I will start by quoting a bit of this article.
It was taken from the Valve Development Community article on making mods.

Quote:
Mod design

As a mod author, the most useful question you can ask yourself is "Why should someone play my mod?" It's a hard question to answer truthfully, but if you can answer it well, you're on the right track. Think about what other mods are out there, and what they offer. Does your mod offer something new to the players? Is what you offer enough to entice players who are busy playing other mods? Even if you can't answer this question, just thinking about it will probably help your mod.

Compete with gameplay

You have power commercial developers don't: You don't have to worry about the commercial viability of new gameplay styles. Commercial developers have to worry about appealing to retail, breaking even, and other nasty things, which is why most games are slight modifications on already proven gameplay. But you don't. You can try out truly new gameplay ideas that just might become the Next Big Thing. This is your edge over commercial developers. Make your job easier by concentrating on this edge, and don't spend your time trying to compete in the areas that commercial products are strong in. Most mods can't compete on a content level (maps, models, sounds, etc) with commercial products. They've got teams of artists with years of experience. Beat them with your gameplay. Players will play a mod that has very little in the way of new content, but has really fun gameplay. Something many people don't realize is that Team Fortress 1 had almost no new art for a year after it was first released.

Release soon, release often

You have another power over commercial developers. You can release much, much faster and more often than they can. We've summarized this mod development philosophy with the phrase, "Release soon, Release often." Commercial developers work for 2-3 years, release their game, and hope to god people like it. You don't have to make that leap of faith. You can design your whole mod, write 25% of it and polish it to a playable state, then release it and begin getting feedback immediately. Then you can start adding the rest of your design piece by piece, at the same time rolling in the player's feedback to the first version, and continue releasing every month or two. You're in touch with your players at all times, so you'll never be in the situation where you've spent a lot of time on something you're not sure your players will like. The trick is to cut your mod up into slices. The initial version needs to be fun and playable, but doesn't need every cool feature you've thought of.
Be careful. "Release soon" doesn't mean releasing bad quality stuff, it just means doing your mod in small, polished increments. The first version of Counter-Strike didn't have half of the features they have now. The CS team released a high quality, but not big mod. Over the past year, they've been regularly adding more and more features and, in response, their player base has just continued to grow and grow.

Different is not always better

When thinking about your game design, don't fall into the trap of believing that "Different is Better." There's no reason to rewrite the shotgun code and have a new shotgun model if it doesn't impact your game in any interesting way. Keep in mind the first question, "Why should someone play my mod?" The answer, "My mod has a new combat system, and a new movement system," isn't necessarily a good answer. So your combat system is different that Half-Life's. OK... but is it better? Does it make your mod more fun to play? Does a new movement system make the game more fun? Player's are used to existing systems, and making them learn another one needs to be worth it for them. So before you think about changing something, make sure you know you're changing it for the better, and that it'll make your mod more fun. Don't be afraid to just leave something the same as it was in Half-Life.

Realistic goals

Create realistic goals for yourself. Think about how long it takes a commercial developer to make an FPS shooter with 10 weapons. If your mod is going to have 40 weapons, you're making life really hard for yourself. The thing to keep in mind here is "Quality over Quantity." Players would far prefer to have 10 unique, well balanced, and fun to use weapons than 40 unbalanced weapons, some of which are slightly tweaked versions of others.
Don't be afraid to cut content and features. If the mod looks like it's never going to be finished, or there's some content that you don't think meets the quality of the rest of the mod, then start cutting. During the development of HL at least 30% of the original features in the design were cut because it became obvious they were unattainable in our timeline, or because we decided they weren't worth their development time. As we said above, "Quality over Quantity." Players would prefer having 3 really good, well play-tested maps over 10 untested ones, and it'll give your mod a reputation for quality content. Don't let the world see your worst stuff.


Its a nice article, and provides a sensible guide to making mods.
That aside.



Well.
Its been a year since I had a scream at you last time in my initially highly reasonable Merger article.

Let me put that in a neat perspective for you. On 2005-02-23, Badspot started working on a Retail model of Blockland Vanilla. For those interested, he sealed-the-deal with Garage Games on 2005-02-26. The first release was on 2007-06-02 12.

