us. There's kind of two sides to that coin being Fallout 4 is based in Boston which has a lot of, you know, New England architecture, which absolutely helped us a lot. A lot of the architecture just fall in place.

[Joe Nash]

Never thought of that. Fascinating. Okay, so again, like the scale thing. So I know, I think, I can't remember where I saw this, but I saw someone mention one of the team mentioned somewhere in interview that the size of it caused you issues in numerous ways. I think distribution, that was one of the reasons you went with Gog, right? That you couldn't Upload it to Nexus mods.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah, yeah. So some of the. I'll get a bit more technical if you like. So just for example, like, the textures are always. No matter what the game is, the textures are the number one thing that cause you to lose hard drive space. Of course, with the creation kit, it uses DDS format, which I think DDS format did very well. You know, it's a pretty awesome format, Very good compression, quite lossless in certain settings and then you archive it all, which compresses everything down even more. But yeah, we absolutely hit the size limit of the Nexus, which we originally wanted to release on, because of course, big mod, big modding website. Why not? Well, I think, to be honest, back then we were kind of quite amateur about it in the sense that we were just like, yeah, we put it on the Nexus. We didn't even question whether they would take it or not. You know, that's me speaking honestly, when it was early days and then when it came to a realization of, like, how are we going to get this to people? We tried to go through Steam. But the Steam process was a bit tricky because if we wanted to do it in any, like, official manner, we had to go through Steam and Bethesda. And that quickly became a juggling game of like, you know, Mummy and Daddy fighting. Are we talking to you? Are we talking to you? And we quickly lost interest because our deadline was creeping up closer and closer and, you know, we ended up having to look, oh, no, we need to build launchers, installers, we need to get permission from Bethesda itself, which is quite harder than people think. You know, we did have some communication with some people, but they can't just go, yeah, put it on Steam, guys. They have to go to their manager, who probably has to go to their manager. And then they probably have a meeting. And we were just getting nowhere with it. And then that's when I can't remember. I feel like GOG reached out to us, if I remember that was the case.

[Daniel Morrison]

It did reach out.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah. Yeah. I believe it was someone called Virgil who was our kind of. He ended up being our manager, if you will, at gog, who really stayed in contact with us. They reached out to us and said, yeah, I'd love to host for that. London. I think they saw some potential in it. They, of course, wanted to grow their platform because I was actually quite surprised at how many people didn't have GOG installed, even on, like, the team. You know, some of us did, but they're absolutely lovely people and it was only after, like, people really start to look up who they were. They went, oh, my God, it's cdpr. And a lot of people know who CDPR are and.

[Joe Nash]

Oh, I didn't actually know that. As in CD Projekt Red.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Nash]

Oh, I had no idea they were linked. Okay.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah. Well, they're essentially the same company. They're not. They are not. GOG is separate, but they're very closely interlinked. Like, I don't know how much I can say on that front.

[Joe Nash]

Yeah, no, no. I guess it's like. Yeah.

[Jordan Alban]

At one point I got sent a drive link to upload stuff and it had like, all the CDPR place on it. And I was like, oh, I should.

[Joe Nash]

The droids have nested corporate structures. They always blur the line somewhere.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah.

[Joe Nash]

I knew them as, like, the DRM free games place or the retro games place place, but, like, yeah, I had no idea they're related. That's really interesting. Okay, so. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah.

[Jordan Alban]

Again, I don't want to speak too much on it. I don't know how closely related they are. I do know they are very close in terms of where they are based. They definitely speak to each other. You may have to correct me there, because I think.

[Joe Nash]

I think I've just looked it up. They're wholly owned by CD Projekt Red. So you've. You're correct.

[Jordan Alban]

Excellent. I was right. Brilliant. Yeah, sorry. I just realized what happened there. Excellent. I have, like, vague memories of people saying they were based on them. So it's like, okay, yeah. The moment we people really looked up who they were, it's like, oh, my God, this is like a match made in heaven. Because we're a bunch of lowly hobbyist modders and you have these really humble people who are absolutely lovely and you know that they make great games as well. Like, come on, guys like Witcher 3.

[Joe Nash]

And Cyberpunk, particularly in the genre you're modding for.

[Daniel Morrison]

Right?

[Joe Nash]

Like open world RPGs.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah, exactly. But that's the thing. They. They also really promote their modding. They love modders, of course, for however many reasons that might be, but they're really supportive of their modding community. People can argue not as much with Cyberpunk, because every time they update, everything breaks. But, you know, if you own anything on gog, that's Steam users. Remember that, guys. That is Steam in itself. That is a big nightmare of Steam. Whereas on gog, you just install the game you want and the version that you want, and then you optionally Update, you never have to update the game. That's the whole joy of their entire platform is. And it's again, this is why we really was a match made in heaven. The fact that their platform is DRM free, they have no obligation to keep the games updated. You know, the users, that is, they don't roll out automatic updates unless you have it turned on. You install whatever version of the game you want. You own that software sort of thing, you have control over it in that sense. Whereas on Steam, as many people will know, it will just force update. You can manually get around it, but it's not, you know, you don't want to ask your average user to go on to go into their Steam files and set things as read only and all this other stuff compared to GOG DRM3 just being like, oh, you click the button and you have that version of the game. So there was lots of things happening there where I think, you know, it couldn't have gone any better. We couldn't, you know, with the complications and the Steam side of stuff, you compare that to Goggles. When of course, there was the complication of Bethesda's next gen update, which had us on the edges of our seats, you know.

[Joe Nash]

Yeah, Sorry. Just for folks who haven't been following the news on all of your trials to release, do you want to briefly summarize what happened there?

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah. So I don't know if Dansky can clarify. I think it was two days before our intended release date of April 23rd.

[Daniel Morrison]

Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, I think it was. Yeah.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah. So I had been keeping a close eye on the Steam database. So if anyone knows on the Steam database you can see when builds of games are being updated and you know, you'll see what the newest version is and if there's any in the. What's called the staging branch or staging essentially before it goes out to the public, you can see that and it's all public information. A few of us was keeping an eye on it and we saw something go up. I think it was like, May, April, May. Sorry. It was earlier in the year, it was about February. We saw some update get put on Fallout 4 and we were shivering a bit at that point, like, oh my God, what's going to happen? Because there was a rumor of this next gen update coming and lo and behold, we gave our release date and then two days after intended release date, Bethesda, I think, put on Twitter that they were going to drop the next gen Update for Fallout 4 and it completely broke everything we did. That's not entirely true.

