Your experiences with mod teams?
polycounter lvl 7
Hey Guys,
It's my first time posting here, I'm a long time fan of Polycount and it's fantastic community here, I just wanted to ask you guys your experiences with mod teams, since I know you a lot of guys came from modding background. I'd also love to hear on what made them successful and what to avoid.
I'm a recent graduate in Australia currently working as a 3D Artist at a studio called Catalyst Interactive in Australia that makes serious games for the military using CryEngine 3. Here's a link to my portfolio www.bugfush.com. Unfortunately the situation for the industry here down here in Aus hasn't been fantastic, so it's a bit of a problem in getting work that's not mobile gaming, although I like what the guys down down here, it's not I want to pursue exactly. I've worked with some mod teams before in the past, but unfortunately they've mainly fell flat for a number of reasons, ie; the leads of the projects suddenly disappearing off the face of the planet, having no real experience with programming or art, expecting to lead because he has an "idea" etc. These days, I try to be more cautious on who I do work for now, since time is precious & you really can't commit to doing pointless work for people. I guess I just want to ask the community here on their own experiences on what made the mod teams they worked on good or bad.
Thanks guys!
It's my first time posting here, I'm a long time fan of Polycount and it's fantastic community here, I just wanted to ask you guys your experiences with mod teams, since I know you a lot of guys came from modding background. I'd also love to hear on what made them successful and what to avoid.
I'm a recent graduate in Australia currently working as a 3D Artist at a studio called Catalyst Interactive in Australia that makes serious games for the military using CryEngine 3. Here's a link to my portfolio www.bugfush.com. Unfortunately the situation for the industry here down here in Aus hasn't been fantastic, so it's a bit of a problem in getting work that's not mobile gaming, although I like what the guys down down here, it's not I want to pursue exactly. I've worked with some mod teams before in the past, but unfortunately they've mainly fell flat for a number of reasons, ie; the leads of the projects suddenly disappearing off the face of the planet, having no real experience with programming or art, expecting to lead because he has an "idea" etc. These days, I try to be more cautious on who I do work for now, since time is precious & you really can't commit to doing pointless work for people. I guess I just want to ask the community here on their own experiences on what made the mod teams they worked on good or bad.
Thanks guys!
Replies
If you discover you've hitched your horse to a bunch of megolomaniac 12-year-olds who spend their time making badly photoshopped banners and crappy websites before getting a cease-and-desist letter from 20th Century Fox, accepted practice is to duck out the back before the "mod-forum" meltdown.
There's just no way to justify the gamble, your time is to valuable to waste it on something that will most likely fail.
So yeah... only if you can find a really serious mod-team, well on their way. Showing proper gameplay footage of their content, not just ideas and concepts.
When you got a bunch of volunteer people and each one of them has his life going on, it pretty much means some devs are inactive at any point in time. and in some periods all that inactivity piles up and causes a general lack of motivation.
Only thing you can do is to find a team that seems well organized and produces content with consistent quality, and hope that your guess is right.
There are projects that feel organized because of awesome art but once you get to see them from inside, it's clearly a directionless mess.
Try to find out how many long time members does the team have and if the project leader has some artistic or technical skillset.
if project has an experienced, dedicated core team, they are more likely to push the project through shitty times. as long as one of them can keep on producing and showing off high quality assets to the public, artists of similiar skill level will be drawn to the mod.
also, check if the leader has worked on something before. if he finished and released a project already that's obviously a sign of competence.
The problem I had with the mod was that the project leader thought the opposite way to myself. He seemed to think creating everything first before doing any engine work was the way forward, and while I was doing stuff for it, there wasn't any sign that any work on the game itself has been done. Maybe it's just me but I would've thought the art could come later. Props to the concept artist on the mod though, he did a lot of stuff, unfortunately the art side was the only stuff being done.
So my advice would be, try to see what they've done before joining, they should have something in-game to see and not just concept art.
I made the mistake of trying to start a project with a programmer friend (since at the time I didn't program but could do the art-related work) and I thought we could tackle a small project given we both wanted to work on a game.
The thing is, some people just say and think they 'want to work on something'; in reality working on something is the last thing that they want to do, and they are going to shit on your project until it completely collapses, letting them flee back to playing league.
Often these people cannot seem to get excited for any project idea; they become a negative wall blocking progress. They will hate everything you suggest but will refuse to contribute any ideas/solutions/alternatives that they would find agreeable, and in the rare case that they do suggest something it becomes 'them versus you', they take it personally, clinging to wildly underdeveloped/misinformed ideas or ones that will produce a project that is destined to fail.
Just be careful on the types of personalities you bring to the project; the field of 'game development' tends to attract a lot of baggage.
There are a few indicators that can tell you something about the prospects of a mod:
Is the leader just an "idea guy"? Then avoid at all costs. Ideally he's a hard working coder or artist with good communication skills and strong leadership.
