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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.
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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. 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. The CS team released a high quality, but not big mod. The first version of Counter-Strike didn't have half of the features they have now. "Release soon" doesn't mean releasing bad quality stuff, it just means doing your mod in small, polished increments.
The initial version needs to be fun and playable, but doesn't need every cool feature you've thought of.īe careful. The trick is to cut your mod up into slices. 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. 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 can design your whole mod, write 25% of it and polish it to a playable state, then release it and begin getting feedback immediately. You don't have to make that leap of faith. 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 can release much, much faster and more often than they can. You have another power over commercial developers. Something many people don't realize is that Team Fortress 1 had almost no new art for a year after it was first released. Players will play a mod that has very little in the way of new content, but has really fun gameplay. They've got teams of artists with years of experience.
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Most mods can't compete on a content level (maps, models, sounds, etc) with commercial products. 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. This is your edge over commercial developers. You can try out truly new gameplay ideas that just might become the Next Big Thing. 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. You have power commercial developers don't: You don't have to worry about the commercial viability of new gameplay styles. 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. Think about what other mods are out there, and what they offer. If they're a modeler who's done 20 models, but they're all half-finished, you don't want them.Īs 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. Make sure they've actually finished things. Don't hire anyone until you've seen examples of their work.
You may not even need any new models, sounds, or maps. But for your first version, you probably won't need more than one person for each area of your mod (code, sound, models, maps). Your first instinct might be to hire anyone who can code, or model, or make maps, and so on. When looking for team members, try to only hire people you absolutely cannot survive without. Counter-Strike's core team was one person. The more people you have, the more time spent managing them. Adding more people to the team doesn't mean more work will get done. If you're dealing with an on-line team, you can easily spend all your time managing it, and that means you won't be spending any time on making your mod. Managing a team of people is a full-time job, even when all the team resides in the same building. The guiding rule here is to keep it small.
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Lets start by looking at how to assemble a team.