[Daniel Morrison]

It pretty much broke everything.

[Jordan Alban]

It did and it did. Yeah. So we were smart enough to block the update before it came. Like I said, some of us kind of knew it was coming, but we didn't know when it was coming and we didn't know the details. We didn't have any details on it. We were completely in the dark basically. We just knew something bad was going to hit us and it just, you know, when we actually finally got the news, it was two days after our initial release date. And that killed our motivation a bit. We did keep going, but a lot of us blocked the updates. And those who did update to test, they updated to test the next gen. Everything was just unplayable. It was bad. Everything was crashing. We had to do loads of work to even convert the files to work on the next gen. And then once I think I spent something like a week basically rebuilding it to work on the next gen update to find out that there was this crucial bug with the next gen update itself being performance issues with NPCs. This was later found out by someone in the community. I wish I could remember their name right now, but they're an absolute star. They found out that the face gen, this ancient technology that Bethesda used for talking NPCs, that that system in the next gen update was completely broken and it was creating massive performance issues where you'd be dropping down to about five frames per second randomly or when it loads them. And that still isn't fixed, by the way. And yeah, we get asked probably on a weekly basis of when are you going to the next gen when Bethesda update the game. It's unplayable at the moment.

[Joe Nash]

You also had, I don't know if it's accurate to call the script extender a mod, but you also had things you were using downstream that were broken as well by this. Right?

[Daniel Morrison]

Yeah, it was all reliant on other people fixing those kind of things. And you know, that's dependencies. So that was another kind of thing as well because it all worked totally fine before the update and it wasn't really that much you were missing out past the update. And that was another good thing about GOG as well was, you know, you can link it straight to that correct version of the game and everything. So yeah, worked out for that.

[Joe Nash]

Which is ideal for folks that, you know, it's great that Bethesda are still supporting the game 10 years after release. But like people who haven't played fallout since2015 and then they're coming back just to play Fallout London and they can just download the correct version and get up and going. It's much easier. Right.

[Jordan Alban]

Well, throughout the entire development of the mod we had worked quite hard to make sure that it was just a one click install. We got permissions from modders all over the shop, you know, and all people on the team so that we could put their stuff into the master file that I mentioned earlier and you could just press play. You didn't have to go onto the nexus and download 50 mods before you could play Fallout London. We even got permission to ship with script extender and all of the script extender components that we do ship the game with. That's not easy to always do because some of these people aren't there anymore. If we didn't get a response, we just had to not use it. And like you're saying with updating dependencies that these guys are like the absolute stars of the community. They are the magic men of the community, right? They're wizards. They're doing all this stuff behind the codes, fixing address libraries and stuff that is completely on another level to anything that I think some of us do on the team. And it was completely dependent on them to update their work for us to even get it onto the next gen. And sadly, because it some of them did, a lot of them did. I think in the end we was waiting for two plugins to get rebuilt, but because, you know, we had this kind of weird flip flop stage where we was like, are we going to do it? Are we not? In the end we just said, no, it's not been updated. The performance is too bad. We can't release like this. People will complain, let alone testing. Bear that in mind as well. I've been testing for about a year and a half on the old gen version. We would have to do all of that again and we would have never released, I think until halfway through 2025 or something, or the end of 2024 if we did that.

[Joe Nash]

Yeah, that makes sense. So I mean, I guess that's another interesting aspect of a project like this, which is I've seen rumbling. So are you still intending to put out a next gen version? Is that a thing that's happening?

[Daniel Morrison]

I don't think that's going to happen. I mean it depends on a lot of other things, but I mean, but then, you know, we're creating updates, we're adding things as well. So you know, then having to do that and retest all of that probably isn't worth it at this stage with everything. But maybe down the line, who knows, maybe, you know, if we keep working on it and then actually make it work with next gen, but probably not.

[Joe Nash]

Okay, that makes total sense, because my question was going to be, and I guess this even goes now for like patching and doing stuff after that. As you said, a big part of having the deadline was, you know, you're doing this free. There needs to be an endpoint on it so you can get on with your lives. How does that work with putting patches out after? Is it just whoever's still around and has passion for it, as have new teams formed with deadlines? Daniel, can you talk on this a bit?

[Daniel Morrison]

Yeah. I mean, the community has been really good about it with reporting any type of bugs or, you know, things that were missing or things which were broken or whatever. And we just put all of that into a spreadsheet. It's mainly quite a lot of the heads of department which are doing things. There's still quite a number of team members which are doing optimizations or things that could be causing some types of crashes. But for the most part, you know, we just have a big list and we work through it now, which is actually kind of nice, you know, rather than having to come up with new solutions to fix various things, we've now got everything all logged, like on Discord and everything. It's a case of going through all of it. Is that one done? Cool. Delete that message. Next one. And a lot of them are very small fixes. And it's actually quite therapeutic at this point, at least for me. I mean, there's some other bigger fixes that needed done. There was actually one where Prowl. So we were finding ways of trying to get ambient audio to kind of work a bit better. And Prowl came up with this genius idea where you would do all of these kind of packing kind of packages of all of these kind of things, where you would lump all of these bits of rubber wall together. They'd be kind of kit bashed with different things, and you can load that as like a preset thing, like, here's certain amount of rubble or whatever. And we wanted a bunch of ambient audio for everything. And he unfortunately put sound of a Brahmin mooing as a stock sound so that it would bug me, so that I would get it done. But actually there was one which I forgot to change, and he sent me a message that says, by the way, you forgot one. And the message was like the Discord.

[Jordan Alban]

Saying, it's still there, isn't it? Is it still there?

[Daniel Morrison]

I did fix it. I tried to argue my case. It'd be great for just one Imbram and Moon. But I did fix it, unfortunately. But their message was something like, I swear I'm going insane, I'm going through the night. And you know, I swear I had a cow mooing from like the rooftops. Is my game bugged? Am I not able to tell like where sound's coming from or whatever? And then Pro sent me a screenshot of that and he was like, mate, you missed one. Is still there.

