Goldeneye Source Team Interview.

With the two articles I wrote about the Goldeneye Source Mod and the unreleased XBLA remake, it's no big secret that I am a massive fan of Goldeneye. In my opinion, three times is the charm, so I reached out to the Goldeneye Source team to learn about the people behind the mod. Since I wrote about the mod in a previous article, I will cut to the chase. I reached out to the team via their Facebook page. They are very active and I highly recommend checking them out to keep up to date on upcoming features. The team answered the basic questions I sent to them, while Mangley filled out the more personnel questions.

Who are you? What is your role on the team? How did you get into modding? What other mods or projects have you been involved with?

Hi I’m Mangley. I do various things on the mod including concept art, weapon animations, textures and sound effects. I got into modding around 2003, just making maps in the Quake engine, but never really seriously got involved with any notable projects until 2010, when I joined the team as a tester after being involved with the community for a couple of years. I couldn’t help but chip in with my mapping experience, and ended up joining as a full developer in 2011.

How many people are working this project? Have you been openly recruiting or is it a closed group of developers?

At the present we have around 10 core developers, plus additional 10 or so who contribute in various ways. We’re a fairly tight knit group that works closely together, but we welcome fresh talent to apply to join us. We’re always looking for people who can help take things to the next level.

From what I understand this project has been going on for 10 years. How has the project changed in that time period? Why has it taken 10 years?

When the project first started out it was a fairly standard Half-Life 2 mod, and wasn’t greatly ambitious. Over the years the project has changed hands and grown a lot, and in the process through a few big overhauls. In that amount of time, things start to show their age, especially when the skills of people on the team had improved a great deal, so there’s always the desire to improve what we have as much as possible, and by often that means remaking things completely.

The shooting in the game feels familiar yet modernized. Goldeneye was developed around the N64 controller how did you find the best solution to adapt this to mouse and keyboard?

From the beginning the game was designed to be played using mouse and keyboard and we never wanted to deviate from the controls that PC gamers expect. We try to recapture the feeling of the original through other means like animations, the sway of the weapons as you run, the way the camera dips when landing from a height. By separating the control scheme and kinaesthetics and treating them, we can keep the game feeling intuitive and fluid for the platform it’s on whilst still recapturing some feeling of the original game.

I noticed while playing you modified certain mechanics for the better (Slappers do more damage, Knives aren't useless). What other features did you guys modify for balance? Are there any plans on modifying any more weapons? Not to sound like a stickler I found the Sniper Rifle to be pretty ineffective in multiplayer (kind of like the original game).

Our explosive weapons saw a lot of tweaks, each explosive actually now has a damage radius adjustment based on their effectiveness. Timed Mines have the largest radius as they’re more difficult to get kills with, and the Grenade Launcher has the smallest. Being able to sneak past proximity mines was definitely a big change too.

We definitely wanted to retain the power hierarchy of the weapons that was true to the original game so the Sniper doesn’t deviate from being a scoped PP7. It’s possible we could buff it by giving it bonus damage on chest hits, which is something we’ve done with other guns like the DD44 to make them more effective without changing how much damage they can deal.

With the success of the multiplayer, are you going to tackle the single player?

As much as we’ve always wanted to do it, it would be an incredibly difficult undertaking to reproduce keeping within our current quality standards, and with as small a team as we have working in our spare time. Since its inception, the focus of GoldenEye: Source has always been on recreating the multiplayer experience, so we don’t have any plans to create a singleplayer campaign.

What future content can we expect for the multiplayer? Are we going to see more characters or even some cosmetic rewards down the road?

We definitely want to keep adding content to the game and giving people incentives and rewards for playing. Right now, we don’t actually have any character artists on the team, so we can’t make promises on that front, but we will definitely do more maps and weapon skins, and make improvements wherever we can.