The winners of the first phase of the Make Something Unreal Contest were announced some time ago. BeyondUnreal interviewed the winning teams about their feelings about winning the contest and their mods' futures
First Place Finisher
Deathball attempts to mix many of the popular real-world sports, such as soccer, rugby, and football, with the futuristic DeathMatch of Unreal Tournament 2003. It can be summed up as Bombing Run with more of a reality sports feel.
Can you briefly describe the atmosphere of your mod?
DeathBall is a well-balanced teamplay sports game, in which you feel like being a necessary part of your team and a part of the game (in your normal counterstrike type game or CTF or something your team can also do well without you, in Deathball a team is as good as it's worst player :) ) Well and the football feeling (which you got in the actual sport) is really coming across
What do you plan to change in your mod for the upcoming phases?
Well, we are planing to have new (free configurable) player models (Any good Modeler + Skinner interested in joining? ) We'll have a Tutorial showing all things you got to know (also little more advanced stuff like boosting, volleys etc) so you can hop into an online match without being flamed by all more experienced players :) One day we'll have a working AI (not super perfect playing bots, the mode is just too complex, but we'll have something so you can have some enjoyable matches against bots) and I have concepts for a motivating Single player league, with role play aspects, so you can improve certain skills of your players etc.( any AI coder available?) Well and things like a new hud, new menu, minor gameplay changes, no big surprises actually :)
What did you do when you found out the results?
When we heard that we won the MSUC we were asking around what it is until we remember that it's this contest where we submitted and old beta of our game several years ago :) Then we got naked and ran across the street yelling "OMFG!!!"
What are your opinions on how the contest was run and judged?
Well, not gonna complain about the result since we won ;) Overally the results seems to be fair, just the maps section makes no sense to me...the "best gameplay maps" section kinda turned into a joke, whatever. :/ And whoever is NOT critisizing the big result-delay in this question is just trying to suck up to the community :) This sure was totally miss-organized.
Second Place Finisher
Face Off was created by one man. ONE MAN! Hegi did everything: the modeling, the coding, the levels, anything you can think of; he did it for this mod. It really is mind-boggling considering the number of team members most mods have. The first release featured a few professional quality maps for the two gametypes, which are Objective and Team Deathmatch. The mod is pretty much a rehash of the terrorists v. special ops formula, but its presentation is stunning and makes the game interesting ande fun to play. Sadly, Hegi has had some personal issues that have prevented him from continuing development. Development has been indefinately postponed.
Hegi was not available for interview