[Joe Nash]

Mostly because it confirms my. I've had a long held professional bias which is the best way to get any designer artist, anyone to do something is to make a terrible first draft and send it to them and tell them you're going to use it. So I absolutely love that as an approach. That's incredible. So one last question, I guess about the technical side of things before we move on to Very interested in all things art direction on this, but I guess Jordan, so you mentioned version control. I'm a git nerd, so I need to know what was the version control situation and particularly again the variety of team members, the fact that voluntary, you know, even though I love git to pieces, it is a labor in any project to use it and I, you know, can totally understand that wasn't the case. So what did the team do in your situation?

[Jordan Alban]

Well, you'd be very happy to hear that we used git.

[Joe Nash]

Oh perfect.

[Jordan Alban]

So actually it's. There's a bit more to it going back. I'll kind of give you a little bit of a timeline. So when we originally started back in the old, old times, people were just sharing files and discord that had to.

[Joe Nash]

Go underscore finder underscore V4. Yeah.

[Jordan Alban]

Yep. Basically that actually caused a lot of errors to the point where the project was restarted is one of the reasons why the entire thing was scrapped after about a year and a half or so and then restarted after that. People would move to Google Drive. So when I started to do the build, we were still using this system. I insisted on getting that completely just thrown though. It was horrible. Everyone would upload files to a folder in a Google Drive and then that person would download them all. It took so long. I can't describe if you were on slow Internet and I was at the time I was in like shared accommodation or something and that took just hours to even just download people's files, let alone upload it. But we had this common issue where I'm sure you guys know whenever you put anything on drive it zips it. Especially if it's like a whole chunk of folders. And what we needed was a whole chunk of folders files, it zips it and. And we kept noticing some really weird bugs where we would download the next build and stuff would just be missing and the person who uploaded it. Then we actually had this revelation moment. Someone checked like the pre uploaded file and the stuff was there, but the stuff that was being downloaded, it wasn't. I have no idea what happened. I don't know if people reached capacity on the drive or whatever. It was a nightmare. It caused us so many issues. And that's when I eventually I took it over and I said, no, we're not using Google Drive anymore. Because this did mostly affect the 3D team. People's games were just crashing out, right? Stuff was missing. You know, you just spent two weeks building something and it's not there. I reached a breaking point of like, no, we're moving to git. We're moving to something that is not just deleting files because I still don't know what it was, don't know if it was a bug. No idea. So eventually we moved over to Git lfs of course. Why wouldn't we? It just made so much sense for us to do it because, you know, it's such a good tool. You really can't, in my opinion, I don't think you can beat git lfs. It's. Or just git in general. The fact you have this little folder you can upload and then just download. Perfection. Absolute perfection.

[Joe Nash]

Just briefly, for folks who haven't done any putting criminally large binaries into git lfs, is it large file structure kind of file storage? Yeah, it's the extension for big stuff in git rather than text files. Cool. And was that through a GitHub? A GitLab?

[Jordan Alban]

A GitHub. GitHub itself, yeah. So we all use the GitHub GitHub Desktop app.

[Joe Nash]

Nice.

[Jordan Alban]

There is other programs we had to use as well. So the built in version control for the creation kit is Perforce.

[Joe Nash]

Oh God. Okay.

[Jordan Alban]

Oh God. Yeah, see, I heard it right there in your voice. I still use Perforce. We'd use it for the Papyrus scripts. So the actual scripting language of the game itself.

[Joe Nash]

That's a really interesting way around. I guess this is built into Creation kit but it's funny to be using Perforce for the text files and git for the 3D objects.

[Jordan Alban]

It's almost reversed in a sense. You think if you're using Git, you're using that for all the text files, the scripts and. Yeah, no, it was in reverse for us. But again, we just didn't have a better way of doing it. We wanted it to be on GitHub, you know, it's. You got redundancy, it's always there. You know, we don't have a local server. If my house collapses and destroys it, all of our work is gone. It's fast. Like, it's really, really fast. If you have good Internet, damn, it's fast. Someone downloaded, I think, 60 gigs in about 10 minutes, you know, and that's unheard of in terms of what we were doing before. You know, they would have been spending three days downloading everything. Yeah.

[Joe Nash]

Nice bag. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, I think, yeah, in terms of the spread of the team, the skills on the team and the backgrounds of the team, I think, yeah, being able to use GitHub Desktop is. Yeah, an ideal solution.

[Jordan Alban]

We did have a bit of a structure to it though, because of course you had the freedom to have like multiple repositories. So we had, like, if people were interested anyway, I don't know how interested they will be. So we had the master data repository. That was the one that everyone. I built into that and people downloaded that and then every week you'd start a new file and then everyone else had their own personal push repositories, that's what we called them. And you just go on there and you put your work in it. Every week, every Sunday and you push to me, I would download it, merge it all together.

[Joe Nash]

Wow. Okay, so you didn't have anyone else doing pull requests into the main. You were doing all of that, they were just sending you the changes and then you were doing. Wow, okay. Really, Truly the build parcel.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah. Yeah. There was a few occasions where I just said to people, like, it's going to be way easier for you to just push to the main. Yeah, and they did. I think Saffron was probably the only one. So she's the lead 2D artist and there was one time she converted all of the textures just to clean them up and scale them down a bit, because otherwise the mod was going to be like 80 gigs, which I didn't want. And yeah, that required her pushing to the main. There was just no way about that.

[Daniel Morrison]

I have very warm memories of spending many a late night with Sunny every Sunday. It was part of my routine to join in with him. And just see him merge everything. And every once in a while I would see something and Fallout 4 edit or FE4 edit or whatever. And something would show up red. And then he would zoom into it and go, what is that? What is that? Why is that there? And then having to go back and manually changing all the values into the plugin for you again. I mean, Sonny's a bit of a hero with all this. I mean, he would get all. With these plugin files and sometimes it would just break just because, I mean, if you move something or done anything individually, you would overwrite other people's work or this or that, and you don't want to go, Sunday's merge day. It's like 11 at night. Do you mind redoing some of this? So then Sunny would go in and manually change everything in the file and revert small little things back to normal and everything and then merge it. And it was on the next one. That was like. How many people were pushing? It was like 30.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah. The maximum was, I think actually 28. We had 20. I remember one merge. Sorry, we call it the merge, but that is when we build everything. I remember one day I clicked, I opened up the GitHub desktop app thing and, oh, my God, I just remember seeing all these little down arrows. I kind of just put our heads in my hands and was like, nah, no, no, no. Because there's just 28 of them little white arrows. And if anyone's ever used it, you know what I'm on about. And I was like, oh, my Lord.

