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Q) For those who don't know, could you please tell us who are and your relation to the mod Half-Life Substance?
A) I am the founder and current manager of the Half-Life² Substance mod, I direct our team's efforts on its development while taking care of the modified Gordon Tales campaign in particular.
Q) Have you worked on, or are you currently working on any other mod projects?
A) A long time ago I did maps for Doom, Duke 3D and Quake. My Duke 3D maps played like Quake's, while oddly enough my Quake ones would play like Syndicate's. The Doom ones were all large islands where you had to sneak in by boat, to explore these ancient ruins that always hid a secret base: retroactively, I guess they played like Far Cry's. Afterwards, all I did was to do occasionally my own minimod for certain games whose money investment left me wanting more, like Blood 2. And out of this deranged habit came Substance. Originally it was just a little experiment without a separate identity from HL2, but later it eventually acquired a personality of its own. Talking about collaborations, the Substance team is all a mix-up of projects that progressively got together in time: our heroic main coder Jerry comes from SP Enhanced, Mike did the Squid mod, Smanu85 works in Day Hard and these are just a few of them. Right now we are collaborating with the port to source of a Max Payne 2 mod and consulting with the makers of an italian Resident Evil 3 conversion to HL2.
Q) Half-Life and the Metal Gear Solid series is an interesting combination, one is an all out shooter, the other a more methodical stealth game, what inspired you to fuse the two?
A) It happened out of love for the MGS series, even if in the beginning the mod wasn't really MGS related. Its name was chosen because I knew that the mod shared the same formula ("same levels, new action") as the Snake Tales in MGS2:S, nothing more. But it proved too evocative and after 6 months of this subliminal influence, everybody in the team was so convinced about the doability of this combination that in a holy furor we gave doctor Kleiner a background of secret MGS fanaticism and had him program Gordon's suit to incarnate those ideas.
Q) On the topic of Metal Gear Solid, which one was your favorite?
A) My preference goes to the first Metal Gear Solid: like in a theatrical play, the game had one plot, one place and one time. It's something that gives personality to a product by holding together its different parts to turn them into a single idea, which is much easier to figure and remember. It happeded with the first Half-Life as well, whose mods endlessly repeated the adventures of Gordon Freeman in the Black Mesa complex up to a point that it became almost unthinkable that on a day he would have finally resurfaced elsewhere.
Q) How smooth was the creation of the mod, did you ever run into any bumps that made you consider giving up?
A) As the Prince of Persia would say: "most people think that a mod's development flows swift and sure in one direction, but I have seen it and I can tell you, it's more like an ocean in a storm". We had to copy to all kinds of threats to survive, even to some reminiscent of HL2's own development history: from thefts of code to capital defections in the team, from resistant bugs plaguing the betatests forever to technical difficulties seemingly impossible to overcome, from players who persistently bashed our work no matter what we did to the massive fade of public when the mod went on hyatus for months. In a particular moment, Jerry alone remained fighting the sands of time all by himself: this deserves high praise, for we would have gone nowhere without him. It's all about not giving up despite odds turning against you, or as the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy would say: miss the ground once you are thrown at it.
Q) Anyone who plays the mod can see it is jam-packed with new features, which few are you most proud of?
A) Gaming wise I am very happy with the new Critical Hits feature imported from Shogo, the anime themed fps that came out together with the first Half-Life and Sin. I find it a smart way to get rid of illogical medikits scattered through the levels, all you have to do in order to replenish life is to get an headshot or a melee frag, so that the game reward you without you getting distracted from the main game. Shogo was even harder than Substance and this system was barely enough to keep you alive, now we just use it as a prize for skilled maneuvres by players. Instead from a technical point of view, I am most proud of the unreported infrastructure that makes the Gordon Tales campaign work as a whole despite not being made of actual maps: the system can still be improved, i.e. by allowing backtracking which right now is still a taboo, but allowing health and ammo stats to be ported from one level to the next was already a big improvement.
Q) Which character in the game is your favorite, and which gun do you find yourself using the most?
A) My favorite character is Solid Snake, because it is challenging to play stealth in a game that was not built with this approach in mind. Half-Life 2 has no alternate routes to avoid enemy contact and you cannot exploit gimmicks like the darkness of Splinter Cell to conceal your presence in open areas. But now you can activate Snake's invisibility module, locate the nearest enemy's blind spot (like a corner or a big object), take a deep breath and go hide in there until the aux power replenishes: of course getting caught would deplete the aux gauge and the surprise effect will turn against you. Taking on a single combine like this is just overkill, but mastering how to trick a whole platoon of them serves as one of the hardest challenge in the mod: you have to exploit your surroundings well. The gun I use more often in a Snake Run (playing the whole game as Snake) is the burst shot of the silenced pistol: it is very damaging and you don't need to tap those buttons super-fast, which I appreciate.
Q) Do you have any features you would love to add, but don't have the resources/time to do so?
A) Other than fixing all the bugs still at loose once and for all, there are some tasks still open from the final stages of 1.2 development which we could use some assistance with. There was the "GTA Strider System", which allowed you to disable a strider with normal bullets instead of rockets to later hijack it: but it proved too glitchy to work in the normal HL2 levels, despite help by the Strider Mod creator himself. Also Snake had other acrobatics, like the split jump and the "Rhyno Mario System" that let you stop foes or dash-kill them. But maybe this was better left out! The impossible-to-achieve dream is another, though: managing to port the mod on the X-Box version of HL2, that would definitely be like entering a new world.
Q) Will there ever be a multiplayer mode?
A) Multiplayer is certainly the feature which players request more often. It has been tried in the past, both for deathmatch and coop mode, even in splitscreen on the same computer. But it was clear soon enough that in order to implement this, the mod should have built all over again from scratch. Having only a handful people in our team, the single player version should have been discontinued and the most immediate consequence of this would have been that now there would be no 1.2 version to talk about. Was I to gain access to unlimited resources, I would probably make a multiplayer game where characters from different games as Tribes and MGS would match each other in a sort of Mugen of fps games. If only mod makers were more available to band together to mix their works' specific achievements, this would have been achieved already.
Q) What is in store for the future of Substance, can we expect any new versions?
A) Actually this 1.2 version was meant to be the final one: I added "Gold" in the title of the release because, in alchemy, gold is the perfect substance. However the 1.0X version was meant to be as well ("X" as my final signature), not to mention that the 0.84 version was too ("84" as in George Orwell's 1984): so it's just all a matter of finding another name like these and move on. On the shor tperiod I think we could implement more VR Training maps, Dead man walking maps (like in Max Payne), a "classic Gordon" HEV Form where you can do just about everything all the forms can altogether (for those players who find the class system too complicated) and a buy system to give players the chance to build their own HEV Form.
Q) Will there will be a Substance for the upcoming Half-Life 2 expansion?
A) Obviously details have yet to be decided, as long as Episode 1 remains unreleased, but at this point chances of this happening are good. But who knows, maybe the expansion will be so good that there won't be any calls to make it any more action filled and various.
Q) Finally, are there any other things you would like fans of your mod to know?
A) I myself would like to thank them all for their continued support and the team as a whole wishes them a good time with our work. Things like this often start out just for fun, but later they become time and energy demanding and end up abandoned shortly after: it's like having a crocodile pet. Instead, if you have a warm supporting public like the one we had, you actually enjoy your work because it feels like a big game with a lot of other people. And you put some substance in it.