Yes kiddies, that means that Badspot got this thing done in two years and four months. That was him, Kompressor, and a poorly furnished apartment with computers to create a game that has netted him a serious pile of cash to date. Around that same time later, he released version 13 of the game, which is a sketchy maybe... 9 builds since he started. TBM was built in perhaps 340 days, according to newsposts on the newsreel on the old site.

Now, Cemetech put its collective mindpower behind TBG a long, long time ago. You established the SVN on January 6th, 2009. It is now the first of July, in the rosy year of 2010.

In that time, I made 2269 posts on Blockland forums, two Chrome themes, a dozen screensavers, and a lot more. Given that Badspot made his game in two years, this should be half done. You surely have the equivalent brainpower that he had here, what with Swivelgames, Elfprince, Kerm, Cyberprime, Shiznit and Floodnik all at your disposal.
Given that the TBM crew also pieced together the marvel that was TBM 2 in less than a year, albeit with a much larger and better organized development team, I am sort of clueless as to what the hell you guys are doing here.

You've been perfectly happy to record how you're planning to tackle this project, and we keep hearing about the wonderous leaps and bounds we are apparently taking, but where is the actual proof? So far, we've seen a new menu and the integration of the new engine. Marvellous, but not even close to a playable game!
In the meantime, we've had to put up with nothing.

Furthermore, your business plan is unrealistic. There are all these mystery developers that you want to come out of the woodwork when the scent of this game seeps into the communities out there. Its not going to happen. You need to advertise, guys, seriously.
Marketing is about making your product easy to access, and get people interested in what you have to sell or offer. You don't even have a Moddb page showing progress shots or whatever. The website is dark and scares a lot of the newbies we point from theorangeblock.org your way away, and TBG itself is very hard to find and access. It isn't marketing itself to say the least.
(And don't mention that we are welcome to make a new website theme. That is also a rather fanciful attitude - flipping the bird right back at us, when it is your website in question.)

Continuing the line of least realism, you expect developers to roll in here and pay for the rights to work on the meat of your game. That isn't happening either. It is not a realistic attitude to expect people will pay for access to something of yours. People rarely pay to work for other people, and generally only for the rich and famous, hoping some will rub off.
Before you yell "Closed Source SVN costs a lot!!!" at me, why not throw the engine files into a super heavy duty encrypting software suite like TrueCrypt and then put that on a public upload service and only give out keys to the developers you want?
Definition of Open Source: (Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Definition)

1. Free Redistribution (And Source Code)

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

Now, is TBG Open Source?
elrunethe2nd wrote:
You've been perfectly happy to record how you're planning to tackle this project, and we keep hearing about the wonderous leaps and bounds we are apparently taking, but where is the actual proof? So far, we've seen a new menu and the integration of the new engine. Marvellous, but not even close to a playable game!
In the meantime, we've had to put up with nothing.
Yes, you've had to "put up with" it, because you have a right and privilege to a freeware game being developed out of the goodness of someone else's heart!

elrunethe2nd wrote:
Furthermore, your business plan is unrealistic. There are all these mystery developers that you want to come out of the woodwork when the scent of this game seeps into the communities out there. Its not going to happen. You need to advertise, guys, seriously.
Again, it's a fun project, not something to have business plans about. I think elfprince13 and CyberPrime have plenty of other things going on in their lives.

elrunethe2nd wrote:
The website is dark and scares a lot of the newbies we point from theorangeblock.org your way away[...]
Be careful to differentiate between Cemetech and TBG here. I am Cemetech; TBG is housed here. You mean the fact that it's maroon instead of blindingly white drives people away? What kind of cowardly people are these, that they're scared by colors on a screen?
elrunethe2nd wrote:
[...] and TBG itself is very hard to find and access.
Cemetech > Forum > Freebuild. That was hard.
elrunethe2nd wrote:
(And don't mention that we are welcome to make a new website theme. That is also a rather fanciful attitude - flipping the bird right back at us, when it is your website in question.)
Again, it's not their website, it's MY website. If you want to insult my hard work and efforts, direct your criticisms at me, not at Elfprince and Cyberprime.

elrunethe2nd wrote:
Continuing the line of least realism, you expect developers to roll in here and pay for the rights to work on the meat of your game.
Are you on crack? I've never seen them request money from developers in exchange for the privilege of working on the game...
KermMartian wrote:


elrunethe2nd wrote:
Continuing the line of least realism, you expect developers to roll in here and pay for the rights to work on the meat of your game.
Are you on crack? I've never seen them request money from developers in exchange for the privilege of working on the game...


