Modding tips series I've started writing

[Defrag]

Following on from an old forum thread, I decided to post some of these tips as a series of articles on my blog (Oh God yes, I started a blog. Kill me now!)

Many of the tips are just common sense suggestions, but I feel a lot of them could be useful as these suggestions are borne out of my own experiences and the mistakes we made on Fortress Forever.

I've started posting them now, and will keep adding more until I run out of stuff to say. Forgive the ugly blog formatting etc. as I haven't looked into setting up a nice style yet (anyone got a recommendation?)

Post #1

Post #2

Post #3

Post #4

Post #5

Post #6

[Psy]

Some good advice. I'll definitely be following the proceeding posts.

I couldn't agree more about the "Keep your team as small as possible..." specifically the part about people not pulling their own weight. I find it most annoying when nobody else on the team seems be doing anything as it's the most horrible, demotivating thing that could ever happen. Maybe a key point that you could write about in your next post is the importance of showing progress regularly from everybody. It's all fun and games when Theoretical Bob posts progress on a regular basis every week but when Billy-Bob Jones who shares the same workload doesn't, you can't help but wander what the hell is going on.

[Defrag]

Those topics will most definitely be covered Cheers.

[jaboo224]

Some good tips, but i cant agree with some of them \:

I think the thing with modding is its a learning experience, there is no definitive way of doing it... you just do it.

[Defrag]

I've tried to post the ones I feel are fairly general (i.e. the ones that can be safely applied to most teams). As I already said, you have to think about these things and decide whether it will work for you.

I often disagree with the content of blogs, but if it gets me thinking about the subject matter than that is definitely a good thing.

[jaboo224]

I find the best thing that benefits a mod is solid communities that allow you to meet people for modding such as mapcore... I think the reason why Insurgency has had such great level designers is because of this community along with others. Communities are a handy tool, they can help your mod greatly in questions and critiques. Mapcore has treated me very kindly and given me some great insight.

Also resources seem to help enormously... Any tools should be shared amongst developers.. as well I think its important for developers to understand all sides of the mod. for example a modeller shouldnt stop learning at modelling, he should try his best to understand sound development and coding so his work can be improved.

[Campaignjunkie]

http://www.hylobatidae.org/modmatic/?ac ... info&id=20

A review about a Guildhall mod that kind of turns into a "how to structure your mod" post. I think, by and large, and the biggest problem with teams is being too ambitious. I mean, we still get these mods with zBrush sculpt renders of some random NPC dude #04 - but you don't have the time, the attention span, or the resources to do sculpts of every new NPC you're putting into the game, to match commercial projects... Less graphics, more gameplay and design.

[Skjalg]

I liked your first post about unit testing, but I think it lacked the part about releasing your test version -- to REALLY see if it works.

I see so many modders spending over 2~3 years making their mod without any releases, and this ALWAYS fails in some way. Mostly because they havent had 1000 nubs running around in your game pointing out the obvious mistakes you've done.

If you release early and keep iterating on that early release you'll eventually end up with a project that has been altered and molded by the entire community, and it will kick ass.

[Ginger Lord]

I liked your first post about unit testing, but I think it lacked the part about releasing your test version -- to REALLY see if it works.

I see so many modders spending over 2~3 years making their mod without any releases, and this ALWAYS fails in some way. Mostly because they havent had 1000 nubs running around in your game pointing out the obvious mistakes you've done.

If you release early and keep iterating on that early release you'll eventually end up with a project that has been altered and molded by the entire community, and it will kick ass.

Unfortunately I think that model of releasing no longer works as well as it did. These days people have very strong first impressions and minuscule long term impressions. If they don't like the first version, 90% of the time they probably won't be coming back to check.

Then again these days most people want quick fixes of action and intensity so imo mods are having a much tougher time competing with official games.

[e-freak]

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.

[Defrag]

I think it's a valid point; I will talk about that and what GL said, too.

[Steppenwolf]

I agree with GL. Look at what happend to the Iron Grip mod. After their first release basically nobody cared about it anymore. When i checked steam stats there were like 1-2 people playing it.

[Pampers]

afaik iron grip was released as an indie title on the q3 engine just before christmas but it was never any sucsessful on the source engine

[Hourences]

I think that depends largely on the type of mod, audience, timing, etc. really. We are doing "small" releases every few months too, and it works out really well for us. The thing is, we got a story, and it is much like the HL episodes really. People come back and continue playing because they want to see how it goes on. I think that is the big thing. If you do release a mod like this, make sure there are reasons for people to come back other than just polish. I think that it would indeed be quite difficult to get this type of release model going for MP, but for SP it is most certainly a very valid way of working imo.

[Defrag]

Posted a couple of more things.

As for the iterative vs. big release: I personally think both approaches can work. If you have something unique that nobody else is doing, or doing well (see: GMod) then if you hit 'em between the eyes they will keep coming back. If you have something that is basically competing with retail games (anything to do with WW2...) or remaking something then if it doesn't have the immediate bombast and quality that people expect, I don't think people will play it.

I didn't really consider this until FF had been well into development. I made FF because I wanted to make FF, so I s'pose I was blind to the issue until we were too far underway to consider iterative releases and the impact they would have.