This website is Merciless Development's contribution to Project: Top Secret.

All members of the Top Secret community are welcome to view our proposals and contribute their ideas and content so that we can help realize the dream of this monumental game.

For more info about us and our work, visit our forums and main website.

You are also welcome to join our steam community of players and developers for Follow Freeman.

Our project Follow Freeman is a unique development. It is the norm for mod developers to release an SDK early in the development of their mod to encourage community members to create maps for it.

Follow Freeman has taken a completely different approach to the inclusion of community content. We have not released an SDK; instead, we have tailored our code to support the existing community content and engine features. This enabled us access to the wealth of community created content already created for single player use, and it also meant that anyone wishing to develop for our mod need not learn anything other than the standard SDK tools.

All content is then woven into the game and presented with full credits and accessibility in game rather than being some obscure map file on fileplanet or some custom map in the mapcycle. All our community content works within the larger framework of the game mechanics. Advanced features, such as in game user defined difficulty, apply across the whole range of game types and game mode configurations. The cooperative scoring system and online highscores system also provide a way for community content to be included as a valid part of the game world.

Another – and in our opinion, possibly the most important part of this new approach – is that we have taken responsibility for the quality of the content and its performance in the final end user gaming experience. We have worked through every piece of content that caused problems for cooperative play and applied solutions from our custom coded toolset. Then, we have tested and refined play with our community of beta testers on our own servers before releasing the content to the public.

This new approach has yielded fantastic results! With a main dev team of just 2 people, we have included a huge amount of content into our mod and have much, much more coming in future releases.

So that is the story so far on Follow Freeman. How does this apply to Project: Top Secret?

We feel this puts us in an excellent position to offer the Top Secret community a proven way to realize their game design quickly and effectively without the need to gamble years of production work creating an engine and SDK while supporting community use of that SDK.

By supporting and streamlining the inclusion of community content into a single comprehensive gaming experience, the potential expansion of Top Secret will be limitless!

The Steam games system offers, in our opinion, the best fully featured support for an online game with their built in communications throughout the entire game world (not just realms as in wow), anti cheat systems, player validation, anti piracy, and of course, the lovely source engine in which we can do everything in the game design document. The quality of the game play experience, with all the depth and immersion of an MMO, is brought to life in a beautiful first person engine and will result in a truly epic game.

Although our name is Merciless Development, we are actually very nice people and have a relaxed, mature attitude toward our work. We also have proven our ability to work with (and for) an online community towards a shared goal over the span of a long term project. "Merciless" pertains to our game play, and anyone that has played bz_trainstation with elimination mode turned on and the difficulty on high will understand exactly what we mean!