I actually was searching the FB forum for a post requesting 'developing money'... No results.


EDIT: typo
If you don't like that we aren't developing as quickly as you would like then I suggest you start doing something. Rather than yelling at us to hurry up, why don't you help us hurry up? You have the skill to take on various things. If you offer an improved piece of code, or art, and submit it, I can almost guarantee that we will incorporate it into the game. If you want you could probably even get SVN access! Get involved; don't sit on the sidelines and complain that something's not going as well as you would like it to when you have no hand in it.
CyberPrime wrote:
If you don't like that we aren't developing as quickly as you would like then I suggest you start doing something. Rather than yelling at us to hurry up, why don't you help us hurry up? You have the skill to take on various things. If you offer an improved piece of code, or art, and submit it, I can almost guarantee that we will incorporate it into the game. If you want you could probably even get SVN access! Get involved; don't sit on the sidelines and complain that something's not going as well as you would like it to when you have no hand in it.
I completely agree here. The whole point of a collaborative community project is to get a lot of people involved in coding, a lot of people interested in artwork, a lot of people enjoying beta-testing. If you're unhappy, do something about it!
To be completely clear, if anyone is interested in helping with engine development, they need access to our closed repository, which will cost me an extra $1.50 a month. For all that you all want this to come out on in a timely manner, I have funding this project completely on my own, and I can't afford to give up paying jobs for the couple weeks at a time I might have them in order to work on this in an ordered fashion. If for every word of b*tching I've heard about how long this has endeavor has taken, someone from the TOB community had donated a dollar, I would have been able to buy an engine license 2 years earlier, and I could afford to tell people no when they offer me $600 for a week of work.
Why is it closed source?
Lucas W wrote:
Why is it closed source?
You have to have a TGE license to work on the engine. Not everyone can work on the engine because you're legally required to own a TGE license to work on the engine. You're more then welcome to contribute scripts, maps, models, etc... without a license, but to get your hands on the actual game engine's development, you have to have access to the closed repository.


(correct me on this if I'm wrong; if not, please clarify Smile )
Quote:
Quote:
elrunethe2nd wrote:
The website is dark and scares a lot of the newbies we point from theorangeblock.org your way away[...]


Be careful to differentiate between Cemetech and TBG here. I am Cemetech; TBG is housed here. You mean the fact that it's maroon instead of blindingly white drives people away? What kind of cowardly people are these, that they're scared by colors on a screen?


No, the fact that to the average web user this site looks like a "nerd" site, I'm sure they get the message straight away when they see the logo.

Also, Cemetech is way too bulky for a site with a forum for a game shoved into the corner.

Quote:
I am Cemetech; TBG is housed here


What is TBG? It's not TBM, It's not ToB, It's not Cemetech.....
KermMartian wrote:
Yes, you've had to "put up with" it, because you have a right and privilege to a freeware game being developed out of the goodness of someone else's heart!

You gentlemen are developing the game because you want to. There is no goodness involved, its something you have a vested interest in.
I don't do my comics because I am a being of goodwill and kindness. We call those fairies. They take your teeth and give you money. I do my comics because I think they're pretty funny. Anything else is a bonus.

I think people with a lot more than you guys do a lot of things to. Don't try and wipe that off as an excuse. Unless you are at work/school or whatever day in, day out, and are balls to the wall with an hour every week to work on this, which I enormously doubt, nobody is unable to work on something, especially if it is something they want to do. A business plan would be a solid step to getting stuff done.


KermMartian wrote:
Cemetech > Forum > Freebuild. That was hard.

TBG is incredibly hard to access. The fact that I had to write a long and rather specific tutorial about it that people still are unable to follow quite often is proof of this.

I am directing my criticisms to the people of the website. It's really your job to decide which bits relate to you.
I was criticizing Freebuild's online face, which, for the moment includes your website, so yes that was directed at you too. For the moment, Freebuild is a part of Cemetech too. I wasn't suggesting "blinding white", but this is dreary, you know.

KermMartian wrote:
Are you on crack? I've never seen them request money from developers in exchange for the privilege of working on the game...