[Joe Nash]

Yeah, this is not the format you're working with. You don't get a diff either. Like, you don't know how a model has changed in the GitHub UI. Right. Like, you just have to take it on faith. It's the correct one.

[Jordan Alban]

Yes, exactly. So the only real way is to compare the size of files so it does read the Papyrus source scripts. That will show you the actual, you know, the changes in Git itself. Once everything's compiled, though. Yeah, no, there's no way of telling what it is at all.

[Joe Nash]

Well done. That's a heroic effort to keep everyone just focusing on the work they want to do and not juggling the project structure. So, I mean, on to. We have two members deeply involved in the asset creation of this mod. So obviously I have to ask you about the art direction and I'm really interested in. You know, you've got something that needs to feel fallouty, and by all accounts, it seems like it very much does feel fallouty. Like, the amount of people who are saying this could be an official release is awesome. But also, you know, the Brit vibes are a big part of the reason for London. And obviously you've also then got the creative expression of everyone on the team. How did you go about juggling those when you were deciding on the art direction?

[Daniel Morrison]

Oh, that's a big question. There's so much that went into all of that with concept art and all sorts. I mean, all the heads of department kind of all had a unifying goal and understanding of having similar humor things, from Still Game to Legend to Doctor who and everything else. So it did all kind of bleed in.

[Jordan Alban]

We're all massive Fallout fans as well, or every single one of us, especially the old ones. Fallout 3, if you ask it, I think Pro is the only person to say Fallout 4 is his favorite. Everyone else is like, New Vegas, Fallout 3, Fallout Tactics. Everyone scoffs at him for that one. Yeah. So Fallout London being set when it is set in 2237, essentially just before or in between the events of the original games. And then the newer, you know, if you look at the chronological order of the games, it's set in between the originals, the newer ones. So something that we absolutely wanted to do was pull in more inspiration from the original games being Fallout 1 and 2. Black Isles, Fallout. You know, if you're a hardcore fan, you know what I'm on about. Not Bethesda's Fallout. Very different, in my opinion. They're very different. And I'll come back to this point later. I think this is really important for Dansky. So on the 3D side of it, our main goal was to really try to capture Bethesda's art style so things fit in. When we originally started, it was just a mishmash of different 3D assets to kind of work as placeholders, whilst the 3D, so the level designers could just go in and place down, I don't know, a water cooler or whatever they needed, and then it'll get replaced in the future with something that was far more fitting. Probably the most skilled, I personally would say, is Edge. He really nailed the art style of the vehicle. So he was our vehicle artist. We had various artists who were very specific of what they did. And he absolutely nailed the Atom punk style of the Fallout setting. But bringing in British cars, like, he made the Mini Cooper look Fallout at you. Right. He was really, really strong on the. On that front. And, you know, for the rest of us, it was a case of, well, how do we replicate the star? But Also give it this British twist. How do we, you know, bring in this feeling of it being unique? It's new, but it's also going to fit in and not just look like it sticks out like a sore thumb. And that's kind of where more my work lies. I try to just give things a little bit of a weird. A lot of inspiration I took. Sorry. I actually go into a little bit like. More like 40 hammer. 40 hammer warhammer, 40k. The kind of gothic. There's a specific name for it, like Diesel punk style. I really tried to apply that to the angel faction because of course, Warhammer is huge in the uk. Like, people love Warhammer and it's very.

[Joe Nash]

By itself is a Brit vibes reference.

[Jordan Alban]

Yes, exactly. And that's. I tried to feed that into the angel faction. So whenever you interact with that faction or one of their labs, you put your hand into the hand scanners or whatever it is that you do. It almost has this Warhammer feel to it. That's what I was trying to. To nail on that front. So from, you know, we said it in our videos from like the smallest things like plug sockets to, you know, things like giant animated set pieces, we tried to really bring in these inspirations from British culture and. But try to almost mimic Bethesda's art style. Not perfectly, I'd say, because we're all different artists, you know, again, this links right back to the beginning of us being hobbyists. I wasn't expecting all the 3D artists work to be consistent. That was just never going to happen unless we were paying them a salary. Right. You're just not. You can't expect that level of work from hobbyists. But we absolutely tried to keep it all together in the same lane. I think it ended up working really well. What I wanted to bring back to Dansky though, was the music. So I remember when Dansky first joined and we had a proper deep conversation about where should we take the music or, you know what, what kind of music do you like? The Sound of and for me, Fallout 1. I'll let him go for it. Fallout 1 and 2's music.

[Joe Nash]

But just to briefly jump in before you start talking. Dancing, obviously, like from a cultural influence perspective, obviously Fallout music, like Fallout Bethesda's Fallout music. You know, the rockabilly, the jazz, the. I don't want to set the world on fire. Like really iconic, but very placed in the U.S. so, like, how did you go about. I guess it all comes down to the divergence point in the history of the Fallout Games, right. What's the influence for the London music?

[Daniel Morrison]

So a lot of the London radio tracks and everything where people would put forward ideas that were all inspired by old British bands and things. Obviously the Beatles, Rolling Stones, all of these kind of things. And a lot of that just kind of all worked really well. I think for a lot of it, we didn't want everything to just be just old tracks because there is a lot of issues with stuff like the licensing of not only the music itself, but the recording as a material itself that could have issues as well. So people would record a bit of what they want. And there's a little bit of 80s in there as well. And I think actually a lot of that works quite well. Ost wise, we wanted to emulate a lot of the stuff from Fallout 1, at least as the kind of starting point. We wanted to make it sound as depressing as it possibly could. Like, it should feel like a survival game ultimately, you know, which I think for starting for something like that's a really good kind of role playing game, in my opinion, you know, is you are playing as a character that you decide who they are and who they're going to develop into and what they're going to become, what choices they make and everything. And you know, for me, something that hams at home is then, you know, they're coming into this world of London. It's all broken, it's disheveled. There's something that's kind of breaking the fourth wall, that people go recognize all of these locations because they are almost one to one in some locations, but things are broken. So there should be something that should feel quite scary for them as a player. But also by extension, you know, the character themselves waking up from a vat and being in this location, they have no idea who they are, where they've come from. People, there's all these factions around making jokes about them and calling them, you know, lab rat and all the rest of it. So, you know, for a lot of it, I think it was just that and going into the kind of scariness. A lot of Fallout 4's soundtrack was quite hopeful as well and quite heroic, which Inon Zur's music is fantastic. And the music that he self releases as well was wonderful with all of it. But in order to make that kind of diversion from that kind of world, you know, there was a lot more stringed instruments, there was more harpsichord involved, lots of tubular bells to simulate, you know, like Big Ben. Lots of references to like the Protect and Survive Stinger and everything. All of these kind of little points, if overplayed, become saturated and a bit, you know, like a cultural joke. This was meant to, you know, actually make it sound like that's how that world should sound. Everything to like the combat music as well, you know, And Zur's combat music's really good and everything, but it's got lots of strong melodies. Whereas I thought, how would this place sound if people were playing with pots and pans? So I would literally sit there and play music in odd time signatures and all of this kind of stuff to try and make it seem like it's a bit off wall kind of thing.

