I caught up with Randy ‘CheeseNip’ Davis, the Lead Designer/Developer for SlaveMaster to find out more about the development team, the mod and the possibility of a team version of SlaveMaster.

Sharky Extreme : Where did the idea for this unique mod come from?

Randy Davis : The idea originally came from a game I used to play in high school gym all the time, called ‘Scram-ball’ (Scramble). Scram-ball is a form of dodge ball where there are two teams, and each team tries to knock out the other team by hitting them with the ball. The catch was that if the person who got you out was later hit, you got to come back in. Although we were forced to play this game ad-nauseam, I remember people were still pretty psyched about it, so I thought it would make a good basis for a mod. Of course, in high school when you were out, you just sat on the benches socializing, and it wasn’t a huge punishment. In Unreal though, being out is pretty boring if you have nothing to do. Thus after much play testing, we nailed down the ideas of collecting favor for items and marking people with flares. We thought these added a cool twist to the game because such things hadn’t been done before.

Sharky Extreme : How many people are involved in making SlaveMaster and how long have you been developing this mod?

Randy Davis : The team consists of me, 6 of my co-workers/friends who love UT, and our server admins who run SlaveMaster servers. I am the main designer/developer guy, but most of the good stuff comes when we all sit down and have big multiplayer games, and figure out what is fun and what is not. The process came together pretty easily, since we all fell in love with UT when it came out, and we were playing big multiplayer games every day anyway. I began my Unreal programming experience back in mid-January with a couple of lame mutators that never worked right anyway. Ever since then, I have worked on SlaveMaster exclusively.