Originality in mods

Yes the mods urge for publicity is horrible. Most spend more time on their websites than on the mod. Dont create a website until you got a mod...

I worked on about five or so mods now, 3 of them singleplay. All of them very succesfull. All of them released. None of them ever had any kind of design document what so ever. We just talked to each other, which works just as well really.

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The coders will prioritize on the wrong things or will code stuff that is unnecessary

As the leader I just talk to the guy, and I tell him what has the highest prio. Problem fixed?

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the level designers will create map layouts that don't work etc.

Talk to them more? Maybe they started off building layouts too soon? Core gameplay not finalized etc. That is why you need to do small builds all the time, so the previous release can be taken as example. You dont need a lot of design doc for this? Just a working build?

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And don't forget that many people are virtualy unable to come up with something if you don't give them exact directions. I met many artists like that. Not everybody is a designer or inventor. Many just want to improove on their skills and need someone who tells them what to do. In the modding community where you meet many inexperienced people this might even be more common then in professional games development.

Yes, but there are also many that do wish to have some say in what is going on. There are of course A LOT of people who do want to be guided, and I am not saying you cant guide them some more. It is a case by case thing. Talk to them more if you think they need some more help. Forcing everyone to stick to your design doc is a too general approach.

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And as i said you have to kick slackers. We always did this at Ins. Our core team at least always worked their asses off. Same can be said about the mod that i worked on before which had a size of around 25 people.

I agree that they must be kicked, but, if you hire a new guy every week, and kick a guy every week, again, I would leave the mod myself because it would give me a really wrong signal. You would get very nervous and demotivated if people are kicked all the time...

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Hourences i respect your opinion but what works for one team doesn't work for another team and your way of doing things is not the universal truth for perfect modding. I had the luck of working on two released and succesfull mods for a long time. My experiences are just different ones.

Of course nothing works for everything, but surely there must be some way that usually, on average, works better than other approaches. There are mods made by 1 guy. There are mods made by 147 people teams. Everything goes, but somewhere in between, there is this holy number. I am not saying my five is that number, but surely there is some approach that will give you most chance of success with the least possible troubles? That is what I am saying. It is not about what works (everything can), but what gives you most chance on succeeding... And considering that, it is logical that smaller teams are easier to manage than large teams. That is a fact. So my point is, if you know that you will make it twice as difficult to manage the mod by increasing the team size, then dont, or only get super experience people who do the work of five others, or, hold of until you REALLY need all of these people. Small team = gets you spend more time on development, less on team managment <- that was my point.

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Hourences, what you are saying is basically gather a few friends, discuss some ideas and let everyone do whatever they like. This method can work on super small mods when you have a team of veterans, but I'm pretty sure it won't work when you are dealing with less experienced people. We never had a design doc in Insurgency and that caused us to scrap countless maps and waste hours and hours on needless tasks.

I dont think you can look at the design doc as your holy grail. I am sure that the lack of design doc didnt help you in INS dev, but the reason why it didnt work is prolly more complicated than just "yeah we had no design doc"? A different approach on team management, work order, the peoples experience levels, and so on prolly also had a big impact on it. Did the INS team made fully working builds every month? If not, wouldnt that have helped for the maps? Youd get to test them in the game right away, without trying to guess how it would play by reading a design doc?

In general: Organization is good when it is self organizing. Forcing organization is bad. Your goal as a leader is to make it self organizing, not to force everyone to do what you want. Guide people. Do not force people. Especially not when they spend all their free time on your dream!

I think the reason our opinions are different is because each of us has only the experience with a specific size of mod teams. We are both right in our field of expertise.

When you reach a certain team size you get to the point where you can't just communicate your ideas to each and every team member verbally all the time. You need it black on white for them. Thats the main lesson that we have learned with Insurgency. You cant run a team of that size as a group of friends. It needs to be semi-professional just for the sake of not falling apart alone. Doesn't mean you can't have fun or friends within the team. Look i bet you have fun at your work, which is completely professional. I do for my part.

If you ever write a book or article about it talk to Jeremy. He was the leader of Red Orchestra and Insurgency. If anyone on this planet knows about the challenges and difficulties of leading a big mod to success then its him.

There is another thing you can take in consideration. Big mods like Insurgency or some of the BF2 mods are not just for fun for the developers. Many members see them as steps in their career and in fact they have proofed to be. Thats a big difference to smaller "fun" mods. A little professionalism really doesn't hurt or bother anyone on such a mod. In fact it prepares them and teaches them some valuable stuff for their later professional carreer.

