Hey Seweryn, thanks for joining me today! For people who might not have spoken to you on our Discord, could you introduce yourself, please?
My name is Seweryn, alias Sewer56, if you see me on the web; and I’m part of the App Team at Nexus. I’m best known for the Reloaded suite of modding libraries, tools and utilities. Back in the day, I used to be a gamer, but these days I’m more of a ‘full-stack modder’ sort of thing. Essentially both in my own time and company time, I’m building the next generation of modding tools and utilities both on and off the clock.
Back in the day, I used to play games competitively for a while, I was successful at one point. I mean you’ve heard me mention before I was Top 10 in Rocket League at one point in 1v1. However, I did stop playing competitively and that’s kind of how I got into programming.
It was mainly due to a lack of time, I had national exams at school, my A Levels, and tournaments back then used to be (mainly) centred around US time. So I’d have to be up at like 2 am on school days to participate which was not ideal, and when I had to travel I was unable to play. So what happened is I just kind of picked up programming as a hobby, since it was something that was a bit slower paced, I could do that anywhere, any time. So that’s kinda how I got into it!
Seweryn back in his field hockey days
How did you get into playing Rocket League competitively? And was that the only game you’ve played competitively?
Most of the things I’ve played competitively were more minor things, mainly like smaller tournaments etc. Before I played Rocket League, I was Top 100 in a bunch of mobile games and games with smaller communities, like indies and older titles (example). I also played a bit of Call of Duty on GameBattles on the weekends growing up, so that was quite competitive.
But when it came to Rocket League, it was more of a situation where basically the game came out, I started playing it around 2-3 weeks after release. Back around the release, there was a game (mod) called Portal Stories: Mel, which was a mod of Portal 2 and I just happened to be playing that. When I finished with that, I started playing Rocket League, since I saw some Beta footage on YouTube. The game just came out a couple of weeks ago and I really liked it. It was an Unreal 3 game, and I found quite a bit of joy in it, so I started, you know grinding 1v1s.
The grinding process was over the summer, and as happens with competitive games you would do it for like 8 hours a day. The process generally boils down to: wake up, grab a 2L bottle of water; queue up a lobby, play a match, finish the match, take a sip of water, queue another game, with common toilet breaks between games. Unfortunately, it was my last year of school, I also went to Poland to visit my family etc. and you know it just happened to be that, I didn’t really have the time to stay competitive. I’m a bit of a competitive person, I’m a bit of an all-or-nothing person, so I just went for a bit of a calmer and slower-paced hobby.
Can you talk us through your gaming experiences growing up? Were there specific games that got you into gaming, or ones you still love?
Oooo, this is a very interesting story actually because if you were to ask ‘When did you start gaming?’, I actually don’t know the answer! I would’ve been too young to know. I was already gaming when I was a little kid, you know when I was like 3 or 4 years old. I had a PS1 back then; essentially I lived in a small village in Poland when it was still turning into a first-world country. So you know, having something like a PS1 or a computer was rare. Reportedly I used it too much so it was taken away from me hahaha!
What I do remember though, I was pretty much the only kid with a PC at the time in a small village. So you know… hehehe; I’d often go off to a local grocery store and pick up a gaming magazine, for example, CyberMycha or Play magazine, and plop the discs from it into my PC. Usually from these magazines, you’d get one or two AAs/indie titles, and occasionally an older AAA title. So for example on one of the discs, I got Rayman 3, two or three years after release.
So yeah, before I moved to the UK when I was 6 or 7, that was where most of my game library came from. There were also times when I would go to my cousin’s place and I would play on a NES, yes on a NES in the early 2000s. Now the interesting catch is that it wasn’t the actual NES. What it was, was a Famicom clone, known as the Pegasus, which was pretty common in Poland. That was a bit of an experience, you know, I remember blowing into carts just to make them work. Putting batteries near heat sources to try and squeeze the last amount of juice out.
Examples of magazine discs Seweryn would collect
Could you tell us your story of how you got into programming?
Ok, here’s the interesting part. When I started programming and modding for that part, it wasn’t that well-defined. Growing up, I’ve always been tinkering with games, you know, as far back as I remember. And not just games, I mean, I overclocked a Pentium CPU when I was like 9 years old from the BIOS (1.6 -> 2.0GHz). But since I was probably 10 at least, I’d use existing tools to edit things in the game and to mod them.
The part when programming comes in, back in 2015 when I was still a teenager, I started with Sonic Heroes’ object placement format. So you know, you have a level, you have a bunch of objects on a level, you can move them around, place them, do whatever you want with them. The way to edit wasn’t known back then, and growing up I had a knack for data mining in games, that being looking for unused content etc. The sort of stuff you see on the Hidden Palace or The Cutting Room Floor.
