Interview: bawNg from Intoxicated Gaming. Part 3

You are reading the final part of our interview with bawNg, owner of Intoxicated Gaming. Thus far we have talked about the history of Intoxicated Gaming, the servers, staff system, development and Facepunches involvement with the community. See Part 1 & Part 2.

What are you currently working on? Both development and community-wise.

It would be easier for me to tell you what I’m not working on. I have so much planned for the future and so many different projects in the pipeline, many of which have already been prototyped or are in some stage of planning or development. I am constantly working towards improving and optimizing not only my own code base but also identifying bottlenecks in the core game. I not only have a huge number of things planned for all of my existing game modes but also have many new kinds of exciting game modes planned for the future. I really enjoy designing and building new things but unfortunately, that has to take the backseat most of the time since ensuring that existing systems are working well should always be the priority.

I also recently partnered up with a data science company which I will be working with to create various new systems for my game servers powered by machine learning algorithms running on dedicated hardware. This will allow some really cool things in the future, including a new kind of anti-cheat which we believe will eventually be able to detect even the most careful cheaters.

As for the community side of things, I’m working towards introducing new centralized systems which will provide many benefits to players, including making it easier to provide feedback and participate in some new interesting ways. I’m also going to be introducing a changelog for all the servers and game modes in the near future so that players can keep up to date with all the changes and get a glimpse of just how much goes on behind the scenes.


What’s the best way to start creating your own mods for Rust? Any tips for starting developers out there?

Oxide/uMod is used by almost all modders and there is a huge amount of documentation and resources available for getting started and learning the APIs. Developers who are starting out need to have a lot of patience and should not be afraid of getting their hands dirty. Rust modding, just like almost every other game, requires a lot of research to understand the internals of the game, sometimes a lot of trial and error is also needed to come up with good solutions to hard problems.

So, Intoxicated Gaming has been around for 8 years now. I bet you have some great memories. Any memory in particular you thinks worth sharing?

There have been a lot of great memories over the years, I wouldn’t be able to choose any single one. I have many great memories from other games in the past which I played myself. Occasionally while spectating Rust players, I’ll come across a silly interaction which makes me laugh, or a wholesome moment when random players meet each other for the first time and hit it off.

And as always we end the interview with tips! Do you have any tips for (starting) communities out there?

I believe that anyone starting a new community should do so for the right reasons and be prepared to dedicate a large portion of their time to management without expecting anything in return. Many players start hosting their own servers so they can abuse admin and help their friends, which may be fine if your server is private for your group of your friends, but will not end well on a public server. Other people see hosting pay to win servers as an easy way to make money, but that just creates an unbalanced and toxic environment that alienates a large portion of the player base.

Playing on your own server is a terrible idea, as no matter what you tell players, they will assume you are abusing your admin due to past experiences on other servers where abuse is extremely common. You should also come up with a set of rules which makes sense to you and your community, enforcing them in a way that is both strict and fair; if you create rules which are never enforced, that will do more harm than not having any rules to begin with.