[Joe Nash]

That's amazing. I have seen. I think it was a Reddit thread, actually, that was like, Fallout London is a horror game. So you've obviously nailed that. And I have heard the survival aspect for the first act as well is definitely. It feels more like a survival game to play than I haven't played Fallout 1 or 2, but even the Bethesda Fallout games definitely is.

[Daniel Morrison]

Absolutely. It was the thing that we agreed with a lot, Sunny and myself, because there was a lot of love for Lovecraftian horror and everything. So the Thamesfolks, based from. What are they called? The Deep One.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah, the Innsmouth. The Townsfolk of Innsmouth. That's it.

[Daniel Morrison]

Townsfolk of Innsmouth. And there's a love for that kind of scary, otherworldly kind of horror, which lends itself quite well to the wasteland kind of area of everything.

[Jordan Alban]

It's in a lot of the original Fallout. So you got the Dunwich offices and Fallout 3, for example. It's all based on Lovecraft once it's American. Yes, Lovecraft's very American, but I love that side of it and we kind of implemented it. It is definitely a big thing we focused on is I think it's something that the artists anyway, very much agreed on. And I say the artists specifically because they're the ones who really wanted to implement and push for this. Like, this game needs to be scary. It's a. It's a Fallout game. It's a post apocalypse. It's based in London. And personally, if you look at like old historic London, it's kind of spooky, right? It's Foggy City and, you know, Jack the Ripper kind of horror stories. And I think we really wanted to bring that back. A lot of us have memories of being quite terrified of playing older Fallout games. And like, I remember the first time I found a ghoul in Fallout 3. I absolutely, yeah, I ran away I closed the game. I was like 14 at the time and I heard it could do its horrible like Screech and I went, nope, close the game. That was a horror experience for me.

[Joe Nash]

So sticking with the sound stuff for a bit. This might be going into an area that won't resonate for us audiences, but I have to ask how John Berkow happened for folks who aren't aware, actually. Daniel, do you want to explain who John Burkow is?

[Daniel Morrison]

Pro just reached out, says, would you be up for this? Said yes, sent the script and then he sent it back. He pretty much sorted all of that. And then it was originally me that was going to be the voice of the House and everything, but then I got replaced by John Berco. So at least I can put that like my LinkedIn or something. I was replaced by John Berco at one point in my life.

[Joe Nash]

I mean, for us listeners, you may have seen scenes from UK House of Commons with the speaker, the person who runs the proceedings shouting, order, order. The most famous speaker who has done that particular thing they managed to get, which is awesome. Alongside some other, like Neil Newborn, obviously is huge. Very cool that he stepped up for the project. You kind of produced a lot of this under perfect storm conditions for any game development, you know, pandemic lockdowns, volunteer run, team building on top of someone else's property. But for the voice acting in particular, like with 90,000 lines of dialogue, famous actors sending stuff in. John Burkow, who does not come from the world of voice acting, how did you manage that process?

[Daniel Morrison]

It was kind of a mixture between me, Prill and Callum for a lot of it. So there was a lot of organization for everything. We planned quite far in advance for everything. There was a lot of kind of structural things that we had to put into place as well, things to do with the conditions of certain voices having potential generic lines for factions and all of this kind of stuff. I think from the kind of beginning part, we wanted it to be as optimized as possible, which is how it has. So we wanted to make sure that people weren't recording more lines than what is needed, but just the right amount that they have a good representation in the mod. And I kind of pushed that for quite a lot because, you know, they're volunteers and for them they probably do. They do a lot of the work there. I mean they carry the story and everything like that, but they're not. You know, when they record it could take like three weeks and that's kind of that. So they're kind of putting time in and joining a project with no kind of promised return or anything other than potentially a small portfolio thing. So from the beginning, like, we wanted to make sure that everybody was represented at least somewhat fully as possible. So giving people multiple roles or working out all these different sections with like, generic characters and things. So we had like, you know, vagabond, male zero one kind of thing. But they would play multiple small roles and everything because there's many characters may only have like 10 lines and then that's them. They're gone for the game. Their whole purpose in the story is to go. Go that way or something, you know. So we had made sure from the beginning of setting all of that up and then it was a case of a casting call. And then once all of that was kind of sent out, I remember that me and Prill, before that got sent out, we were going, you know, this is going to be rubbish. We're going to get like 10 applicants and they're all going to voice like 40 characters or whatever, you know, I don't know why we're thinking that, because I think sometimes we get a bit shocked because we work in an echo chamber almost, because we're just sitting here, you know, and, you know, we're not in an office, we're in our place and we're sitting on discord and everything we send out and I had everything all linked up so that it would get to like an Excel and everything, so it would all generate all the names and everything like that of those applied and everything and like the portfolio and say, oh, my God, we have like, how many was it? Was it like 800 or something?

[Jordan Alban]

It was over a thousand at one point, if I remember.

[Daniel Morrison]

I think it was. Yeah, it was.

[Jordan Alban]

It was crazy.

[Joe Nash]

What kinds of people were applying? Was it people who were trying to build up a portfolio? Was it people who were in the community and thought they'd give it a go? I mean, obviously, you know, there were, as you mentioned, famous voice actors or who have hands in the work also jumped in. But in general, at that stage in the project, how were people hearing about it and why were they applying, if that makes sense.