So I was working on an early version of that game, that was built for the Gamecube, and I wanted to see if I could, you know, get some unused objects to spawn. Because, there were files for these objects, but they weren’t placed on any level and the final game didn’t have them either. So you know; I was in a situation where there were no tools because nobody has worked with this yet. So that was kinda the basis of me getting into programming.
Basically, I looked at it and opened the layout file in HxD (hex editor), I took out Notepad++ and I painstakingly started working on the binary file. I used a web tool to convert between integers/floats and their byte representation, and I would test and modify the game, writing anything I found in Notepad++. Now here’s the funny part. I was working with a Gamecube game, so the testing for this was extremely painful. Every time I made a change I would have to open a tool called GCRebuilder and click like 3 buttons in it to export a new ISO file. Then I would plop it into Dolphin Emulator because there was no way at the time to run unpacked files. So every time I wanted to test, it would take me like 1.5 minutes just to get a new ISO file that was 1.4GB. Then load the game to check if my changes worked, yeah that was pretty crazy.
Even before that when I was about 12 to 14, I spent quite a bit of time tinkering with Android ROMs, the modifying OEM ‘Stock’ ROMs pre-installed on your devices. I would create derivatives of whatever the manufacturer ships, apply some optimizations, remove bloat, etc. so the user could have a better experience. Funnily enough, this is also a niche story, I caught a certain phone manufacturer (OnePlus) spying on its users. What happened was they were storing your telephone number, IMEI, your WIFI network, GPS location etc. They’d store it and later send it off to their server at regular intervals. I posted it on the XDA forums but the caveat is I was young and a bit naive, so I thought this was standard, everyone does this, but actually no, these days I’d argue it’s unacceptable. A year and a half later, a security researcher (Christopher Moore) found the same thing, and when publications started talking about it, I was like, I found this a year and a half ago haha!
The funny thing is that all of that happened when I was on Christmas break after playing Rocket League. I was off to Poland to visit my family for Christmas, so I couldn’t play Rocket League. So I went back to tinkering with my phone and you know, somehow found out this company was sending off all your info haha!
SlugGirl: I love that that is what you did on your break from Rocket League, it’s very Johnny Silverhand, taking down corporations!
Full screen Sonic Heroes' multiplayer mode mod
What was it that drew you to your role here at Nexus?
Oh, so that has some context actually. So COVID hit and game modding started becoming very popular, Nexus was growing and the company started to expand. So what happened was Halgari (Tim) was hired as the Product Manager for Vortex to join Tannin (Seb), and there was some planning around Vortex 2.0, like this huge update for Vortex which revolutionises things and changes and cleans it up. But it quickly became clear that maintaining Vortex as-is, was not feasible in the long term, like the amount of things you would need to do to fix it would mean you have to redo this thing from scratch. So that kind of became the start of the team, the App Team.
I was post-university, but not yet employed. I was finishing up my personal projects before applying for work. A friend tipped me off to a post on Nexus' front page saying; ‘ah we’re hiring a .NET dev’ and I’m like, well… this job is perfect for me because I have a very unique set of skills, that you know is essentially full stack in game modding. I don’t only do mod managers, I do mod loading, like mod loaders, the libraries and the mods themselves. So I know how the full stack works, so that happened and the rest became history.
Between the time I applied and when I did the interview, I kind of snuck myself into the Discord for Nexus Mods and started, you know, chatting it up in the Dev channels. You know, API discussion, Vortex Dev, and yeah I was getting myself integrated into the place. I was the first hire on the App Team.
The funniest part is I spent 2 weeks preparing for a Technical Interview; you know Leetcode and all that jazz, I figured ‘ah new team, chances are Halgari will interview me, US Dev, this may be more of an American style interview’. Instead, my interview wound up being more of a casual conversation over Google Meet, focused more on behavioural questions and the like; chances are in my case the portfolio here may have spoken for itself instead.
You touched on it briefly, but can you tell us more about your modding?
I don’t make mods as much nowadays, I mainly make the tools which let other people make mods. And you’ll see my stuff used all over the place. To give an example, you play Final Fantasy 14 right?
SlugGirl: Yeah I do, a lot!
Yeah, so when you play Final Fantasy 14 you use a framework called Dalamud, and it just so happens that part of the code it’s using to let you overwrite the game code (hooking library), was written by me as part of the Reloaded suite. So basically, what I do most of the time these days is make tools which let other people make mods, rather than making mods myself, that’s what takes up most of my time.
