Since Orfeo’s been doing his ‘What Not To Do‘ series, I thought it might be an idea to counter it with the exact opposite: some tips on how to go about running a mod. However, I basically have no idea how to do that. The only mods I’ve ever run that haven’t been solo projects have basically collapsed. So my idea was pretty much broken from the start. But! I realised I know some people who have been successful in this area. So I decided to talk to a handful of them. I’m hoping to get more responses, but for now, here’s three expert modders telling you how they think you should go about creating one of your own.
Robert Yang (Radiator): Start small and then go smaller. If you’re having trouble implementing a feature, design around it. For example, I can’t code worth a damn, but my solution isn’t to find a coder; my solution is to tweak my mechanics so I don’t need custom code. Don’t get fixated on an idea if it’s not working, just drop it and move on. (But don’t delete it either. It might be useful a month later.)
Don’t plan media releases every week — commercial games need to advertise because people actually buy them. (Do you know why mods show weapon renders? It’s because they don’t actually have a game to show you yet. It only testifies to the weakness of their design.)
But my main advice is nothing that hasn’t been said before: no, literally, Daniel Benmergui said it: “If you don’t feel personally exposed when publishing the game, you did not make art.”
Take a risk. Make yourself vulnerable. Experiment. Build games that you KNOW some people won’t like. In contrast, re-creating your favorite game (“Call of Duty on the Source engine!!”) is the equivalent of turtling in an RTS; you’re giving up a lot of map control for a vague, long-shot victory that any competent opponent will exploit and prevent.
What’s the worst that can happen if you do something different? Some dude says, “I won’t download this.” Oh no! End of the world, right? Some assholes will say you’re being pretentious. But tomorrow you’ll design something absolutely amazing that people will love — meanwhile, they’ll still be assholes.
Dan Pinchbeck (Dear Esther): I love shooters as much as the next gamer, but for me mods give us a chance to really work out where the line is drawn and do our best to blur, break and ignore it. We don’t have to sell these things, so why not blast out some really left-field ideas and see where we end up. Mods are never finished products, they feed into each other, grow, develop, so for me a polished, finished product is less important than spewing ideas out there and seeing what sparks they make when they collide with other things. So I guess my first thought about this is “why not – go for it”
Having said that, it’s really frustrating to see a good idea wrecked by bad implementation – and it tends to obscure the great idea as well – so getting a good team on it is essential. Know your limitations, exceed them slightly, but don’t bite off more than you can chew. The best lesson I ever learned was recognising that I am a truly bad coder. And mapper. Work to your strengths and find the people whose strengths are your weaknesses and let them shine in the areas they are great at. And they will think of things you didn’t, spot mistakes you haven’t, and make you questions all the assumptions you inevitably have.
And have fun. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Jonas Wæver (The Nameless Mod): The advice I always give is to keep your ambitions in check and do something small – it’s better to aim low and release something than to aim high and fail, etc. But I think Yang and Pinchbeck would be better at covering that angle, so since I’m the one with the super over-ambitious mod, how about I give you a piece of advice in case you completely abandon your common sense and embark on an enormous total conversion like I did?
Whatever you do, you need to be determined and able to finish everything yourself if all else fails and just release whatever you can get done. No matter how awesome your ideas are, nobody else will ever be as passionate about them as you are, so if you have no actual game development skills and you’re not genuinely prepared to learn, you are much less likely to succeed. Having a content creation skill (such as programming, level design, or 3D art) is also critical in assembling a team, because why would anybody worth their salt want to make your game if you have nothing other than the idea to contribute to the development process? If you can put together some art or a level, or prototype some game features before you start asking around for help, people can see that you know what you’re doing.
The good news is that if you actually get a mod team up and running, you will learn so much about every aspect of game development even if you fail to release a finished mod, and that’s a pretty good payoff in my opinion.
Regarding some of Jonas advice – he reminds me of a worrying trend in the mod-world to devalue the idea.
The paranoid demand for material content from every contributor is akin to the demand for years worth of qualifications to get a job in a given sector.
Qualifications are frequently earned by the dumbly persistent rather than the impatient but talented – the best and brightest often find some quite original ways to the top not involving eight years of university.
Indeed, most students I’ve known tend to drop out of three subjects before contenting themselves with something wholly unrelated to their ambitions around their late twenties, then have some children and sell cars or similar.
The ‘idea’ is the motivation and energy of the mod. The guy who has the goal in mind gives the ship a destination and keeps the morale high, not to mention assuring the delivery is worth having waited for when it arrives.
A functional mod released without a decent idea is a dead thing, as the modern mainstream shows us over, and over.
A JOAT can be useful, and a variety of skills is great – but not every good writer/designer has the patience or the inclination to churn out individual furniture prop models or to optimise code til 3am.
It’s a matter of personalities. I’ve gathered a fair selection of contacts over the years in various fields, and I find very similar tracks run through the minds of each type. Common threads of personality, varying degrees of patience versus imagination.
Purely speculative, but not without evidence.
A multitasking lead designer is a rare thing; one who is actually particularly competent at any of his fields is rarer still.
Don’t underestimate the idea. The most technologically proficient and organised mod development and release is meaningless when the game is lifeless and boring.
I think Jonas’ advice is more that you’re much more likely to see that idea out of the door if you can make it yourself, than if you’re having to rely on others who might not share your vision so passionately.
