How (not?) To Develop A Mod, Part One

Development on "5" is now in full swing with work on the internal demo complete, and the first level is now being worked on. I figured I'd post another entry here to commemorate our total failure to make any progress.

When you decide to work on a mod, planning is key. Planning is key for just about anything, from asking out a girl to laying the framework for a mod.

The team must start with a clear plan in mind for the mod. Don't even touch Hammer or Photoshop or Maya or whatever else you use before you know exactly what you want to do, but make sure your initial plan is flexible. For all you know, it could be completely impossible.

The initial concept for "5" was the player being dropped into a large forest being assigned to track down a kill a single target, and the target was supposed to have flawless A.I. to the point where he could change position to engage the player dynamically. The sniper would take a shot, we kill the sniper in the nest and spawn a combine soldier behind the nest, then he would assault to a different point as fast as he could, we kill the runner and activate a sniper in the nest, then he would wait until the player was within a radius, then take another shot. The player was to begin with nothing but a melee weapon, and then track down a single shot rifle to engage the sniper with. The map would have been very large, including a rail yard, a small shantytown, and huge expanses of dark forest, complete with constant rainfall and fog to limit the player's ability to engage the target. But we just decided it wasn't feasible to make because of the huge emphasis on the A.I. The combine aren't designed to run away from the player, and since we have no coders on hand, just mappers and texture artists, we decided to abandon this model and turn to the current one. The player is dropped in much the same, except he will likely have a hatchet and find a crossbow shortly in his quest giving him more ammunition. We upped the target count to four and forced the player to figure out a new way of combat, similar to the game "Shadow of the Colossus." The player will need to exploit his environment and flush the sniper. There will be several methods of either flushing or killing the target, adding replay value, plus additional "scout" units actively scouring the island attempting to find and kill the player. Scanner units will also act as informants, and the player has the option of avoiding combat entirely and attempting to unravel the greater motives of the people who dropped him on the island, and interfere with their endgame.

In one way, you could consider the new version more ambitious than the original one, but at least with an island we have a more finite landscape to work with, plus less work with trees and displacements (Forests look bland when you have a bunch of cloned trees). And the new setup also allows for an alternate ending that will be difficult to unravel but well worth the effort.

Another important part of modding is to love your job. This may sound corny, but I genuinely enjoy slaving away at a keyboard working in Hammer because it lets me take my brain and smear it all over a screen for other people to play. (I bet this mod will have far less users now that I've used this analogy.) You and your mod team need to have a unified vision, so having a small amount of people with a large skill set is good. Depending on the scope of your mod, you may need more people. I won't pretend to know about modding with a large team, as this is the first mod I've ever worked on. One of our team has worked on previous mods, but for the most part we are first time modders.

Third part: Don't be afraid to change things when technical issues arise. The current island workload might even change for all we know. Early in the development of a mod, things are very volatile. Things can explode several times over before you nail down a correct concept. Let them explode on occasion. You might find out something better than you had.