I'd say the complexity and originality will dictate how much documentation a project needs. Even for a solo mod, the amount of people is secondary to me, having a design doc shouldn't be downplayed. I'd say one the reasons for constant failures in modding scene is such lack of prevision, some people due experience or mental skills may succeed working without a good design doc, but in the end is a recipe for fail.

Quote from KoKo5oVaR

Seriously .. the great thing about mods is that you don't have any constrains so you can be as creative as you want, especially considering that you do it for yourself. I'm not sure at all, because i was young and i changed a lot since then, but i remember that in 1998 - 2004, when modding was great, people had a lot more original concepts than what the modding community of nowadays is doing (with the exception of some gems of course). What do you think guys, do the old modding community was more creative, or is it basically the same thing ? because i actually can't answer to this question myself

Well, even compared to the generic clones, nobody played the quirky mods.

People are also looking at mods different now than they did back then. Creators see mods as a passage into the industry, they want to work on the Next Big Thing. Gamers see mods as products that rival commerical games in quality.

I completely agree with what Taylor said. There seems to be this general idea that mods have to be of the same quality as a game developed by a professional studio in order to be successful or for it to be worth a download.

While steppen and peris provides very valid points, I think they've learned the wrong lesson from their experiences.

let me just start by saying that I agree 100% with the list Hourences made, lets look at a small exerpt;

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Great and super efficient design. You cant make the next GTA game as a mod. You cant make a WOW clone as a mod. You cant make a mod with 30 playercharacters, 6 different environments and 29 levels, and 4 types of gameplay. You need to go for something that is doable.

This is where Insurgency failed. Ofcourse you will waste huge amounts of time when you try to make a complete game without a design document. What I think Hourences is trying to say is that you shouldn't have done that in the first place, you should have started small and released early and built ontop of that with a release every other month. This way you wouldn't have needed a design doc, you'd change things and test them as you go and spot bad stuff very early.

I do not believe Jeremy is doing a great job at leading his mods when he does the same mistakes over and over again. The best talent he got is getting a lot of talented people to join his mods, but if he had gone with the fast-release (or fast internal builds and playtests with little or no art involved yet), then I believe his mods would have been more successful. Let's just compare the CS with INS, the two mods are fairly similar in what needed to be done (and in gameplay ), but one took the early-and-often release approach and the other didn't. I would not call Insurgency a hugely successful mod when looking at what might've been; Insurgency had one of the best teams that any mod leader could want, and I strongly believe they could have done a lot bigger and better.

Now, to remedy this whole situation (the need to make something big and successful to compete with "real" games), I would not go and write a 100 page design document that every modder in the team needs to read so you are sure everyone is on the same page, it would just lead to frustrated modders thinking they will not be able to share the joy of actually helping with the design of the mod. Besides, if there was a few things in that document that was wrong or at best looks good on paper but would never ever be good in a game, then you are royally screwed. If you go for the fast release (or fast internal build) approach so that you can playtest all your ideas in a new prototype of the "final" game every week then I think you could accomplish a lot more. Just remember that CS started with 1 room, 1 player model and two teams and it just grew from there, like any healthy mod should.

You could argue that your mod wouldn't be downloaded by half a million (or whatever) like insurgency or red orchestra was at first release like 3 years after it was first started, and that because of this it wouldn't be counted as a very successful mod. But I'll bet you everything I own that if you make smaller releases early (after like 4 months) and built it from there it will generate a lot more downloads eventually and when you reach the 3 year mark you'd own beat the half a million with a million or more...

Let's not get hypocritical here Skjalg

Let's not compare CS with INS they are totally different projects with different scopes. Releasing often is a lot easier when you only have to include a new wad or a new map and your patches are only 5mb big. Things also take a lot longer to get done in Source (comparing to goldsrc). People would surely get pissed off if they had to download a new 100mb patch every 2 weeks to play the mod. I'm quite glad with have access to steam now, so releasing more often can actually be doable.

Of course we could have released more often but I think our pace is pretty good for such a big project.

I disagree. There were a number of mods for Half Life 2 that released early and they completely failed in terms of popularity. Players today want polished mods otherwise they will bash you to death. Hiring new staff for a unpopular mod is also very hard if not impossible.

Your comparison to CS also seems a bit out of place imo. No mod will ever again reach this level of success. Critizizing Jeremy for a lack of success? We must live in two different worlds. Both his mods won a "Mod of the Year" award. One of the mods won "make something unreal" and spawned a games company. It doesn't get much better in this day and age for a mod maker. A proper design document would have made the only difference. Then we could have released Insurgency 1.0 a lot earlier. Thats the only way i see how this mod could have been more succesfull. And for this was not Jeremy to blame.