[Daniel Morrison]

The MOD got quite a lot of traction and everything with everything to do with advertisements. I mean, it was. I mean, I work in a university and there's sometimes students like, mentioning to me, how's Fallout London going? How do you know? I work on that kind of thing, you know, word seems to travel quite far, quite oddly and everything. But when all of them came in it was from all sorts of backgrounds. People had done modding before. I would say that probably made like a good 10 to 15% of the people, which is a big amount. You know, they've done stuff with mods before, and that was part of the portfolio. And then there was a bunch of people who were famous, either through YouTube or part of that influencer sphere, or actual established voice actors as well. And it was ranging all over the place. And I think it was just a. A kind of testament to just how much passion we put into it and, you know, tried to show that visibly with stuff and, you know, people like Neil Newborn and everything coming on board and chatting with him, actually not met him in person. The whole team's met him in person, apart from me, because I had to go somewhere else and do something else for the team. So I was, like, tasked with something that even though I've. He really wanted to be. Yeah, I love him. He's. He's fantastic. But I'm sure he would understand. But no, he's been completely brilliant. He took everything on board and, you know, we had discussions about what the character should be like, and he was, you know, completely fine with everything. He was just so professional about it. I think that was something we kind of baked into it from the beginning as well, because it was me that went through each and every. What would you call it, their portfolio and everything and their takes and everything. And I deliberately made sure that I just downloaded all of that, had it all numbered, just went through all of them, didn't look at the name, didn't know who was who or anything like that, didn't want to be influenced, try and keep it as an even playing field for everybody. And I'm quite passionate about, you know, making sure people are represented fairly and, you know, being treated fairly and everything. So I at no point made it clear to everybody that even if somebody's famous or an amateur or a professional or semi professional, I spoke to everybody the exact same way. You know, they would all get the same details, the same sheets, the same potential Zoom Call or Microsoft Teams chatting about the characters or whatever. And I think that was quite important for me, that everybody got exact same experience.

[Jordan Alban]

You know, that's where I remember you going through them applications and portfolios for months.

[Daniel Morrison]

Oh, it wasn't months. Maybe it took like a thousand.

[Joe Nash]

Sounds like it could be months.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah, it was two weeks.

[Daniel Morrison]

I mean, I went through it. So I would listen to them all from the start to the finish. And to be quite cutting, there are some ones due to microphone quality or just in terms of range of voice. So they were asked to provide multiple different character approaches to stuff, how they would interpret for things. So you can kind of detect what their kind of range for that would be. So then you go through it from start to finish and that would get you a yes and no. And then the next stage, I would listen from the start to end again of that next stage and then start saying, you know, who's a yes, who's a maybe, who's a no? And then the stage after that, again it was between the yes and maybes and then fine tuning that and then sending out emails to folks in. Because it did take me a wee while and everything. Because I wanted to get it done super soon and say, sorry, there's a delay and everything. You are shortlisted. Which I just wanted to say for people, but, you know, some people didn't get it and some people did get it. But, you know, there was a lot of people to manage when people got in because we had like, what, how many was it? It was like 80, 90 people. Eventually at the end of it, it.

[Jordan Alban]

Was about 100 to start with. Yeah, it was in that round.

[Daniel Morrison]

Yeah.

[Jordan Alban]

Sorry, I was just laughing there because I remembered a whole Neil Newborn story. Probably didn't know who he was and he received this email from him.

[Daniel Morrison]

Oh, yeah, like months and months I've.

[Joe Nash]

Seen Neil talk about this. Also, we should just mention, for folks who don't know, Neil Newborn plays Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3, amongst other roles. That's what most people know him for. Casual Oscar winning actor in your game lineup. But sorry, go on, go on, Jon.

[Jordan Alban]

Yes, it was really funny. So of course you have to imagine the guy's getting loads of emails anyway, and then he goes, who's this Neil Newborn guy? And me and Wolfie, the lead level designer, we've been sitting there playing Baldur's Gate and we went, wait, what? This was just around the time of him getting all of them rewards for Baldur's Gate. Or I think it was just before he's like, who is this guy? And we're just like, you didn't leave him on red, did you? And yeah, he had left Neil Newbon on red. And we were sitting there like, oh, my God, what have you done? You need to get him on.

[Joe Nash]

Yeah, also I realized just I said Oscar meant bafta, but yes. Yeah. One of the most beloved characters of Baldur's Gate 3. Yeah. Plays a fantastic part in your game as well. It's very Very great part. I mean, even when you say it's a lot of people to manage, like you said 90,000 lines of dialogue. That's a lot of dialogue. It doesn't sound like a lot of people for that much dialogue. I guess there's a lot of lines for each person.

[Daniel Morrison]

Yeah, we had about 10 dialogue editors or so working on it. And it was a lot of work back. I mean, this was, I mean, for like the voice acting kind of side of it, because that was because I had a day job and this. That was pretty much me for a full year just doing VA related stuff completely. And I couldn't like work on my music or anything else. So, like collaborate with artists. This was me going to work nine to five, coming home and then from like five until midnight or one in the morning doing spreadsheets, organizing things, phoning voice actors, giving them direction, you know, or editing the dialogue, which might be just. It just depends on how long the lines are. But you're sitting there editing them and you're having to go through and check take to take and everything and exporting them all. I got really good at it, but I don't know if that's like something I'm super proud of.

[Joe Nash]

I guess that brings me on to something alluded to earlier, which is, you know, so volunteer project members of the team are fairly early in careers. You know, you mentioned you have day jobs at the time. Has it paid off in terms of your career and prospects? You mentioned not being super proud of the work you got good at. Is that something you want to continue doing, Daniel? Or is that a side skill that you'll never touch again?

[Daniel Morrison]

I mean, we're going to be, you know, we're developing a company out of this, so we're going to be building our games studio out of this. And, you know, we want to keep doing this. I think it's a shame that you don't have all of us here in the podcast because we're quite all together. We're quite strong personalities. But, you know, I'm quite a shy person overall. But I like, love all of these guys a lot. So, you know, I wouldn't want to work with anybody else. I'll still be doing other stuff with teaching. I teach like game audio and stuff like that now for them. But, you know, a lot of the focus is working on this. We want to build something, potentially create opportunities for folk, create really good games. You know, we have people that we can bring on in the future. We have ideas that we've worked on we can translate this into something that could be scalable in the future. So definitely not lost. I would say the people that have learned the most were the people who stayed up to the project in like the last eight months of development. Creating all of those things is not easy. Obviously creating any type of graft kind of stuff. The most fun I had was composing music for me personally. But all the way up to release, for getting all the audio to work correctly, things not working, dialogue lines mismatched, making sure quests work correctly for Sunny, making sure that 3D models are all properly optimized. Everything had to be fine tuned the most. And I would say from that last eight months, you know, the team, a lot of the team really were really passionate about everything as well as the heads of department. And that was the point where we were exhausted. But at least we were still almost whimpering to each other. Says when this is done, we're gonna make something out of this. Cause it's really difficult to actually complete a project of this scale. It's easy to make it, but it's difficult to complete it. I would say.

