Mod Startup! I. Evaluating your Ideas

Posted by requiem2d

January 12, 2008

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Your mod will fail, well the statistics dictate this anyway. 84% of Mods registered at Moddb.com for Half-Life 2 haven’t released yet. You can’t exactly say that the game is new on the market and that the best times are still to come. If you’re however a dedicated Modder and have really thought this over, then all is not lost. Actually you have a good chance of being successful given you make the right steps and cover all your bases. In this first segment of my series entitled “Mod Startup!”, I’ll take you through some of the research you need to conduct before taking that big step. If you’ve ever put together a business plan or evaluated the profitability of one, you’ll understand what I mean here. Do you have your idea written down? You know the one where you always say “ If this kind of mod only existed, then…”, well get it ready because we’re about to evaluate it!

Step 1 – Competition. Who’s playing against you? Not that the relationships between Mods are fierce, tense and full of hatred, but there are a finite number of players out there. Depending on how the publisher promotes the modding community, you can assume that three quarters of the player population will never even bother to try any, so you need to evaluate your niche for maximum results. I’ve decided to pick Crysis as an Engine and a fictional mod by the name of “Sniper: Last Man Standing”. This is a multiplayer game where you death match against other snipers on the island. To better understand who I’m up against, I’ve decided to pull up Moddb.com to see what my competition is like, I’ve also made a small chart and formula to help me get a better view of what’s out there. This is what it will be calculating (where SQRT is Square Root):

Relevancy / Competition = Theme Factor X Dev Momentum X SQRT(SQRT(Registered Forum Members))

“Theme factor” is how close their theme is to ours (out of 10) and “Dev Momentum” is how fast they seem to be moving along (out of 20). I’ve lessened the importance of how many registered forum members a mod has and also gave any mod which had 0 or fewer members a base number of 100 for this value. This model will give us a brute understanding of who we’re playing against. I’ve only taken into account 5 mods for this example and have some interesting results (you may want to use 10-20):

Mod Analysis

Like said, it’s not a model that will predict how everything will go down, it’s more of a feeler and method of generating an overview. The numbers in this case let me know that if I start my “Sniper: Last Man Standing” mod, 50% of my target population will probably also download Obsidian Edge 2. Due to Carbine’s high relevancy to my mod, i.e. present day high powered rifles, they also score highly with 24%. Given the numbers, I know it will be tough but I’m still going to see it through, let’s take it to the next level.

Step 2 – Surveys. Just like any business plan, you need to go out there and understand what the community is interested in. No point in asking friends, because they’ll all tell you the same old: “I think your Zombie idea is really original, never seen it before, you’ll do great!”. Yesterday, CNN released the results of a poll regarding the presidential elections, they had contacted 1’033 people in order to obtain this data. When Project Reality conducted a survey pre-0.3 release, it received 1’250 submissions. We asked about their experiences, likes, dislikes, asked them to vote on upcoming features and we got more responses than CNN! It’s a powerful tool that will help guide you in the creation of your design plan. There’s nothing better then asking a bunch of random people, as they’ll give you their honest opinion. Why is that you may ask? They’re not your friends and couldn’t care less what you thought of their choices on the survey, talk about unbiased!

We have a couple of tools at our disposition for this, here are two online free ones (be sure to google for more):

http://www.esurveyspro.com/

http://www.surveymonkey.com/

You’ll need to think about the questions and make sure they cover everything you need to get this mod going. You’ll need a few general ones to kick it off, this will help filter your results later on.

Do you own the full version of Crysis?
Do you play Crysis Online / Multiplayer? (if no, exclude from final results)
How many hours a week do you play online

Now you want to get to the juicy details regarding our “Sniper: Last Man Standing” mod:

Do you like present-day Military themed Games / Mods?
Do you enjoy Death Match / Solo Game Modes at all?
Which Sniper Rifle would you most like to see in a Crysis Mod? (provide list of 10 rifles)
Which one of the following is your favorite Special Forces team in the world? (provide list of 10 teams)
Do you prefer Levels with open landscapes or dense vegetation?
What style of gameplay do you prefer?
Do you enjoy maneuvering, waiting and setting up for the perfect kill in a game?

Well guess what! For the sake of this exercise, I actually took the 5 minutes to create this survey and another 5 minutes to register and post on a Crysis forum asking for participants (some users also gave good feedback vs. the question structure). When I came back from work 10 hours later, I had 71 responses! For 10 minutes of work I got all that valuable data for FREE! Here are my results:

Survey Results

Bringing it all back together (Competition Analysis & Mod Survey), we conducted a pretty successful exercise. I found out a few things that I’d need to do with “Sniper: Last Man Standing”:

Market my mod around Obsidian Edge 2 & Carbine, most probably by introducing a unique game mode.
Create a couple Singleplayer missions as a number of people play offline.
Provide a team-oriented alternative to Deathmatch (Team Deathmatch maybe?)
Definitely create some high power rifles like the Barrett M82 as well as introduce some Delta Force playing characters.
Create maps where both styles of combat are available; Close 300m & Long 1km+
Incorporate some realism factors into the shooting system, such as bullet drop and scope sway from breathing.
One Shot One Kill for all of those fans which love to setup & plan their kills.

“Sniper: Last Man Standing”, the ultimate lonewolf challenge when it comes to sniper mods now has a foundation to build off. Sure, my conclusions above would not be final but they make a good starting point for the design plan, as well as pleasing our soon-to-be community starting from day one. Our fictional mod finally has direction.

I hope you have found this piece informative & helpful in your modding goals. Doing your research can save you a lot of time as well as manpower. Shooting straight for what the community wants is much better than scrapping assets once you find out your release failed. As always, feel free to subscribe, comment, or suggest other article themes! If you’re going to be performing the test above, also let me know!

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