With Valve opening Steam up for Mods its gets easier again though. You can really see the Patch history of DIPRIP, Synergy or Zombie Master getting much more faster since they have the ability to get it straight to the players. Imagine more and more mods getting into automatic update process it will hopefully give back some of the gold-src spirit.

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With Valve opening Steam up for Mods its gets easier again though. You can really see the Patch history of DIPRIP, Synergy or Zombie Master getting much more faster since they have the ability to get it straight to the players. Imagine more and more mods getting into automatic update process it will hopefully give back some of the gold-src spirit.

amen

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This is where Insurgency failed. Ofcourse you will waste huge amounts of time when you try to make a complete game without a design document. What I think Hourences is trying to say is that you shouldn't have done that in the first place, you should have started small and released early and built ontop of that with a release every other month. This way you wouldn't have needed a design doc, you'd change things and test them as you go and spot bad stuff very early.

It's just different development philosophies, and the one behind Insurgency clearly works for some kind of projects which don't want to reinvent anything. In such cases you don't need to release early because you already know if core gameplay works or not. That early release probably would kill the mod rather than helping it.

It’s all team size isn’t it?

Leads and a design document sets restrictions and restraints. On a small team this is a negative effect as it restricts a certain amount of development ‘freestyle’ and tweaking that makes development fun and arguably gives a product its soul. But on a larger project it stops these concepts ballooning into evil feature creep and a project that never gets finished.

Previously everyone used to do the small team/small mod with lots of gradual updates. But after Counter-Strike (which itself was developed progressively with a small team), everyone seems to be going for larger teams and the first release being amazing in quality. There must be some logic behind this jump, if someone released a new mod with a couple of classes, unfinished weapons, small map roster and known bugs would the mod-players pick them up and follow them? Or pick them up, label them unfinished and put them down for good? I think there's been a shift there, too.

Quote from Taylor

Previously everyone used to do the small team/small mod with lots of gradual updates. But after Counter-Strike (which itself was developed progressively with a small team), everyone seems to be going for larger teams and the first release being amazing in quality. There must be some logic behind this jump, if someone released a new mod with a couple of classes, unfinished weapons, small map roster and known bugs would the mod-players pick them up and follow them? Or pick them up, label them unfinished and put them down for good? I think there's been a shift there, too.

Would it be safe to say that there were far less MODs available by the time CS made its first releases in comparison to today? I suspect so. People were happy to try anything that changed up the game slightly, today there are way more teams developing mods who compete for player attention. They want to get it right and capture the player from the start. Back in the days there was no police vs terrorists MOD for half-life out there. Day of Defeat only had to compete with "War in Europe", that was it. Today there are shitloads of similarly themed MODs available, so if you can't stand out with an original theme or gameplay (which brings us back to the original topic), you try to stick out with well polished releases, which take a while to develop. That's how I see it anyway

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I disagree. There were a number of mods for Half Life 2 that released early and they completely failed in terms of popularity. Players today want polished mods otherwise they will bash you to death. Hiring new staff for a unpopular mod is also very hard if not impossible.Your comparison to CS also seems a bit out of place imo. No mod will ever again reach this level of success. Critizizing Jeremy for a lack of success? We must live in two different worlds. Both his mods won a "Mod of the Year" award. One of the mods won "make something unreal" and spawned a games company. It doesn't get much better in this day and age for a mod maker. A proper design document would have made the only difference. Then we could have released Insurgency 1.0 a lot earlier. Thats the only way i see how this mod could have been more succesfull. And for this was not Jeremy to blame.

You are totally disregardig my reasons for criticizing. I said that he would have had a lot more success if he had done it the way Hourences described with the team that he assembled. I'm quite aware that his mods have received some awards but I strongly believe that this is mostly due to his excellent ability to find talent and getting them onboard with his projects and thus creating something great.

I don't really get why you can't compare INS with CS, and stating that no mod will ever again reach the CS level of success is a bit narrowminded. It's like saying back in 1980 that you'll never need more than 10mb of hdd space. (my point being that people will always outdo what has been done).

Yes you are right about some mods failing when they release early, but this is because their idea was bad from the start and poorly executed, so gamers didn't even see the potential in them. I am talking about what a talented group of developers (like the ones on INS) could have accomplished. If ins had released early there is a small chance it could have failed, but I doubt that since most people on the team had a strong passion about creating something. Also worth mentioning is that those mods that release early and fail would have with 100% certainity failed later on "during development" without ever releasing anyways.

