How are you doing today DarkFortuneTeller? Why don’t you give us a quick intro to yourself and what you’re playing and modding at the moment?
Hey! I'm Dark Fortune Teller. I do a bit of everything, either professionally or as a hobby; game design, UI design, and programming. I love games with survival elements especially, and lately Pacific Drive has me in its clutches. It's so good! (I think I care about my car in this game more than I do my own in real life!)
You’ve just released your, very impressive, survival gameplay mod for Cyberpunk 2077: Dark Future. Congratulations! What made you want to mod for Cyberpunk?
Thank you! Dark Future was voted Mod of the Month for November 2024, which is a huge honor. A big thank you to everyone who has played it and shared their thoughts with me; I really appreciate it.
Cyberpunk has long been one of my favorite games, and I knew you could mod it, but I didn't realize until last year what kinds of experiences were even possible to build using the current toolset made by this awesome community. Once I saw what other folks were doing, something "clicked" and I had to learn more. It's been a fun ride!
Dark Future adds a whole bunch of new mechanics for players to navigate, but the core one is Nerves. Can you tell us a bit about this and what made you want to add this feature?
Dark Future is, fundamentally, a survival mod. You get hungry, thirsty, and so on. The question I had was, "What is unique about living in Night City, what sorts of forces are acting against me?"
That's when I realized the overwhelming mental pressure of just existing in a populated and dangerous city of the future must be a huge factor, so I decided to add a mental wellness mechanic, called Nerve.
This ended up being the "star" that all other things in the mod orbit around, nearly everything ties into Nerve somehow. I'm happy with how this worked out, as it gave Dark Future a sense of cohesion that it wouldn't have otherwise had.
With the whole new level of immersion your mod adds to Cyberpunk, do you have any mods that you love that you’d pair with Dark Future?
Absolutely! Because of its focus on consumables, I love using it with Custom Quickslots by rmk1234, who was generous enough to add special Dark Future compatibility support.
I also love using it with Wannabe Edgerunner by none other than djkovrik. The concept of Humanity, and the way that you restore it by resting in your apartment, complements Nerve very well, while at the same time feeling distinct.
This mod is your first mod uploaded to Nexus Mods, but do you have any other mods or projects you’ve worked on? What made you want to start with this one?
I'm a programmer and designer by trade, and I've made content for other games, so you might say that this isn't my first rodeo. This is my first leap into the RED Engine, and so far I've really enjoyed learning how it works under the hood. I'm now embarking on a new challenge and starting an indie game project in Unreal Engine 5 to explore more of the themes of Dark Future I wasn't able to touch on due to working in an established game and world setting.
I think there's something exciting about trying to survive in a dystopian city that's out to get you at every turn, and I'm curious what it would be like to build a game where the core elements of survival, mental health, finding enough money to pay rent, threat of eviction, and so on were core pillars of the gameplay instead of being layered on to an existing game.
Really, this is just an excuse to learn something new (UE5), but I'm excited to see where it leads. We'll see!
The whole mod is really expansive, did you encounter any issues or roadblocks when making it? How did you overcome them?
The biggest roadblocks, other than just not understanding the scripting language and the tools, was just understanding certain core design decisions that CDPR made that are difficult to discover on your own without a lot of reverse engineering.
One of the biggest ones was that, after playing the mod through the Prologue until you reach Act 1, everything in the mod inexplicably stopped working. After a lot of trial and error and debugging, it turns out that your player character entity (the "puppet" you control when playing the game) is a completely different one between the Prologue and Act 1; it's an entirely new "V" under the hood. That means that any stored references to the player in the script code from the Prologue were now pointing at "nothing".
The trick was to keep listening for Player Attach events and update all references to the Player entity throughout gameplay, not just once, because it CAN change!
What was the highlight of putting this mod together for you?
Honestly, just seeing how far I could take this mechanic was the real joy. I'm addicted to "a ha!" moments, and I had a lot of them putting this together. It's always awesome to see something finally snap together and start working after a lot of trial and error.
Another massive highlight was how receptive everyone has been to it; it's clear that many players were hungry (ha!) for this kind of gameplay. I hope that the mod brings many hours of joy to the folks here on the Nexus.
Do you have any other shoutouts you’d like to make, or anything you’d like to say to our community?
Huge shoutout to psiberx, flib, rmk1234, and manavortex for sharing their knowledge and encouragement. This modding community exists due to folks like these helping propel others. I hope to pay it forward in my own ways.
Thank you to DarkFortuneTeller for chatting with me today: Have you tried out Dark Future yet? Plus, don’t forget to send SlugGirl a DM if there’s anyone from our community you’d love to see interviewed.
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