The true scares of Halloween 2002 came not from monster movie marathons, haunted houses or college dorm parties but a multiplayer Half-Life FPS-RTS hybrid mod named Natural Selection, released that night by Unknown Worlds. Low-tech space marines and bestial aliens shrieked and spat out their trick-or-treated goodies in fright as inter-species war with terrifying tones of the movie Aliens raged across derelict complexes among distant stars.

A solid real-time strategy lay on top of the action, with both sides vying for control of key map points including the resource nodes which paid for structures and upgrades. While Frontiersmen served under a commander who essentially played a top-down RTS, the alien Kharaa were ruled by consensus and chose their own upgrades and classes.

The next step for Unknown Worlds will be Natural Selection 2, a commercial sequel announced in 2006. We recently caught up with studio founder and NS creator Charlie Cleveland to discuss progress since then, the path from mod to commercial release, and improving one of my personal all-time multiplayer favourites.

Shack: Who are Unknown Worlds?

Charlie Cleveland: We are a small independent game company based in downtown San Francisco. Our mission is to "unite the world through play," which may seem heady but informs many aspects of our company. We made a game called Natural Selection for Half-Life and are now working on a commercial sequel.

Shack: And how are you funded?

We've received some small bits of investor funding, we license Decoda [a Lua script debugger] and we receive pre-orders for NS2.

Pre-order income accounts for approximately 25% of our budget and that's growing (it's the only funding we're currently receiving).

Shack: What led you to develop a direct sequel to Natural Selection for your first commercial project?

Charlie Cleveland: We're most known for NS and our players like us so it makes sense to follow-up with a commercial sequel. Many players have told us they don't care how good of a game NS2 is, they've played NS1 so much they feel like they "owe" us that no matter what. It's incredible that so many of them have supported us with their voices, time and money.

Shack: Natural Selection 2 started with grand ideas impossible for a Half-Life mod--large outdoor environments and vehicles spring to mind--before scaling down to a game which closer resembles the original. What was behind the reversal?

Charlie Cleveland: Damn, you remember that? Building a company and building a game like [that], both without much money was completely infeasible for us. If we went out and raised $10M from a publisher or venture capitalists I believe we could do that, but had about 5% of that budget.

We still have those ambitions though and I hope one day to be in a position to build towards them.

Shack: You also started by licensing Valve's Source engine before switching to your own 'Spark.' What advantages did that bring?

Charlie Cleveland: We are a small team. Our core group in our office is just now growing to 5 people. We knew that to make a game as ambitious as NS2 we needed technology that allowed a small team to build a relatively big game and one that removed as many obstacles as possible. Our engine is completely real-time lets us iterate as quickly as possible.

For instance, our competitors typically have to wait 30 seconds to an hour to see their art or code changes reflected in game. With Spark, we wait a few seconds or more often, not at all.

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Shack: How are you finding having a fanbase already possessing such solid conceptions of how your game should be?

Charlie Cleveland: It's...interesting! Sometimes we feel we can do no right, but other times the responses are heart-warming and wonderful. The trick is to listen to the reason behind their suggestions and not just the suggestions themselves. Often the solution the propose won't work from an integrity, technological or finance perspective, but you can address the problem behind it in a different way. Then everyone is happy.

Shack: You must be anxious about how fans will receive changes.

Charlie Cleveland: Of course! We're always checking feedback to features we tweet or our blog entries. I thought [art director Cory Strader] was going to have a panic attack when we first showed the Onos. We want and need to try new things but we need to appeal to our base too or we're sunk. It's a tricky balance.

Shack: What you consider improvements could potentially open NS2 up to a wider audience but run the risk of alienating an otherwise-assured market.

Charlie Cleveland: You hit the nail on the head. I always think that given the difficulty of learning NS, it's a miracle that anyone plays at all. The first time experience is just... painful. Something you don't see you kills you. You build something and someone yells at you because you did it in the wrong "order" or wrong "place" or should be "saving for something else".

The first time I playtested NS on a LAN I watched a player walk up to the Command Station, see the tooltip that told them how to become Commander, log in and then...do nothing. He was just scrolling around the map, probably looking at the artwork and the little blips closing in around his marines. The entire team was screaming but he didn't realize what his role was. Scenes like this make me want to curl up and die. It has to be more accessible.