Yeah, Lewis got it right. The irony of my advice is that when I joined The Nameless Mod, my only skill was writing – they had a well rounded team but no ideas for a story (talk about Modding Bizarro World), so I jumped at the opportunity to be the vision guy for a team of talented people. The reason it worked is that the guy who actually started the project, Lawrence, was a level designer who had already started working on a map before he began recruiting for the mod.
I probably didn’t emphasise this enough, but there was an important point dropped into my paragraph: “if you have no actual game development skills **and you’re not genuinely prepared to learn**” – throughout the development of our 7 year project, almost everybody dropped from the team and had to be replaced, and towards the end, I ended up personally filling in for people in every area of development apart from 3D art and audio. I had to learn level design, 2D art, and even gameplay scripting in order to ensure that the mod was finished. I’m sure Lawrence could say the same, he ended up doing level design and 3D art on top of basically managing the team on full time.
So I’m not saying you can’t start a mod if you don’t have any actual skills, I’m saying if you do that, you’d better be prepared to learn if/when it becomes necessary :-)
And I *am* speaking from experience – my first DX mod was an equally ambitious project that failed completely because I, as the team leader, did not understand the particulars of game development, how the engine and its content pipeline worked, or indeed the details of what anybody else on the team were supposed to be doing.
That said, Yang’s advice should always overrule mine: don’t go crazy, start small and go smaller. My advice exists for everybody who lacks enough self-constraint to heed Yang’s :P
Jonas, I couldn’t disagree more.
Everyone has ideas.
But few have viable concepts. And the only way to know if it’s viable is to do the actual design work of building and testing and building and testing.
Modding isn’t a highly specialized or arcane talent. It’s a skill that you learn. You pick up Photoshop, you open a game editor, you write code. If you suck at it, start getting better at it by doing it.
This is not a worrying trend. It’s modders finally waking up and ditching dead weight.
Err, I meant “Jakkar,” not Jonas. I can’t read.
Heh, yeah, I was thinking about writing a piece like this but I realised that I can only criticise.
Nice piece lewis!
Yang: Heh, yeah I was about to say, that doesn’t sound like you disagree with me at all :P
It’s probably worth noting that it’s as much a question of what you demand of others than anything else. You can be as unskilled as you want if you work alone (if you pick a relatively easily moddable game such as Neverwinter Nights, you won’t need any skills more advanced than playing with Lego), but if you start asking other people to help you out, you have certain obligations.
As Yang said, the very least that’s expected of mod managers is that they have to understand what everybody else is doing, at least roughly. I can’t model to save my life, but I know what goes into it. As a game designer, you have a lot to do during the concept and preproduction phases, but your work is pretty much done when the project enters full production, and then you have to start doing something else because if you stop noticeably contributing to the project, the team will stop as well. I find that game design and level design make good bedfellows, but if you’re working on a text-heavy game such as an RPG, you may be able to get away with writing.
Ultimately, it comes down to etiquette: I always considered it pretty arrogant to just throw up a game concept and ask people to execute it for you if you aren’t capable of doing any of the work yourself. Everybody has ideas, so yours better be the best god damn idea in the world to pull something like that ;-)
Like it or not, ideas are cheap – implementation is expensive.
I do tend to go on a bit, don’t I?
As a modder this has to be the best article (and thread to go with it) that I’ve read in a long while. It’s great to hear these things from guys that have released these popular projects. I haven’t yet released a mod (I’m close) but I’ve been on a few teams that failed, and learned pretty much everything said here along the way.
One thing I haven’t heard much comment on is team size. To me it seems like the larger the mod team, the faster the mod dies. I was on a team that drew in 20+ people and usually what happens is the person who’s organizing the whole thing can’t really handle the full time job that results from that team size. Another team I joined had about 6 – 8 active developers at any time, and while they lasted much longer, the same thing eventually happened. So far the most successful mod I’ve been part of is the one I’m leading, with a team of only 3. We haven’t released, but at least I know we’re going to, and it’s because we’ve been easy to keep together. We’re not relying on 6 model makers to check in every day. Aside from that, I’ve learned all of the skills myself (save animation) so I can step in and do whatever is needed to finish this up.
Team size is hard for me to comment on, but I can say that TNM had about 20 people working on it at any time throughout development. Those weren’t the same 20 people from start to finish, we had well over 50 people work on the game in total, but the team size seemed to stay around 20, which was what we reckoned we needed to realise the project.
I don’t know how we made it work. I can think of a few possible factors. First of all, we had a management of first one (Lawrence), then soon two (myself), and finally three (Gelo) people to poke everyone regularly. Secondly, we allowed our contributors a fair degree of independence, so often a week or two would pass where we didn’t hear from anybody, then they would swing by and show off some progress or ask for additional info on what they were meant to be doing. We tolerated that most of the time.
Third, when we lost somebody, we just replaced them and carried on. A lot of the time we were able to hand people’s half-finished work over to their replacement, other times I took over myself. And fourth, we had a slightly less turbulent team of about 8-10 people in the end that stayed with us and contributed steadily to the project, regardless of the chaos engulfing the less dedicated half of the team.
Sure it was chaotic a lot of the time, but we just kept at it, and in the end it worked out. Down to equal parts dumb luck and persistence, I guess.