[Joe Nash]

Yeah, it really shows the potential of the team to have gone through that. Yeah. How about you? Well, I mean, I guess you're involved in this new company effort as well. Jordan.

[Daniel Morrison]

Oh no, no, he's actually. No, I'm joking. So actually I'm not doing that actually.

[Jordan Alban]

It was definitely an ordeal. So some of us were. Yeah, I probably gave up. I certainly gave up. I'll talk some about the sacrifices really because it was six years for me, but one year out of that. So about five or four and a half years of just working and then working. So I sacrificed my health. I ended up actually sacrificing career over it. Just time management was just. It reached a point of impossibility. Yeah. And I think a few sacrifices or a lot of sacrifices were made for people. And after five years we really want to put that into something good for us all and move forward because yeah, there's limitations behind what we're, what we're doing. So of course it's all owned by Bethesda at the end of the Zenimax, at the end of the day, which is a bit sad on our front, but I think we really want to move forward with that. It's not just that the fact that they may own the assets or the engine and the game itself, the fact that we can't monetize it essentially, that would really open up avenues for us to move into a new games company. But we've done, we've had crowdfunding, etc. The YouTube, which has helped us really forefront that. But even just like on a technological level, I think a lot of us are very done with the creation kit.

[Daniel Morrison]

Oh, I can second easily.

[Jordan Alban]

Good point. Just I wanted to raise the survey. Talking about dialogue, at one point we had so much dialog, I thought it was the end of the project.

[Daniel Morrison]

Oh my God. I remember that. Yeah. We were almost crying because we were running out of what, like the form ID limit or something.

[Joe Nash]

You were just running out of IDs in the engine. Amazing.

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah.

[Daniel Morrison]

Something like that.

[Jordan Alban]

The 64 bit like integer limit, which the engine hits a certain point, we're already way past what the engine itself can load. We have to use a master. That's right.

[Daniel Morrison]

Because we have to actually strip Fallout 4 for actually load our thing because we.

[Jordan Alban]

The engine can only load two master files and then it has a reference limit of 2 million. I can't remember the exact amount. It's a big number. We had to go into Fallout 4, delete all of its world spaces, delete all of its levels, delete literally everything so that you could load it as a master, but actually load Fallout London at all. And if you want to mod Fallout London, you have to do that now. But there was also a side of it where we had so much dialogue coming in, the game wouldn't load. So there was about three months of development where we would launch the game to test something and it would take about five minutes to launch.

[Daniel Morrison]

I mean, that was a good month for me. I mean, that was when I delivered like 12,000 lines or something. Or sorry, like a good week.

[Joe Nash]

Single handedly ruined the game.

[Daniel Morrison]

Yeah. And everybody pulled the game and everything and started loading up and says, why is my game taking like 20 minutes to load?

[Jordan Alban]

It would just black screen you. It would just go to a black screen.

[Daniel Morrison]

At one point I couldn't even run it. I gave up. I was actually scared to tell you. Either you were going ridicule me because I broke my computer or I'd done something stupid with the creation kit.

[Jordan Alban]

So when it reached this point, we had so many. Essentially it's just the loose files that the game can only load a certain amount of loose files. And that of course, the. Maybe something specifically to do with the sound or audio, the dialogue files themselves that stop it from loading properly. But we reached a point of like, it's over. Like, this is it. We've reached the limit of what we can do. We're just going to have to Release a half finished thing. But no, there was a fix. Fortunately, it was just archiving it all. We were like, eureka. Moment of. It's not broken. We can continue. Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Nash]

So you're done with the creation kit, I guess. How far along with the new effort are you? Do you know what technology you want to be working on? Is there a preference in the team?

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah. So I think Dansky and Callum, the lead writer, who probably prefer Unity, I feel like they both have more experience of Unity from what they've said. Am I wrong?

[Daniel Morrison]

Yeah, definitely prefer Unity.

[Jordan Alban]

Yes. Whereas I myself, Wolfie, the lead level designer, Priller, we've all used Unreal Engine. So I've used Unreal Engine Back to like 4.00, back when it first came out. So I kind of really pushed that because we have a lot of experience. But there's good, you know, there's good things and bad things about both.

[Joe Nash]

Was it part of the trailer was made in Unreal? Something was made in Unreal, right?

[Jordan Alban]

Yeah, I made the logo in Unreal, so the Fallout London logo, I did all that in Unreal. How did you hear about that? Wait, what?

[Joe Nash]

Couldn't tell you. I read a lot before these shows.

[Daniel Morrison]

I don't think that's ever been said.

[Jordan Alban]

About how that has been made. That's a bit nuts.

[Joe Nash]

If a guest has said anything on the Internet, I can guarantee I'll have read it.

[Jordan Alban]

Okay, well, maybe I did say it in like a previous interview or something. I have no idea. Just the logo. Everything else I recorded in game, Xbox Controller, moving the camera. So Unreal Engine definitely moving forward.

[Daniel Morrison]

I think, thankfully, in terms of how far we are on with everything, I mean, the most important thing about setting up something new, that's a totally different kettle of fish. You're no longer working yourself or modeling off something else. This has to be something that's built up from scratch, that actually is fully functioning, you know, and has a good grounds to then build up from it. So, you know, like, we have meetings very regularly. We're currently, you know, have ideas for games, but it's very much. This is all conversational. This is where, you know, it actually turns more about business in the sense that everything that gets discussed in terms of actually creating or facilitating the creation of something, that's something that should be taken seriously because it actually has risk involved. And that shouldn't be something that's taken lightly. Of course we'll chat and have ideas and everything like that, but that's like at a stage where we will bring everything forward and we'll start to actually think about what the best outcome is for us personally, as well as actually creating a business as a whole. And I think that's something that we would be good at actually kind of managing altogether. We're not going to be jumping into it saying we've made a mod, mod was successful, let's quickly make a game that absolutely needs to be done. Right. Because that's easily like the textbook thing of something that can easily fall apart, you know. And I think we strongly understand that as we've been really strict about having formal conversations from the beginning and saying let's make this properly. And that takes time to do that, you know, without even thinking about anything game related. But we've all got our tasks and everything that we're doing. We come together, we chat about how stuff's going, but might be sooner than you expect.