Are the mods goals comparable to creating a AAA game despite only having a small team of amateurs? Then avoid. Most mods never see the light of day because the goals are completely unrealistic.
Check the portfolios and credentials of the team members. If they have already produced some nice art and maps and worked on an released mod before that's a good sign.
When all they have to show for are some ugly greyscale renders stay away. They don't know how to finish an asset then they absolutely don't know how to finish a mod.
Suppose you found a talented team and a promising mod then be ready to put even more hours and work in there then you anticipate at first. Working on a mod that will be released means to take responsibility. There will be times when development is slow, when the leader has a new girlfriend or important members get an industry job. If you want to see the mod released you must be willing to step in, work for two and if necessary take over the leadership. That's how it was for me when i worked on Insurgency. We didn't have enough env artists so i learned modelling and texturing. The leader was busy with college so i stepped in and lead the mod for a while even tho it wasn't my dream job at all. But in the end it paid off because we released despite all difficulties that we faced.
great advice. be picky and be willing to work like mad.
Unfortunately that didn't work on one mod I was on. The core leader got an industry job and could no longer lead the project. His fellow programmer didn't want to take over. So I had to.
It wasn't fun inheriting this project while attempting to get more coders and artists. While the original developers got new jobs or moved on. The day the project died was the day a meeting was planned and no one showed.
My advice? Find leads with consistent work already who aren't seeking a new job. Who have either already been married and settled down, or have no serious relationship going on.
Avoid students, people with or about to have fiances, and people who are actively seeking a career.
That was an excellent mod, nice job! Us over at Fortress Forever were always sorta jealous of you guys getting a release spot on Steam ;-)
One thing to expect when joining a mod, is that you will probably need to learn other skills to fill production gaps. That's a good thing. Always step up and take more responsibilities (if you can) and always try to deliver work on a constant basis. Nothing more annoying than members who promise a lot and never finish anything.
I worked on two mods, one of them got released (Insurgency) and another never saw the light of day (Citizen-132).
Although Insurgency set its goals pretty high, we always had a pragmatic approach to things. We were always iterating on maps and testing them early on. New code and weapons were added on a constant basis and and as soon as we moved to SVN we always had an up-to-date playable version of the game. Level designers had pretty precise list of assets needs for their levels, so it was just a matter of choosing what to work on.
Progress in a mod needs to be constant, otherwise team morale drops pretty rapidly. If the team is spending more time discussing design ideas than actually implementing them, then that's a bad sign.
Although the (very talented) team had awesome ideas for Citizen-132, we bit more than we could chew. We wanted to create a mod for HL2 before the game was even released. So when HL2 was delayed we split the team in two, one half working on a "demo" on the Half-Life 1 engine and another half working on a prototype version of the mod on the Far Cry engine. Of course neither of them ever got finished, even though we created a huge amount of content.
The team leader was just an ideas/marketing guy who would make infinite amounts of promises but never really did anything concrete for the mod. Anybody can have ideas, but implementing them is a completely different thing. We never really had playable versions of the game available at all times either.
Another thing to look for is if there are any experienced programmers in the project. An experienced programmer will know how to organize the mod's structure, provide playable builds etc... From all my experience in modding I can say that the biggest bottleneck is always coding, because artists are generally a lot easier to find.
All in all modding is a very fun experience if you join the right team with the right attitude. It's very saddening how the modding community is pretty much dead now
Hope that helps
- You don't need a team to make a mod or a game. You only need as many people as you need. Sometimes that's just 1 person.
- You don't need to JOIN a pre-existing team. You can start your own project. Work on what you want to work on.
- Some projects don't need programmers. (90% of Half-Life 2 single player mods do not have custom code.) Other projects don't need artists or level designers. (To this day, Garry's Mod still ships with just 2 really plain maps with mostly stock assets.) You only need what you need.
- Some people make mods / games because they like to make them. They don't make them just to put something in a portfolio. Many have no interest in working in the game industry.
Disadvantage is that you will probably have to deal with not so great/unfinished tools (but this is something not too uncommon in the industry too) and you will not get experience working with a big name engine like UDK. However nowadays there are quite a lot of studios working with open-source graphics engines too, for example Torchlight was/is done with the open source OGRE 3D engine and knowing the insides of the Quake engines (now open-source) will probably not hurt either
If you want I can point you to a few good examples, but even better would be if you had a look at the games presented on our blog: freegamer.blogspot.com
Or join our community of open-source game developers at freegamedev.net and have a look at the games we host.
Edit: Note however that most open-source games will require you to license your artwork under a creative commons license or similar.
Edit2: Opengameart.org is also a good place to get into contact with teams and releasing your creative commons licensed artworks.
I've been on three mod teams that looked to be serious, but reality is that putting a project together is a very big task and most fail when they realize how long the journey is.