Thank you for joining us JohnnyJohnnyBS, why don't you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Thank you for allowing me to join you, I'm very excited to be here and to answer your wonderful questions.
Well, I'm not exactly the most interesting person. I'm 14 at the moment, my name is Joseph and I live in England. I've got a few years of experience now making mods and working on other things related to games and I'm just having fun here modding.
Which game(s) would you say truly made you a gamer?
That's a very hard choice, games have always been a part of my life but I believe where I really got hooked was when I got my first PC game, Minecraft. I'm sure nearly everyone knows what this game is but for anyone who doesn't, you are in a world where everything is made of blocks and your goals are to survive and build. This game is a lot of fun and it was one of the first games I discovered modding with.
Minecraft has a ton of great mods and was my first interaction with modding which was honestly great fun and inspired me a lot. I played it so much, it really was the first game I truly loved.
You've been a part of the Nexus Mods community since we started hosting Blade & Sorcery mods back in December 2018, making you one of the first modders for the game. What was it about Blade & Sorcery that really captured your imagination?
Since I first played it, Blade & Sorcery has been a great game for modding. Modders started with the ability to simply change a bunch of the values that affect how game works, but this soon evolved into adding new weapons and so much more. You can change pretty much everything about it. This really drew me in as it allowed for a lot of freedom for the modders.
The most inspiring thing for me was seeing other modders making great things, while there weren't many of us back then, they really were great people and some of the best modders I've seen. Seeing them creating great things made me want to just get in on the fun.
The mainstream appeal of VR games is something people often disagree on. We've seen games like Half Life: Alyx recently which have given VR games more of a spotlight, but others feel it will always be a niche. What are your thoughts on VR gaming and it's future in the industry?
I believe Half Life: Alyx is just the start for big, mainstream games for VR and for the entire VR industry. We've already seen smaller games that have blown up and done extremely well such as BeatSaber and Boneworks, both are these I think you can objectively say were pretty revolutionary at the time (whether or not you like them) and we've been on an upward curve for these games since. Now with Half Life: Alyx, it got a lot of positive attention, so I believe we'll see a lot more big games like that in the future and make VR much less of a niche.
Looking at the mods you've shared, there is a wide variety of cool stuff. Which ones are your favourites?
Oo... this is a hard choice as there's quite a few I've used a lot. I'd say the most fun I've had with a mod will definitely be Multiplayer, the testers and I have had loads of fun just playing around with it. Other than that, there's also all of my gun mods, I've made quite a few of these and had lots of fun using and making them.
If I have to choose one though, it would definitely be Multiplayer, even in the early stages of testing we got around 8 or so people on and just messed about, it was very buggy at the start but we could still see each other and just laugh about.
What about mod from other authors, are there any that are "must-haves" for you?
Oh my there's many but I'll try to narrow it down (These aren't in any particular order):
First of all, I can't not include The Outer Rim by Kingo64. It's the biggest mod for the game and has provided me with a lot of fun. Whether it's messing about in Multiplayer with lightsabers or just using them solo to destroying waves and waves of enemies, this mod is amazingly well made and super fun to use.
Secondly, we have Electrical by Oli8t, this mod gives you a bunch more electricity-based powers such as being able to throw electrified punches, charge your held weapons and tons more. This mod has been around since basically the start of true modding for B&S and it's still working to this day. It's a great mod and adds a lot to what you can do with the single lightning spell in the base game at the moment.
You recently uploaded "Johnny's Multiplayer Beta" which allows you to play Blade & Sorcery with your friends, I think you'll agree this is a big deal. Can you tell us more about the mod, how it works and what your future plans for it are?
The mod is still very much a work in progress, I still want to improve it and make it more like the multiplayer experience people would expect. It currently works by every player (client) sending the position of their items, head and hands to the server. The server will then send all of the received data to the other players which will interpret that by putting a banana head in the head place, a ball in the hand places and items where the items are.
I am currently waiting for U8 to come out to do any further development on enemy syncing and full player models but I have been working on quite a large security update which will prevent people from exploiting the way everything works and "cheating". I'm not gonna go into details on how this works as it could help bypass it but there is some basic encryption on the packets sent from client to server and server to client now which wasn't included before.
Is there a story behind the floating banana head you're using in the beta version?
Haha the bananas, yes there is sort of. Originally we had floating balls for the heads as well. This worked but you couldn't see the orientation of it very well and it sort of depersonalised them. One of my friends (ButtersAndSorcery) was working on a game at the time and he had this banana character in it called Carl, he suggested that we put him in the mod. He quickly chopped Carl's head off into a new object and sent it over to me. We thought it was great for a temporary head model until we get proper player models and it adds a bit of character to everyone in our opinion.
With Blade & Sorcery still in active development and Update 8 getting closer by the day, what are you most excited about for the future of the game?
Whilst I'm super excited for U8 and the features it will bring and just how great it looks. What I'm really looking forward to is the modding that will come from it. The update is going to add a proper magic framework to use and that should allow the community to make some great spells. Hopefully, we'll even see a bit of a boom in modding when U8 comes out and attract some new modders with fresh ideas for cool mods.
For the general future of the game, I'm really excited to see where WarpFrog takes it. We've seen in previous updates that modding will continue to be expanded, allowing us to make even more types of mod and making the whole process easier. I can't wait to see how the game turns out let's say, a year.
For a new modder who would like to try their hand at making a mod for Blade & Sorcery, do you have any advice on where to start?
I would recommend joining the official Blade & Sorcery Discord server, the community there is great and there's a lot of modders who will help you out with getting started. There's a modding-howto channel as well which has a bunch of resources for new users to quickly learn the basics.
Is there anything else you'd like to say to the Nexus Mods community?
I'd like to say thank you! Thank you for downloading mods, making mods and just generally being there. Nexus is a great tool for me and other modders to use for sharing our mods, getting bug reports and doing just about anything related to the release of mods. So thank you.
A big thank you to JohnnyJonnyBS for taking the time to talk to us! If there's an author or mod project you'd like to know more about, send your suggestions to BigBizkit or Pickysaurus.
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A moderator has closed this comment topic for the time beingGone too soon <3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M67_grenade#/media/File:Reservehigh20048611453.jpg
child_eater btw
rip <3
rip johnny
Thank you though :)