Really is worth investing a year making a new cooperative megawad mod? Players audience

[SkyBreach]

Hello,
I put you in situation (Try to put yourself in my perspective): Imagine for a moment that you want to create a full conversion of doom aimed to cooperative online style with emphasis on teamwork and new game mechanics (you know how to do it and you got a team willing to do it). You and your team are going to do all the new code, maps, new mosters sprite by sprite, new sound effects and a complete new soundtrack made by yourself. BUT! here it comes your big dilemma:



Is worth investing a year making a new cooperative mod megawad? What about the player audience? Doom online seems to have stalled in the same 4 game modes, more curious is to see how megagame has even more audience after all. It is worth spend a long year of work, graphic design, musical composition, mapping more than 30 maps, coding hundreds of lines if not thousands and testing again and again in a debug loop, bug fixing, updates and the never ending list "of over here" and "of over there"? All of this work... How many people would play it? 10 players? Perhaps I am very optimistic that of those 10 players, 5 of them do not invest more than 20 minutes playing your mod, the work of three people during a year of dedication (In fact, there are also personal tastes here indeed).

Zandronum has incredible potential as an online gaming platform for mods. But where are the players?

The big question we have is: Should we work on a doom megamod cooperative online aimed for play it with Zandronum? Or maybe we should design a new game from scratch: a flash game or HTML5, easily shareable, easily embeded in every website (that assures thousands of audience, followers, supporters, even an economic remuneration) Or maybe we should desing a multiplatform game for Win/Mac/Linux? thats the big dilemma here.

What do you think honestly? and by your own experience the effort is worth?

[Ru5tK1ng]

Sorry, it's just not worth it at the moment unless you truly think your mod is going to pull away everyone from LCA and all the other game modes. LCA is the current giant mod hogging everyone and you'd have to take it down and take it's place and even if you managed to do that, it probably wouldn't be worth all the work.

You can go the route Cutman did and have your mod powered by Zandro and hope your steam page grabs players from outside the community. If you want money, go make your own multi-platform game from scratch or use another game engine. If you want to easily grab a playerbase, go the flash route.

Take it from someone who has been mapping for multiplayer for years and has seen many others create content for multiplayer Doom. You only make content for self-satisfaction or because you have a vision. Sometimes you get lucky with your vision like some of the older mods did (GvH, AOW, ZDoom Wars, Samsara, etc.). Other times what you make is just a fad and everyone goes back to their old interests.

If your team is going to do that much work and take a year to finish (hate to break it to you, it's going to take longer), you might as well try to make some money off your efforts. Or, at the very least go a route that'll give you a playerbase of more than 5 people.

[r4z0r]

Honestly what Ru5tK1ng said is actually very accurate. The reality is that even on top of the big challenge to take the LCA Behemoth down, you'd also need actual players to play your game, which considering the dwindling player base of this port, really isn't gonna happen. 3.0 got delayed again but considering how few players remain to play this port, it's already too late to have any sort of impact. If you really have a team that can dedicate their hours and invest so much time and hard work into a big project, your efforts really are better placed in something like a new gam entirely or something that can make you some money. The best possible scenario would be to not have a team work on this, but possibly just as individuals. Using a team would be too much wasted potential but as individuals, you could make multiple diff projects that can add to the growing list of mods and increase the chances that you actually get noticed. Putting all your eggs in one basket as a team is not gonna be worth the struggle.

[fr blood]

Instead of making the entire project, just put an alpha with a few map and "To be continued" then check if players have interest in it. If they do then finish your project.

[SkyBreach]

Hey thank you so much for your honest answer guys. I agree with your opinions, when you want to get involved in something "big-long-term" project, you should think about it carefully before choosing the right path. If you go alone, it is your own decision, but when more people are involved, the important decisions about "where's this going and how" are discussed together as a team before choosing, you know how this works.

About our little team, we have played zandronum-skulltag with doom since years. Yeah we know Zand got a great Potential for our project. Also and not less important Zandronum is a great base to continue, there is a great work already completed and a fantastic community behind. You got the engine, a fantastic engine indeed if your project points to a "first-person-shooter" and got OpenGL rendering so this is fantastic really, you have in addition multiple tools very easily adjustable at your needs like Slade3, GZ-DB, XWE, Whacked4, SlumpEd and the mechanics of working with .wad or .pk3 files is very comfortable, easy and fast.

We did not start for the money obviously (if not, we would never have considered Zandronum first) But let's be honest, if you can make money by working on what you like and are good at it, who would say no? This began one day, guided by the "follow your dreams" we grab our backpack full of experience and we thought about "hey lets doing something great for once with all of it"...