You bring up a good point there Minos, when you say players would get pissed off with 100mb patches every other week. But the only thing that really takes up space is maps, and you don't really need to update them very often, I also said every 2 months, which is a very acceptable timeframe.

Times have changed. This is why there will never be another CS success story. Modding has become far too complex and will get even more complex in the future. There is a shitload of competition now with other online games and mods, gamers are far more demanding in terms of quality, then you have the console market competing with the PC market etc. etc. etc.

I don't even see TC's being released at all in a not so far future. At least none that can only remotly compete with the quality of the games they are made for. So maybe this whole discussion about team sizes will be obsolete soon anyway.

Quote from Steppenwolf

Times have changed. This is why there will never be another CS success story. Modding has become far too complex and will get even more complex in the future. There is a shitload of competition now with other online games and mods, gamers are far more demanding in terms of quality, then you have the console market competing with the PC market etc. etc. etc.I don't even see TC's being released at all in a not so far future. At least none that can only remotly compete with the quality of the games they are made for. So maybe this whole discussion about team sizes will be obsolete soon anyway.

i disagree. it's true that times have changed, but there will always be something new over the next hill. you can't predict what will happen in 2, 5 or 10 years. sure people are more demanding, but in the end this will spawn a new form of modding, unlike of the old. perhaps modding will be reborn as something else...

I don't know if you guys have read this before, but it's a good insight on what problems and challenges mods (most specifically source mods)face these days : http://%7boption%7d

The article tells the story behind the failed development of one of the most promising Source SP Mods, called NightFall. I can tell you that when we where at the peak of our development the quality of our game was miles away from, for example, Black Mesa Source (we had a small partnership with them for a while, so we knew more or less what was going on with their game), but we really had a hard time developing it, and almost everything that could go wrong, actually went wrong, and the project was inevitably canceled.

While i don't agree with everything that is said in the article, and that contrary to the previous examples posted in this thread we lacked a lot of experience, it's still a good read, and i think it might bring something new to this discussion.

While this might sound mean, I knew Nightfall wasn't going to last. The moment I saw it was being promoted as a "professional mod" with wallpapers, fancy renders, magazine coverage and all that other glitzy stuff you see real developer studios do. This really is something mod teams need to stop doing. And the only mod I've seen that has done all of that, and survived is Insurgency which only lived because it had a bunch of great, experienced guys making it who knew their balls (except when pongles got beat by his ruskie girlfriend lol at that). I was going to mention something about Nightwatch here but we'll leave that dead horse alone.

Quote from dux

While this might sound mean, I knew Nightfall wasn't going to last. The moment I saw it was being promoted as a "professional mod" with wallpapers, fancy renders, magazine coverage and all that other glitzy stuff you see real developer studios do. This really is something mod teams need to stop doing.

You got it all wrong, although i understand that for those on the outside it might had seemed like we where trying to be like the big boys, all the "merchandising" we had was stuff that Tai (mod leader) did on his own free time just for fun, since he was a really creative person and had the need to constantly be creating something, he even started doing a graphics novel about the mod once but that never went outside our private forum, along with other amazing pieces of graphic design that he did without breaking a sweat.

Some other stuff, like the posters and business cards, where created do to us being invited to showcase the mod at two different game events, and we wanted to have something to give to everyone who played the game at those events. I actually had to spend some money from my own pocket to get a couple of posters printed and spent the entire night cutting business cards just so we had something to give away when we showed the mod at the WCG Portuguese finals in 2006. Also I must say that every mod team that gets an opportunity to have their mod tested in public like this, should take it. The amount of feedback you get from it is invaluable.

About the magazine coverage, we never asked any magazine to promote our mod, they where the ones who wanted to write about us, and you can't refuse opportunities like that as well. Besides i think every major Source mod has been featured in more than one magazine article, if i remember correctly theres a guy that is part of one of the HL2 modding sites, that also writes for PC Gamer UK (if I'm not mistaken), and he made articles about all major HL2 mods. Just go to the sites of a couple of mods and you will see that the articles are all from the same magazines.

I really don't see anything we made as a deliberate "marketing strategy", it was just stuff that got into the mod naturally, and opportunities that where presented to us that we, as a small humble mod team, couldn't afford to refuse.

All that time spent promoting and feedback for the mod at game shows and what happens, it died anyway. I would never do something like that with a mod unless I well knew that the mod would never die. Mod developers should spend less time promoting it and actually making it.