Hello everyone,
I have an exciting announcement for you :)
But first, let me talk about a problem that I think all modders and all mods face from time to time: lack of motivation. Everybody who has a more difficult hobby knows that it's sometimes hard to actually push a project through, primarily because there's no external driving force behind it which means you always think to yourself "why am I actually doing this?" Of course, modding makes no difference in that regard.
In fact, it's often even worse because it's both harder to do than most hobbies and you often work in a team which means there's the additional psychological factor of "let the others do it" (which happened to everyone, including me).
The effect of this problem is that - if you work with a closed team - your private forums can be pretty empty at times with not much going on (this happened to us), therefore making it even harder for people to motivate themselves when there's a distinct non-existence of answers to their posts. Thus, gradually, the whole team will slide into a certain state of lethargy and work will often come to a grinding halt; if you also take into account the amplification process that takes place when certain important members of the team have to go about real-life business for some time, it can be very hard to keep focused at times.
Alright, enough of the pretext. Here's what we've been thinking about to avoid these issues in the future:
We want to adopt a new development policy for Italia Invicta (and Anno Domini) that involves the community to a larger extent. This means that our modders will start developing things over the public forums, research consensus will be found in open discussions and WIP stuff will be posted for you to comment on.
The last of these points is probably the biggest advantage of the idea: We will give you our designs and you can comment, make propositions, ask for changes and even get your hands dirty doing some modding work yourself at your heart's desire. This will give you quite a bit more influence on how the mod crops up and hopefully rid us of a piece of the huge workload this mod constitutes.
We did not yet make a final decision on the policy (i.e. it can still be changed if it makes sense) but for now, the main change is to make the core team smaller. This means that following this announcement, every current member will be moved into a group called "contributors". These are people who have already made some considerable contribution to the mod and in the future, dedicated people who regularly post comments and make propositions on the forums will be added to that group.
If you are in the contributors list, you can request to be added to the core team to signify that you want to participate on a more regular level. In general, the private forums won't contain much hidden info, mainly the playable betas and some things like WIP stuff that a member doesn't think should be made public yet, but of course you'll also get the fame (and the opportunity to have MSN chats with me).
Ideally, once a member feels like they're getting bogged down or don't want to/have the time anymore to participate to a huge extent, he could just sign out of the team again and be moved to the contributors list, however I'll also evaluate people's activity level over time to see whether I should have a word with someone and in order to keep the team list up-to-date.
Another important advantage of this policy is that it forces people who do something on the mod (including me again as I have a sometimes detrimental tendency to discuss things over MSN) to also write about what they're doing on the forums. This is especially good for you as you'll have a much better idea of the mod's status and about what it actually is that we're doing.
It also provides me with a good way of giving you an opportunity to participate on some simpler modding tasks and at the same time saves me a lot of work that could often be better spent on more creative things. What I'm talking about here is obviously the more "repetitive" tasks like writing unit, building and traits descriptions but also copying certain features for all settlements (for example, the provincial titles have to be customized for each city which is a very nice starter into scripting if somebody feels like it) and factions that have already been worked out in general.
All in all, I believe that we can all greatly benefit from this approach to modding, and of course it's pretty likely to speed up progress because the motivational issues will hopefully be much less severe with a whole community to reply to threads instead of just a small team, therefore allowing us to stay clear of the vicious circle that I mentioned in the introduction.
In the next days and weeks we'll get the info out of the hidden forums and into the public ones which means that members won't immediately be denied access, but after that is done, I'll first clean up the access list.
I hope you guys like the idea and are going to participate to a large extent (after all it's your chance to help us in development both directly and indirectly).
