The Future... Lessons from Rome in mod development and team management

[Epistolary Richard]

From this thread:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=70145

Lessons from Rome in mod development and team management

The RTW mod community has been something of which ancient Rome itself would have been proud. There's been scandal, strife, civil war, sabotage and smut. Glorious achievements and ignominious failures. Mighty champions and egregious villains. And somewhere amongst it all quite a few decent mods as well!

Not only did we see a larger community with Rome, we also saw modding teams themselves get larger as more and more content was generated in order to provide complete total conversions.

Given then, that the objectives of our community must be a) To release great mods, and b) To have fun - what then are the lessons from the RTW mod community that we can offer to those who will attempt to form teams and make mods for M2TW?

For as George Santayana might have said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to never manage to release their mod." The floor is open for your words of wisdom.

[Epistolary Richard]

Here are a few things modders have had to say on this topic in the past:

Step 0: there is no point starting a mod if you have no idea about modding and have no motivation to learn along the way.

At the end of the day, you want a mod with good gameplay. My personal opinion is get a 'skeleton' of the mod working. Basically a map and factions, and some units. They don't have to be balanced. Then once you've done that, you can play around to your hearts content with stats and stuff to make the game fun.

If I knew this two years ago I never would have started Fourth Age: Total War. I got lucky and found the right people to run the project...

The sole reason that started this whole fiasco *laugh* is my desire to see Gondorian soldiers in the game, appearing just like in the movies. I found the idea to be very exciting and, most importantly, quite achievable. But instead I kept making more and more models and before long it’s enough for a decent sized mod.

Creating Your Team
Accept everyone who applies, whatever their experience. Every contribution has the potential to be useful eventually. This does not mean include every contribution that is made. A crappy model is still a crappy model, and it’s your job as leader to not include it into the mod. But less experienced members can be taught, and in time grow to be very valuable.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=52350

Lets start by looking at how to assemble a team. The guiding rule here is to keep it small. Managing a team of people is a full-time job, even when all the team resides in the same building. 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. Adding more people to the team doesn't mean more work will get done. The more people you have, the more time spent managing them.

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Making_a_MOD

If you have never been apart of a mod team before, forget trying to start your own. A common misconception is that either it is easy to make a mod, or easy to get a team together. It really needs to be said, that this could not be further from the truth. Instead join a mod, learn what they do, learn from their mistakes; get to know people in this scene. Any time spent here will be made up 10 times over if you set out to make your own. Mod DB help wanted is a great place to find what jobs are available, otherwise contact a mod team, tell them what you can do, send them some samples and ask if they have a job for you - simple!

http://mods.moddb.com/getting-started/make-mods/

[Dol Guldur]

All good advice.

One of the major issues resulting in the failure of mods to materialize is in the spreading of talent among too many mods. There is nothing wrong with people starting and working on their own mods. This cannot be forced. What could be done is to create an environment where like-minded modders and similar mods are more likely to have contact with each other and thus build relationships that will lead to a joining of minds and mods/mod ideas.

This could be accomplished by providing subforums in some way that funnel modders/would-be modders into areas by era or genre. For example, for M2TW you might have discussion/resource subforums such as Historical - Americas, Historical - Europe 1300s, Late (Romantic) Arthurian, etc.

Bringing those working on or desiring to work on mods very similar to each other into a discussion subforum is more likely to create joint ventures and even abandonment of initial mod ideas for a common idea. It would go some way to naturally unifying the isolated and many. Fewer mods there may be, but more will likely be finished.

[Epistolary Richard]

I still find some of the advice hard to reconcile with each other - some people say accept everyone in your team as even a little work helps you to your goal, others say only accept really dedicated people who you absolutely can't do without. Big teams or small teams?

Also regarding releases, is it good to work for a long time on one big release or put together lots of small releases? The big release approach always has the challenge that they may never _reach_ a release. Small release approach though tends to have less of an impact on fans, it also makes it harder to rejig your mod as you go if your developing release to release rather than sitting down with a single design document.

And there's also leadership and decision-making - so many mod projects it appears need a single brain to keep it all together, but some seem to manage to have a more collaborative approach.

And there's also the matter of what happens when things go wrong. Countless mods are going to be developed for M2TW, many of those will fall by the wayside with their stuff never being released, never being used and basically being a big loss to the community. Even 'ongoing' projects might suddenly hit the skids as they realise that all the stuff they've previews is on the hard-drive of someone who has suddenly disappeared. This, to a large extent, is completely inevitable - however I wonder if there is anything that can be done that can allow the community to get some worth out of these projects or at least not let the creations of projects that have fallen fallow from completely being lost to the members of the team who carry on.

[wlesmana]

The size of the mod would depend on what the core members are comfortable with. Some like to work in a big group where everyone is supporting each other with a lot of discussions. Others prefer small teams where everyone knows each other. When I mention "core members", I meant members who are expected to do the bulk of the workload and must interact with most of the team. A Historian only needs to deal with other Historians/Researchers and maybe with Designers. A Modeler must interact with the Designer (and Researcher through one) and the Texturer. And his work will be judged by all members. If your Modeler doesn't like the Sound department guy criticising his work when everyone else loved it, then there are some issues the mod leader must deal with.

A big group is harder to manage but the stagnation rate is potentially smaller.

Any group needs the Final Decision Maker. Other groups who claimed to have none have one that acts like it unofficially. There's always a personality that's dominant and could convince others his way is the right way. I think it's better to point one person (usually the mod leader himself) for this position, to keep the goals focused. However, this person must also be open-minded and accepts suggestions and criticism.


I personally doubt M2TW projects would improve over RTW's. They're still amateur, non-profit mod projects and not many mod teams are like TheLordz. The same mistakes would be repeated and modders would still prefer to start their own instead of joining existing ones.

[Encaitar]

Regarding 'frequent mini-releases' vs 'few, major releases', I think it depends a bit on the type of mod. A mod that tweaks/extends the vanilla game can easily have many releases, as you really only have to get the new stuff working for it to be 'ready' (okay so it can get a bit more complex as the mod gets larger, but still). For 'conversion' mods (such as fantasy-based mods), it's harder to have mini-releases, as you can't really use the vanilla data to fill in for the stuff you haven't done.

With ME:TW I got quite frustrated with some of the reaction to our initial release. It was primarily a beta 'battle' release, and we had included the ability to load up our very early work-in-progress campaign map to 'have a look around'. Despite clearly stating on the downloads page, in the install process, in the readme, and in-game as well that it was no more than an alpha 'sandbox', we received a large amount of complaints about the campaign being 'unbalanced' or missing features (such as anything other than the core buildings!), and criticism of 'how crap our mod was' (purely based on this alpha campaign). I'm still unsure as to whether it was the right thing to do or not (including the campaign), as we did get a lot of useful feedback from people who understood what it was.