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Sure, but if you're going to do Fallout, you have to go back to the originals for your baseline before you try to put a new twist on it. "Feral ghouls" aside, Fallout is not really a zombie apocalypse game. It really comes down to being about those old standbys, war and greed. (Never changes . ...

Well, The Road is very much a human drama story, and it leaves the protagonists to a partially uncertain fate. It's not really covering any sort of new ground -- it just does so in such a bleak fashion that I suppose it's like The Day After in that it just doesn't pull any punches or give you...

There's a lot to see and read, really, from A Boy and His Dog to The Road (crushingly depressing, really) and even crazy things like Cherry 2000. The post-apocalyptic genre seems to be experiencing some kind of resurgence. Its roots were pretty clear in the '80s -- we were reeling from the Cold...

Given the state of brahmin, one must wonder about the state of horses . . .

Payment schedule aside, Fallen Earth development was headed up by my buddy Lee Hammock, who infused it with his love of zombies, rockets, and monkeys. You, dear reader -- whoever and wherever you are -- should definitely check it out.

Games as a medium have the ability to respond to interaction from the player. Books and movies are not very participatory. This is part of the reason that a lot of adventure and RPG games are pretty short; often the game includes content for a multitude of variant dialogs and perhaps even story...

During Fallout 1 dev we had some instances in which a particular design document was incomplete and we worked out a skeleton of an area, then went back and filled it in later. Often this is a good way to lay down a foundation, but having a design doc in advance is always a good idea because you...

When modders have limited time, the solution isn't to skip the process of making a design document. The solution is to pick a smaller, less-ambitious starting point. Design documents are a way to pre-think your material so that you don't run into problems later. As a cogent example, during...

As with any other aspect of development, pre-planning is an important part of the process. Writing dialogs should go through an editing process; set up your character dialogs in advance with a design document. This will allow you to write your nodes and make sure that you cover all of your bases...

Since the violence setting is controlled in engine, it MIGHT be possible to determine if an enemy suffers a massive damage kill even if the animation is constrained, but I'm honestly not sure.

This is a really good idea to make Repair and Science skills more useful, and it fits with the crafting skill systems that tend to show up in RPGs nowadays. Hell, if you wanted to go all-out you could have a few kinds of custom armor that can only be made by salvaging components and having the...

Oh yeah, one other thing. Based on what I recall, the script_overrides() command exists to cause a script to prevent an object from doing what it normally does when you use it in some fashion. For instance, you could (theoretically - I haven't tried this) put a script_overrides() command on a...

Sorry I wasn't super clear - it's been 12 years since I did scripting on Fo1, after all! Here's the skinny. Probably the closest script to what you want to do in the actual Fo1 build is the people in Vault 13 lining up to pick up their water rations. Everyone queues up at a specific hex, and...

Amusingly, I tried to implement some scheduled sleeping in Fo1, but it was low priority. For the beds, here's my recommendation. Have a list of available beds. Pass a pointer to the top of the list into a global variable. (You can do this on map entry, for instance.) When a critter looks for...

Meaning no offense, but if it is in fact actually a wasteland of nothing but lifeless craters, then there is nothing with which to conduct dialog, plot, or roleplaying, unless you want to do an abstract existential experience with the character talking to him/herself and to various...

As we get older the world gets stranger.

There should be a big-headed dead "Gray" in the Glow, behind one of the broken glass specimen cylinders. Then again, I haven't looked in a while.

Even the QA testers were important to the game. Remember the multi-tool, which you can use as a bonus to Repair on certain items (just, not all of them, because of inconsistent scripting)? Came from a suggestion from a QA guy.

Late in development of Fo1 we moved the formula more toward "three solutions of different types" without necessarily always leaning on fight, talk, or sneak - some puzzles would be approached with Repair, Science, or even Gambling. The core idea was always that you had several ways to handle any...

A small mod is now in progress - designed primarily to familiarize myself and some associates with the GECK. If it comes out well we'll move on to something more ambitious. I'll post it to NMA and the usual suspects when it's done. It is not presumed to be "canonical" but it is small enough...