A General Guide For Mod Creation 29
Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Kieron Gillen has combined and updated a series of guides he wrote for getting into the development of game mods. He provides a detailed explanation of the process from concept to reality as well as a look at some of the obstacles you're likely to run into. Quoting:
"First thing is that it really is work, and should be planned as such. As I've said earlier, you really need to be aware you have to sacrifice other elements of your life to get it done. If you just rely on your free time, the Mod will fail. You may find it helpful to actually time-table periods when you can do stuff, in the same way you would book a regular evening class. If every night you put aside a limited amount of time to do work, you'll make steady progress. This is considerably healthier than the boom/bust approach which most modders will follow. But - y'know - most people on your team will move on a cycle of massive productivity followed by long fallow periods."
damn.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought soundtracker MODs were making a comeback. :(
Re:damn.. (Score:4, Informative)
I believe that was called "tracking" and one who did tracking was called a "tracker".
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Free Time (Score:5, Interesting)
It's true that if you just rely on free time to do work on a mod you'll never get it done.
For almost 5 years I woke up an hour early for work to work on my Quake 3 mod called BASE Conflict. This was the guaranteed only way to get things done with a full time job, part time school, and a wife and kid. Work finally came to a halt sometime after I transferred to WSU and with the increase in school work and I found myself working on homework in the morning rather that debugging UI code. But up until that point I made an amazing amount of progress. I'm currently porting my code to the ioquake3 code base and the patch files created for the port total nearly 400k or somewhere in the realm of 13000 new or changed lines of code.
It also helps to write out a list and keep it where you can see it. After I graduated I didn't really get back into the swing of things until I made a new to do list. If you check my sig you'll see that getting my website back up is somewhere near the top.
It depends on the scope, actually (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it depends on the scope of the mod, actually. Not everything is a total conversion, like the summary seems to assume.
I could be remembering wrong, but I think the smallest mod I've seen that did anything useful and got downloaded, was a 1 line change to a Creatures 3 script. Admittedly, there was obviously some time involved in reading and understanding the scripts, but I still can't imagine anyone needing to set time aside over long periods for that.
Also, a lot of games allow a more modular approach
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If you check my sig you'll see that getting my website back up is somewhere near the top.
To be honest, 5 years is too long for a free mod to be in development. You really need to face up to the fact that your mod is a failure in its present form, and start working on something for a newer game. Or do something smaller that you could have finished in weeks to a few months.
So far as picking quake 3 goes, people who still play that will have their favorite mods by now. At most you'll get a few people trying yours out for a bit. Your chance a of a decent userbase are severely limited, and that's on
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Cheeky Bstard!
"To be honest, 5 years is too long for a free mod to be in development."
Sorry, I would wait 5 years for a mod if it is that good. Some mods take some game worlds by storm, and become The definitive Expansion pack, i.e. Ledgends of Arana, started as a mod, now its the Definitive expansion pack, and ... IT IS STIL PLAYED. ( Dear god Space Siege is a bitter disappointment )
Quake 3 has a LOT of good mods. I play the Helms deep one from time to time, but still, I am looking for one with a sci-fi st
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Cheeky Bstard!
Yup
Sorry, I would wait 5 years for a mod if it is that good.
Some mods take some game worlds by storm, and become The definitive Expansion pack, i.e. Ledgends of Arana, started as a mod, now its the Definitive expansion pack, and ... IT IS STIL PLAYED.
Agreed, I play Dungeon Siege II and Broken world myself, I yet might get legends of Arrana again (lost my copy a couple of years ago)
Dear god Space Siege is a bitter disappointment
AGREE EMPHATICALLY!!!
Seriously, wtf IS that game? Because whatever it is, it isn't an RPG.
They even stick the few (what is it, ten?) items there are that you can pick up on your map so you can't help but find them.
As for the upgrade material that everything drops, well, what a crock. I don't think that the reward for dropping a boss should be a pile of junk you can make int
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You do realize that Counter Strike is a mod don't you?
Even CS:S is a mod, albeit not in quite the same way as CS was.
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To be fair the engine is now opensource so he could feasibly release his mod as a full game instead of a mod for anything.
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You hit it right on the head. The last year of that development time was a port to Steam. It's a neat engine and all but I couldn't use much of my old code and many things had to be rewritten from scratch and it's a bugger to get anything done in Steam. I would have rather used Doom 3 but I really needed large outdoor spaces in a way that engine could not provide.
After the end of that year I hadn't even come close to where I was in the Quake 3 version and I wasn't making progress as quickly. I realized that
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It's true that if you just rely on free time to do work on a mod you'll never get it done.
Disagree. I'm lead coder for a fairly sizable and popular mod (4th in moddb awards 2007, honourable mention and 2nd unreleased 2006, 14th and 2nd unreleased 2005) and I get everything I need to done just in my spare time, juggling a full-time job, a full-time girlfriend and a full-time cat. What I think he really means is only antisocial types need apply.
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What I'm suggesting is that you can't rely on free time when it comes about randomly. You have to set aside the time to make it happen. It was still free time, but it was partitioned off just for this purpose.
For the first 3 months or I would work on it in the evening. I wasn't very focused and work was slow. One day on a whim I went to bed an hour early and got up an hour early and did more in one hour than I had done all week. Maybe I'm easily distracted but this is what worked for me.
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That depends on what you're making. Obviously a one man team can't make the next Call of Duty or whatever, making what's essentially a new, AAA grade game needs a professional development team, making the mod equivalent of a flash game doesn't take long and can feasibly be done in one's free time. I've made loads of smaller mods (for the Spring engine [clan-sy.com], modding that involves making a new set of units as well as scripting any game logic you need beyond the standard Total Annihilation hehaviour it offers) in m
You shouldn't be creating mod (Score:5, Funny)
Don't write your own mod, you'll just screw it up. Use the % operator built into your language -- it will be faster and always come up with the right answer.
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It will... always come up with the right answer.
Unless you're using negative numbers!
Thats why I wrote my own mod function.
There's a lot of sense in this... (Score:4, Interesting)
My team is currently leading The Witcher mod competition [thewitcher.com], and I read through this article thinking 'oh, yes', 'oh, yes', 'oh, yes'. Compared with the very well established Neverwinter Aurora toolkit, D'Jinni, The Witcher toolkit, is very fragile, and very under-documented. And, of course, we're pioneers, so while there are a few people who have already tried some things, we're having to learn a lot through trial and error.
My conclusion? This is the last mod I'll do with closed source tools. D'Jinni produces very polished results - the scenery of The Witcher is breathtaking - but when things don't work we could at least debug and find out why not. So we're looking carefully at The Blender [blender.org] and the Java Monkey Engine [jmonkeyengine.com].
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"..but when things don't work we could at least debug and find out why not. "
How does blender factor into it? Or it just a FOSS option for 3d for you?
TBH; you did cite one reason I'm glad I'm modding on the UE engine.. Epic is fairly decent at providing documentation (even though to get -all- of it and do some low-level stuff you have to be a licensee). We're also fortunate that the company [tripwireinteractive.com] whose game we are modding is fairly open and helpful regarding it; perhaps because they started as modders..
It's not hard at all... (Score:3, Funny)
Oh yeah, don't forget to look out for rockers. [wikipedia.org]