Audio Interview with Magnar Jenssen (Number 2)

5th August 2012

Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3

UPDATE: This audio interview has been transcribed by Sparks and is now available as a PDF file: magnar-jenssen-2nd-interview.pdf. Left click to open in your browser (if available) or right click to save to your computer.

With the recent release of Mission Improbable and let’s not forget Whoopservatory, Magnar has cemented his position amongst the great SP Source modders.

In this second audio interview (the first is here), we mainly discuss the changes and new additions to Mission Improbable

Magnar has agreed to follow this post, so if you have questions that I didn’t ask, he may be able to answer them for you.

Rick Underhill’s site is called EditPoly.Net

This podcast was live-streamed to the Podcast17 YouTube channel and is available as a video on there.

Enjoy!

Listen to the podcast

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16 Comments

  1. Intriguing interview.

    I found it interesting when he said that about 50% of what he makes gets cut. This probably explains why I get a bunch of content out in a relatively short timespan, because I don’t cut anything at all. That’s probably pretty stupid of me but honestly I can’t bring myself to remove something I’ve spent a lot of time on.

    And it’s probably also part of why Mission Improbable is so good. Only the best parts are kept in.

    I do have a question for Magnar Jenssen.

    You said that you tend to play the singleplayer mods that are highly rated here. I recently released Baryonic Predicament, which is a mod for HL2: Ep2. Have you played it? If so, could you at least briefly give your opinion of it?

    1. Magnar

      Yeah, me and Rick actually played it while we were waiting for the final build of MIMP to go through!

      I think it was good, high quality overall, nicely detailed, the lighting was nice and so forth. The puzzles were cool, although some of them I think took a lot of inspiration from Research and Development. Also, sometimes it was hard to know where to go and how to continue, since all the areas were evenly detailed and so forth, so there was no hint to the player which areas were more important.

      -Magnar

      1. I never consciously took inspiration from R&D but seeing how it’s my 2nd favourite mod right after Mission Improbable, it’s quite possible that I was influenced by it.

        Note taken about guiding the player a little bit more.

        Thanks for your reply.

  2. Ade

    I have a question, why not use The BetaTestersCollective at any point during the development? 🙁

    1. Magnar

      Well, I didn’t know it existed, but also I have had very good experiences with the playtesters I’ve used before 🙂

      1. Ade

        Aww.. well I did comment on one of your updates and mentioned you contact Phillip, guess I should’ve tried a PM instead.
        Maybe next time!

  3. Jack5500

    I recommend using Google Alerts to monitor the web for “Mission Improbable”, Magnar 🙂

  4. Would you Phillip transcribe these interviews to text? I’m really interested in these but I suck at listening english.

    1. I have been looking at ways to do this automatically. It’s very time consuming. I tried some voice to text software but it didn’t work very well and with different people speaking it’s even worse.

      I would love to have a PDF available, but honestly, it would probably take at least 2 hours to transcribe this interview and I just don’t have time. Sorry! Any volunteers?

    2. This has now been transcribed. See the main post or my last comment for the link.

  5. HiroProtagonist

    Hey Phillip you said you’d link Ricks website in this post, just a reminder. Great interview.

    1. Yes, I did, you are right, sorry about that. Adding it now.

  6. UPDATE: This audio interview has been transcribed by Sparks and is now available as a PDF file: magnar-jenssen-2nd-interview.pdf. Left click to open in your browser (if available) or right click to save to your computer.

  7. I’m sorry for the delay with this question but I just remember what I wanted to ask when I was listenning to the interview.

    You said you work as a level designer. What do you do exactly, as in, do you only build the game world or are you also require/expected to produce assets for the game (namely models and textures)?

  8. Just a quick
    THANKS MAGNAR!

    I always find these interviews very interesting,,

    perhaps next time we get both faces??

  9. Interviews like this are just another reason that Planet Phillip is tops in the mod world.

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