Posts by Minos

  • Originality in mods

    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.

  • Originality in mods

    Quote from Steppenwolf

    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. For example the lack of proper design documents was nearly the downfall of both these projects.

    If i would ever start to work on a mod again i would make sure that it gets a proper design document and a well organized plan for the coding. You waste so much ressources when people don't know _exactly_ to the detail what they are supposed to do. The coders will prioritize on the wrong things or will code stuff that is unnecessary, the level designers will create map layouts that don't work etc.

    In the long run this will demotivate the team more then some "professionalism".

    I totally agree with this. Organization can never be bad.

    If I was to start a new mod nowadays I'd gather 3 different people to start with, one experienced in coding, other in art and and another one in game design. We'd sit down and discuss what we want to achieve with our project and what our longterm goals would be. We would write basic design docs, code skeleton, conventions, rules, define the art direction etc... Once everything is established and we are sure about what direction to take we would start recruiting a few people, preferably people we know and trust. These people would form our core team. This way the mod team could grow around these few people making organization easier and making it clear to everyone what their role is.

    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 do agree with releasing the mod in smaller cycles though. It's easier to keep focus when you have a rough idea of when things should be done and what features need to be worked on for each release.

    The biggest mistake mods can commit however, is too much exposure as it takes the focus away. You get more concerned about polishing your work so it looks good on magazines/screenshots than working on the core gameplay. We were a lot less mature in Insurgency back then, and we know how too much exposure is bad. We lost precious hours dealing with mod drama and shit like that. I hate it when the first thing mod teams create is an empty webpage. You shouldn't build your mod an webpage until you have a fully functional beta and any gameplay to show. Any mod can show pretty screenshots, but only a few succeed in having good gameplay. In the long run nobody will care about eye candy as technology grows and games consequently look outdated. A good gameplay can never get old though and that's the key to longterm success in my opinion. That's why people still play Quake 3, CS 1.6 and Fallout, despite those games being 10 years old.

  • "casualizing" of games

    I blame this phenomenon to trend of big corporations buying out every and each small company. Small developers had a lot more freedom a decade ago. They could actually make games they would enjoy playing and try new formulas without worrying too much pleasing the publisher or marketing trends. As more and more devs got bought out by big companies, they had to stick to their publishers marketing vision and needs. Considering these publishers invest a shitload of money in triple A games they want these games to be as risk-free as possible, forcing developers to stick to proven marketing formulas and dumbing down their game to please more casual gamers. This is specially obvious in games like Spore, where you are hardly punished when you fail. (It happens nothing but respawning in your nest when you die) This works well with casual or kid gamers but piss the shit off of hardcore gamers.

    Some casual games are actually pretty good, despite hardcore gamers' prejudice. There are many challenging and refreshing games on the DS and on Steam. Elite Beat Agents (DS) and Audiosurf (Steam) comes to mind.

    Personally, I hope devs start giving players the ability to customize difficulty settings just like we do with advanced video options. It would be awesome to be able to choose whether or not you want auto-regeneration or health kits, infinite continues or not, etc... That would represent many design challenges but would be worth the effort in the end.