Look harder.


elfprince13 wrote:
To be completely clear, if anyone is interested in helping with engine development, they need access to our closed repository, which will cost me an extra $1.50 a month.

Words. Read them. They are often meant for that purpose.

I wrote:
Before you yell "Closed Source SVN costs a lot!!!" at me, why not throw the engine files into a super heavy duty encrypting software suite like TrueCrypt and then put that on a public upload service and only give out keys to the developers you want?

If a key gets leaked, that is equivalent to a developer leaking the engine files themselves on a close source SVN system.
I think the more appropriate response should be "we don't care"
Lucas W wrote:
No, the fact that to the average web user this site looks like a "nerd" site, I'm sure they get the message straight away when they see the logo.
Oh no, a game being developed on a "nerd" site? Technically-proficient individuals writing a game?! My whole world has been turned upside-down!
KermMartian wrote:
Lucas W wrote:
No, the fact that to the average web user this site looks like a "nerd" site, I'm sure they get the message straight away when they see the logo.
Oh no, a game being developed on a "nerd" site? Technically-proficient individuals writing a game?! My whole world has been turned upside-down!

That logo is about as welcoming as a plank of wood to someone who comes here with playing with blocks in mind.
The first three times I came to this website after seeing the URL on the maps I was convinced it was a terrible mistake and that I had found the wrong forum.
I really want to say something on how selfish you are being.....


Also, this site *isnt* revolving on freebuild... it's about calculators... and DCS....
I think narrow-minded would be a better word to describe it. Just the following comment is narrow-minded:

Quote:
I think people with a lot more than you guys do a lot of things to. Don't try and wipe that off as an excuse.

The people on Cemetech are not paid to work on this game. This means they can decide when they work on it and nobody can do anything about it. If they do not want to do something, complaining about it or trying to force them to do it anyway will change nothing. Since this site advocates freedom of speech (and I am fairly sure most established members on Cemetech do), he can still complain as much as he wishes , but it doesn't mean he won't get ignored.
Just like the KKK.. they are always ignored these days.....


DJ is right, you are being narrow, THEY... HAVE... LIVES...

If you want to see improvement, start paying them or do it YOURSELF.
qazz42 wrote:
Just like the KKK.. they are always ignored these days.....


DJ is right, you are being narrow, THEY... HAVE... LIVES...

If you want to see improvement, start paying them or do it YOURSELF.
You need to stop trying to derail this thread.

Also, this site may argue in favor of free speech, but it isn't very successful. Threads get locked all the time, and a lot of what Swivelgames and qazz are trying to do is to get the upset people to shut up.

They may be able to decide to develop this game however they like, but we're the audience. We'll be doing you a favor by being the people who will play, test and ensure this game has a community after it is finished or released in a playable form. Surely that counts for something. Besides, if people are upset enough to make threads like these, it generally means something is wrong somewhere. Going and making mass denials across the board and saying that we should clam up and let people do whatever they have been doing so far is not an answer.
Sigh... Not to shut up, to understand to not complain when most of the programmers are not paid and do this for fun, and thus, should not work on something just for you.

Quick thing, yes there is freedom of speech, but this aint America, it is cemetech with Kerm as out beneviolent Dictator.


Heh I remember when I was like this about ndless I was like "I WANT NDLESS2.O U R ALL STOOOPIDZ"
I've been perfectly content to sit and watch this, but you evidently don't care about anything the people here have to say, so now I'm going to play Logic Police.

elrunethe2nd wrote:
You gentlemen are developing the game because you want to. There is no goodness involved, its something you have a vested interest in.
I don't do my comics because I am a being of goodwill and kindness. We call those fairies. They take your teeth and give you money. I do my comics because I think they're pretty funny. Anything else is a bonus.

elrunethe2nd wrote:
They may be able to decide to develop this game however they like, but we're the audience. We'll be doing you a favor by being the people who will play, test and ensure this game has a community after it is finished or released in a playable form. Surely that counts for something.

I smell a contradiction. Surely if they work on the game only because they want to they'll only work on it when the inclination strikes? And yet you claim some sort of entitlement to what they work on for fun..

elrunethe2nd wrote:
Besides, if people are upset enough to make threads like these, it generally means something is wrong somewhere. Going and making mass denials across the board and saying that we should clam up and let people do whatever they have been doing so far is not an answer.

The only such person I see is you making an ass of yourself..
  
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