With the Make Arma Not War 2025 modding competition now concluded, we’re excited to speak with the talented creators who claimed the top spots in each category. For our final interview, we have Rock Paper Scissors creator Brickloco, the winner of the competition’s Don't Fight Alone Award.

BIO

Name: Frank

Nickname: Brickloco

Nationality: Netherlands

Random fact about yourself: I can touch the tip of my nose with my tongue!

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I work as a Product Owner who enjoys climbing and bouldering as much as I can in my free time! Obviously I am a gamer, and I almost always dip my toes into the modding/map making side of every game I play, going all the way back to Call of Duty 2. Furthermore I play the piano, enjoy breaking my brain on chess puzzles, and I have an orange cat named Duvel.

How did you first get involved with Arma and modding?

Arma got my attention a long, long time ago when I started playing the Arma 2 DayZ mod. I poured a decent chunk of my time into it, and I was immediately in love with the vast scale of the environment, and bullet mechanics of the game. I only started modding on Arma 3, when helping out on an Exile server, and later on I did some modding and modeling for a StarSim community.

Would you give us an introduction to your winning creation?

Rock Paper Scissors is a mod which aids in communication in a playful way. It’s something that can help you decide what to do at any moment, and it can resolve every dispute!

How did the concept for Rock Paper Scissors begin, and what inspired its creation?

When the competition caught my eye, I specifically tried to design something for the “Don’t Fight Alone” award, as it had incredibly tough criteria to meet for a multiplayer game. Making something that positively influences those criteria, which CAN’T be abused, was a hard challenge to fulfill. When I started brainstorming for ideas, I briefly tried to gauge how difficult it was to analyse the VOIP radio communications, and write an algorithm which would reward or punish players based on what they said. The rewards would have been along the lines of personal supply points (which is a core feature now), or award them small bits of exp. I quickly realised the absurd complexity of it, and how easy it would be to manipulate it, even if I managed to develop it. So I went back to the drawing board, and I tried to keep the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle in mind. So for a few years I have had this utopian philosophy, that any conflict in the world should “just” be resolved with a good match of Rock Paper Scissors (which is totally ridiculous of course), so when this crossed my mind and after thinking about it for about two weeks, I had my mind set on creating it for Reforger.

Give us some insight into the development process. Are there any interesting anecdotes you can share?

Coming from having only done modding for Arma 2 and 3, the Enfusion Workbench is at least a million times better, being more user friendly and intuitive to use. Being able to open other people’s mods to figure out how they made something, opens up for so many more learning opportunities, but even without it, both the Wiki and API documentation are such a big step forward. They greatly helped me with staying motivated, and not feeling so lost.

For the mod itself, I took inspiration from TheBonBon animations, and I tried to see how he had set up his mod. After approaching him, he mentioned that he made the mod before Bohemia Interactive implemented their version of it, so he had to do it all from scratch. So I would like to thank him again for being open to discuss some of the issues I was facing. Luckily I could lean on the existing framework, and I was able to make the mod without a single line of code! Animating the gestures was a bunch of fun, with making adjustments after each round of feedback from my girlfriend. In the end I think that striving for the same technical implementation and quality as the Bohemia team did was the most interesting to me!

Could you tell us about any future updates that might be coming to the Rock Paper Scissors mod? 

I would still like to incorporate being able to do the animations while in a vehicle, but I am still trying to wrap my head around that. I also want to potentially add some sound effects to give the animations a bit more body and weight.

Can you tell us about anything new that you might be working on in the future? 

As of right now, I have nothing planned, but I am sure something will come along the way!

What is your favorite piece of Arma user-created content (mod, addon, scenario, game mode, tool) and why?

That would still be Arma 2 DayZ, and how that evolved into DayZ Origins, and DayZ Epoch. Mainly because the genre was new, and people hadn’t realised yet that “Shoot on Sight” was the most effective method of communication. You could really choose your own play-style (hero, bandit, or whatever), the zombies were a threat, but not a nuisance, and you had some nice mechanics to play around them. Zombies not being able to hit you in a tree wasn't a bug, but a feature in my opinion!

With the popularity of Arma Reforger and the potential of Enfusion Engine and Workbench, what are you looking forward to with the franchise as we move along the road to Arma 4?

The Enfusion Engine is so much more powerful and accessible, so I’m eager to see what people will come up with! Hopefully the documentation on the wiki keeps expanding with the same quality as it's currently having, as I can't stress enough how much it helps! And lastly, for Arma 4 to be just as epic an experience as the previous installments!

BONUS

What is your most remarkable “Arma” moment?

Being a part of gigantic (100+ players) Zeus Ops in the Arma 3 StarSim community almost every other week. That was some intense, but epic gaming! Or walking down the stairs and breaking my legs in DayZ… Take your pick! 😉

What advice do you have for people who want to start modding?

Start by following the tutorials on the wiki. They're a great place to start. Write things down somewhere to better wrap your head around things. Bookmark pages, and if Google can't answer your questions, or if you're not getting an answer in the Discord, use the search function from Discord. There's a huge chance that someone else has had your problem.

And as a lot of people will mention, start with something small! Modding/game development is super broad, and has a lot of things to specialise in, so find something you enjoy doing!