[Joe Nash]

Yeah, I mean, I guess that's one good aspect about the mod taking six years. And I guess even to an extent the volunteer aspect of it is that you've had the, you know, in terms of the business reality and the real time investment and how much, you know, how much risk you're putting on the line by saying, okay, we're making a game that's that could be five, six years of investment just in time, let alone the cost of that. You've had that experience and you know what that means, right? I guess that must be a useful place to start versus I guess it's a less naive place to start this kind of endeavor from. Right. Like, you know, everyone has a picture of what that means.

[Daniel Morrison]

Very interesting thing that's quite curious about all of that because we're all going to be, you know, working remotely for a fair bit of time, so need to find our ways of being able to collaborate in a really kind of exciting environment. And I think I don't know much about really that or anything they particularly express. I just think that that's an interesting point to think about. How they have innovative space to be able to design and foster creativity in an online remote environment, I think is quite challenging. And I think we're quite aware of that as well.

[Joe Nash]

It's also interesting to hear that you still consider it challenging. You know, after producing all of the assets and the art and the 90,000 lines of dialogue in a completely remote environment, that that's still daunting to you, is it? Because it's completely like completely fresh, you need the whiteboard space as it is.

[Daniel Morrison]

Or it's a space to know that we're Communicating. And we're very clear because, I mean, social interaction is quite an important thing, especially, you know, for establishing that you understand what somebody's saying as well as, like, you know, anything else that comes with that, the trust factor and then what other meanings might be held with us. Something that, you know, you just get from something in person. And it's just important to be aware of everything like that. Of course, when it comes to making things, that will all be fun and we'll be sitting on discord and everything. But, you know, starting something from scratch again has to be done correctly, especially if it's purely remotely. I don't know if Sunny has any thoughts on that.

[Jordan Alban]

No. And yes, I think you're right. Probably. It's probably a bit daunting at the minute, so don't know how much I can really say, but I feel like. I feel like we should just say, I think we want to make some kind of small project to cover something not on the same scale because we really need to learn how to use the new tools. I personally, I think two others agree. Two others disagree. I don't know how much they disagree.

[Daniel Morrison]

Or agree, but I'm fine with unreal. I'm totally fine. I just know how to use Unity.

[Jordan Alban]

It's more the scope. More the scope of the next thing. I think a big fear that I personally have. And I'll voice it, I would be quite vocal about it anyway, that we don't want to just finish Fallout London and go, yeah, we're going to make Fallout London 2. Because that's just not in the realms of possibility yet. From a financial point, from a skill set point as well. That's just not happening. So I think we'd really like to make something of a small scope or even just throw away game jams. Spend two weeks, just make something. Oh, it was crap. But at least we learned everything we could from it. Throw it away. Next game jam, maybe. There's various ways we could approach that.

[Daniel Morrison]

Yeah, Smaller games definitely allow you to test things. And then it's like an iterative process with making more games and everything. So we'll be able to expand from that, learn from that. If you do something that's just one large game, you're always internally learning and stripping things away or resetting the project like Fallout London did. And everything, of course, is part of the learning and making of something, but not really possible now, I don't think.

[Jordan Alban]

And probably not exactly literally, we can't afford it. We could spend, you know, a certain amount of money Developing something and then have to reset it after a year, that would be tragic. Whereas, you know, I think it's really important as well for people starting up companies or even just companies in general. You see this everywhere. They'll be running multiple projects at once in the event that one falls through or maybe they're all successful. I think that's really important for us to do as well.

[Joe Nash]

Yeah, strange scaffolder big for doing this at the moment. He's relatively well known indie now, but he's always running a ludicrous amount of projects with his indie. And that's exactly why I think that makes a lot of sense and I think that citing smaller scale, it makes a lot of sense. So I guess last question before I let you both go, because I know we've gone over time a bit in terms of the new studio and releasing new games. Do you feel like you've got an audience ready to follow you now from Fallout London? Or is that the Fallout 4 Modding Communities audience like to what extent is that people who are just into Fallout and you're part of that community, that's why they're there. And to what extent is that audience like come for you as developers?

[Jordan Alban]

Now, I think I won't say with certainty because I wouldn't be able to give you an exact answer on it, but I definitely say a good chunk of people on our Discord, especially even, even from the bug reports we've had people who are completely unaware of things that happen in Fallout 4. It's quite obvious a few people hadn't actually played a Fallout game before. We had a lot of people saying they're buying PCs to play Fallout London. A lot of people buying Fallout 4 for the first time. The GOG numbers told us that as well. There was people who didn't even own the game or, you know, they maybe they played it on Xbox or PlayStation years and then they wanted to to play full out London. So I think the answer to that would be there is a good chunk. I think right now we've got somewhere in the realm of 87,000 people on our Discord, which yeah, a good chunk's going to be from the Fallout 4 modding community. But I would say quite confidently a good chunk of that is people who probably want to see us move on. I think from any kind of donations we've got. Most people have been saying stuff like we really want to see what you do in the future. Even from comments on our YouTube or comments or reviews on Google GOG, wherever it is. People are saying, I want to see where they go, because clearly they're capable of creating something that we want, being what we released. I think we would be okay. I hope we'd be okay.

[Daniel Morrison]

I think we should definitely be okay. I think things are going to change and everything, but this is like the crossover between, you know, what is Fallout London and what is Team Fallon, because they're completely separate. And that kind of transition, at least on the public facing front, is really important as well. To then say, you know, we are going to be making something at least with the same, you know, we don't want people to be thinking the newer games are Fallout London. They're absolutely not. The style and everything in terms of writing style, you know, from Callum, the way of developing assets to 2D texturing with stuff, all with that kind of stylistic kind of choices as things that, you know, yes, was influenced by Fallout, but, you know, everything that went into that was a lot of experimentation and developing a voice and playing about with how stories and characters develop and everything, even, like, the music as well, eventually went astray. Those are all things that we'll be carrying to future projects, and we're just hoping that people follow us, see that aspect of it, rather than it's a remodeled Fallout game, because it has more than that, at least for us.

[Joe Nash]

Perfect. That seems a good place as any to wrap this up. Daniel Jordan, thank you so much for your time today. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, thanks for joining us on the show.

[Jordan Alban]

All right, thank you.