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