Crankshaft Games
Eternal Silence
An award-winning total-conversion mod where, as a teenager, I led a volunteer team and hacked past an engine's hard limits to ship seamless space combat.
Eternal Silence is where a lot of it started. I was fifteen, and I wanted to build an ambitious hybrid of first-person combat and space dogfighting. I founded the project, recruited a volunteer team, learned to make 3D art, and led the build on Valve's Half-Life 2 engine after outgrowing my first attempt on Battlefield 1942.
This was my first real lesson in leading people toward a shared vision, and closing the gap between a cool idea and a thing people can actually play.
Early leadership
Eternal Silence was a fully-remote project before the tools for remote work really existed. Keeping the team aligned and on task required real leadership. I created a website, wrote design documentation, hosted forums with a private section for team members to comment on artwork and designs that were coming through. I developed the rituals and directed the project - including people much more experienced than I was. This project gave me a taste for game development and leadership. Between all these tasks, I programmed and solved hard technical problems, all while going through school.
Breaking the size barrier
Eternal Silence pushed the limits of the Source Engine that powered Half-Life 2. The engine stored world coordinates as fixed-point values, which capped the playable world at roughly 800 meters across. That was far too small for space combat. So I built a miniature, 40-to-1 scale arena elsewhere on the map and hacked the renderer to draw it at a massive apparent scale, with a teleporter that seamlessly swapped a player's full-size ship for its tiny counterpart out in the asteroid field. It all ran in online multiplayer, and this got us noticed.
We were invited to Valve in Seattle to show them the mod. Taking the ship out of the hangar into the asteroid field earned an audible gasp in the room.
What it became
- Best Multiplayer Mod at the Independent Games Festival, demoed on the show floor at GDC
- Released 1.0 beta in 2006, with other 100,000 downloads in its first weeks.
- Released on Steam in 2009
- Passed on the project to an active community in 2010.