Screenshot of Reloaded-II
So back in the day, before you were making the tools, what kind of mods were you making?
Mostly quality-of-life stuff, so for example adding widescreen support to old 4:3 games, improving the load times, adding controller support and making stuff not crash; you know that kind of stuff. I did have some ambitions for big projects and all, but I kind of came to a point where I’ve spent most of my time maintaining the tools that others use, and I’ve kind of been locked into that since. So I would love to lead a big project, but it’s a bit hard, given how much code I’ve put out there and how much of it I maintain.
Turning a chicken into a playable character
You’ve been with us at Nexus Mods for a little while now, how do you find it working here?
To be perfectly honest, I can’t really ask for any better!
Could you also give us a rundown of how a typical day for you might look?
I wake up and pick up whatever I had from the previous day. Sometimes it’s a bug report, sometimes I was just in the middle of developing a feature, or sometimes it’s something else. Around 2:30 pm (UK time) we have our stand-up meeting as a team, which involves our core team, CaptainSandyPants from the Design team, the QA team, NexusModsLuke from Product Management, and Pickysaurus from Community. Occasionally we also have guests. During these stand-ups, we deliver an update on progress, and updates from the community (end users) and also it serves as an opportunity to raise any issues we have or questions regarding the project, and after the stand-up then it’s back to cracking on. We also do a lot of our developments on Discord, which naturally gets the community involved too.
A lot of us, I’m not sure everyone is aware, but a lot of us were formerly open source devs, that you know, we were already working with the community in some capacity. We want to keep working with people, so a lot of our development is done on Discord, in public for anyone to see. Anyone can comment, and anyone can contribute. I feel like that brings us a lot closer to the people that we’re actually making the application for. It also allows us to get better feedback, see how we can improve, build confidence and give people input as much as possible with whatever we’re up to. The best thing you can do is just be transparent with people.
Are there any games you’re playing at the moment, or upcoming releases you’re looking forward to?
A bit complicated. I’m always working hard on the next generation of tech, so sometimes I get so occupied, that I don’t really get much time to play. But on the very rare occasion, you would see me play a game, it would probably be like modded FlatOut 2/UC and I’ve been itching to play a bit of Worms Armageddon, but it’s hard to get a more casual lobby with that one. I’m also in the credits of FlatOut 2 actually.
If I were to play something that’s more recent, then I believe NieR Automata or Baldur’s Gate 3 looks great as far as AAA games go. It’s just a matter of when.
Any final thoughts, or anything you’d like to share?
Yeah, I guess a shoutout to GOG and stopkillinggames.com, we live in an unfortunate time, where ownership of games is being eroded from you. Essentially you ‘buy’ a game and despite that, someone could just take it away from you any time. Sometimes, on newer PCs, the copy-protection could simply stop working; and there’s a bunch of people who have been burned by this, myself included.
What I mean by this is, say we bought a game on disc, we have the game, we legally own the game, 10 years later we put the disc in and it doesn’t work. The actual game itself works, but the copy protection doesn’t let you play it. I have many such discs.
Throughout the years it’s been getting worse. With DRM like Denuvo, where some big publishers use it in perpetuity (forever) and don’t remove it, there will be a day where the servers will go down and you’ll never be able to play your legitimate games again.
It’s happened before; it will happen again; and people aren’t talking about it enough. Just last week, PlayStation Network (PSN) was down. It turns out you can’t boot downloaded games from the store without a connection to their servers, millions of people were unable to play their games, just like that.
We’re coming to an era where, well, ownership of games is eroding and that’s not very good.
So I would love to shout out GOG and the person running stopkillinggames.com, which are actively campaigning to actually let people own the games they buy.
(PS. Copy protection also makes it much harder for us to mod games!)
Thanks so much once again, Seweryn, for sitting down to do this interview. I’ll be back with another ‘Get to Know’ interview next month.
In the meantime, if anyone on our About Us page looks particularly interesting and you'd like to hear from them or know more about them, drop a comment to let me know. Otherwise, it’ll be up to the fate of the wheel once more!
9 comments
@spamporpoise - impractical? what on earth did we modders do before Discord started in 2015? Oh yes, I almost forgot - forums! Sure, I hear what you say about how many use it but Nexus should surely have a moral duty of care, and not surrender to the mob.
@kasumirina
at least with CDs we could play games without anyone being able to decide to change the terms of use afterwards, or to ban you from playing for random reason (as long as there was no real need for an internet connection)