KaoH, lead coder dude of UnrealSpeed, shares his thoughts on the Mod Contest and the future of his mod.

What do you like or dislike about the contest?
I like the support that Epic and Nvidia are showing to mod teams like ours, this contest is the ultimate recognition for the community in my opinion. Offcourse the prices are in my 'like' lsit also ;) Dislikes? well really only that I still dont know if we won the first phase or not :D

Did you expect to see such quality mods in phase 1?
Less I must admit, I knew many cool mods where being made, but I expected more of them to wait till the second or even the third phase.

What other mod did you personally like?
Marble Mania together with Deathball, those are the favorites in my book. Although AirBucaneers is suprising also.

Do you think that the phase 1 mods represent the quality of the other mods to come? Will they get better?
I think this phase is more like a very early demo, so yeah most mods will greatly increase in quality in next few motnhs.

How do you feel about your contest-version of the mod?
Its not done, basicly, we have so much more planned, and so many enhancements we are building, but thats what the next 2 phases are for I guess. All I can say is that our next version is a great leap forward, so I wish that version was in this first phase.

Where is the mod heading? What can we expect from it?
We wanna do so much more, in the end our vision is to have a full car mod, where the player is able to do anything with his car he ever wished he could, ever type of car abbuse is planned into our mod. More of everything goes without saying. A main focus of the upcoming versions is car handling, bot support and community support, we focus strongly on supporting community maps, cars and car skins.

What is your favorite feature for your mod?
My fav feature? Thats a hard one, as programmer I tend to look at code features, so on that level I must say that our car feature enhancements (the lights, horn gears etc etc) is one of my favorites. On gameplay its one of our new feature in the upcoming version, but I cant tell you what it is yet ;).

What will you do if you win the contest? Will the mod go retail?
If we win, No this mod will not go retail, a race game on the current engine is not going to be a challenge to the current specialised racing games out there. Although we will see what we can do with the engine when we get access to it, but it might not. But if we win, we will see if the team is up to going to develop a commercial game with that license, I dont think it will be Uspeed though. But we havent really discussed it yet, lets win this thing first ;)

Are you planning on entering the latter phases? If so, what changes will you make for the next phase?
Well, our development is not completed by far, so we will continue working in our own schedule and at our own speed, Hoping to have good improoved version ready in time for phase deadlines, as many of you know we have been releasing new version since the start, we release to get feedback, thousends of people trying it out gives us so much feedback about why they think it sucks or what they love. So we just continue doing this, our feature list is still growiing every day. So I hope to have features like visible drivers, enhanced bot support, better car skins, more more more, improoved car handling settings etc.

Any other comments?
No not really ;)

Thanks You Kaoh! Be sure to check back often for more mod interviews!