Red Orchestra creator Tripwire Interactive is seeking the modding community's best and brightest to create an expansion pack for its upcoming PC World War 2 shooter sequel Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad, the indie developer has announced.

The 'Rising Storm' expansion will take RO2 to sunnier climes with the 1942-1945 Pacific Theatre conflict between the USA and Japan. Both US and Japanese campaigns are available, complete with co-op support, as well as competitive multiplayer.

"The Rising Storm team will be made up of the best developers from the Red Orchestra modding community and the mod community at large," Tripwire explains, who will be "sponsored" by Tripwire and have "the potential to earn real money for their work."

"We're very excited about this new concept in game development," said Tripwire president John Gibson in the announcement. "We've always been impressed with the quality of work coming out of the mod teams for our games. We decided that we wanted to try this experiment where we would work closely with a mod team, give them early access to the development tools, and give them an opportunity to make some real money from their work. As the lines between developers and modders blur, we feel this type of synergy could be a great thing for the games industry."

Indie games Natural Selection 2 and Achron are already enlisting the help of their communities to create content, though not on such a large and comprehensive scale.

Tripwire itself started as a modding team, winning an Unreal Engine license in Epic's 2004 'Make Something Unreal' contest with the mod Red Orchestra: Combined Arms.

Red Orchestra 2 publisher 1C Company currently lists the sequel for release in the second quarter of 2011, while Tripwire says Rising Storm will come some time in 2011.