I talk with my two teammates today, was sad but take this to Zand is not viable (Yeah really sad because we got enough experience working with maps, graphic design and coding, that means fast work and high quality result.) doubly sad is, I am the only one who knows how to work with Flash and multiplatform engines like for example Stencyl. My two teammates, they both feel desolate now because this is a door that they have never gone through before, so they feel like with a blank sheet in front without a pencil to hand, and even if they had the pencil, they would not know how to use it. One of them is an incredible graphic artist and works very well the vectorial drawing, and he's studying model animation right now, he has a lot of talent. That can be really useful even in Flash games that uses in most cases vector graphics because they are easy to edit, adjust and resize without losing quality and another cool plus is that they can even be articulated. The last buddy feels completely out of place when you talk about all of this, he only knows how to work with doom mods related, nothing else. He insists that we should continue with Zand, but sadly we dont. So that probably means the team itself will change.

[r4z0r]

You could always just mod for GZDoom instead of Zandronum. I mean again this brings up the question of how much do you care about it succeeding. If you are more interested in the actual journey and experience rather than how much attention the mod will receive there's really nothing stopping you guys...

[Combinebobnt]

whether you will be successful or not is a guess in the dark really. but what I can do is give some good plans (duke?):

- releasing all at once is really awesome but there is nothing wrong with making a demo like every other mod ever made. That way you know people will like it or save yourself from wasting time lol.
- downscale. don't need 30 maps or whatever, could be 10. don't have to go full blown effort tc, can get some good stuff going with just replacing some doom assets.
- rethink. ppl like mods where you can join the game and just start playing without doing any preparatory thinking (or thinking at all I guess). maybe some super teamwork fantasy of a wad won't work but something lighter that still encourages it would grab way more players. I think arkore already made some wad where you can only play with 4 players using ~teamwork~ and yea safe to say it probably only got 4 players total. that and all the maps were just gray boxes
- bite the bullet. If your mod is big cookie like megaman or brutal doom or complex or (insert successful mod here) maybe it will go against all odds and triumph. look at what watermelon elo priv did (rip). remember this port now does have database stuff for saving info across server restarts, untapped potential.

crossport compat is really good. with 3.0 coming you can get a mod working on gzdoom on zandronum easily. if things get a little complex you can just make 2 different versions with small changes. I guess what can break this is highly exclusive features to either port like zscript or zan database stuff. don't be that guy to eliminate compatibility because we are missing one decorate flag or whatever. find a workaround like they did in the old days.

From what the other people said above me: Please don't try and make money off a doom wad. Go find a real engine or make your own for some indie game crap. This is doom where everything looks bad and doom physics and the game will probably play like doom anyway. Even big dogs like sgt mark can barely scrap something off of pateron. If the mod is good and what you really want to do, just make it and don't chase playercount/popularity. It might follow anyway.

[Konda]

If you're gonna work on a classic megawad-style wad, with just classic maps and maybe new music, then you can go for it, but in the end let the audience from gzdoom and doomworld know too and if the maps are really good, they might be played, usually offline, but you might see your mappack played with 2-3 additional complex-doom wads on Zandronum.
But this is probably not what you're aiming for, seeing as you're focused on Zandronum and cooperative gameplay specifically. In that case you should tread carefully. The classic megawad formula is tried and true, it stood the test of time. However, since you want to try out new ideas, your best bet is to make something like 6 maps max, and release that, analyze how much people are playing it for a month, and then decide if people caught on and if you should continue making new maps.
For every popular multiplayer wad there are 5 more of them (some of which are even similar in nature to the popular wads), that got half a year of popularity at best and then died, and a good portion of them never got to "live" in the first place.

I see that you want to make something big and grandiose, but if you want purely that, it's either a CLASSIC-style megawad or bust. If you want to try something different, keep it small and see how people react. You can try out multiple ideas this way and see if anything gets played.
As for the classic megawad option, it's preferred that you already released lots of classic maps (not megawad-sized packs) before and adjusted your style based on the feedback.

[Catastrophe]

It really depends on exposure. Unlike survival, the co-op scene is very diverse. If you can get good exposure from other places then you should be fine.

You and your team are going to do all the new code, maps, new mosters sprite by sprite, new sound effects and a complete new soundtrack made by yourself.

That being said, if you plan on going into game development I wouldn't recommend GZDoom/Zandro/etc since Unity/Unreal Engine exists. Don't waste your time.

[Konda]

That being said, if you plan on going into game development I wouldn't recommend GZDoom/Zandro/etc since Unity/Unreal Engine exists. Don't waste your time.

Yeah... I know a guy, who knows a guy, who started making a game using GZDoom as its engine and now deeply regrets it. The development process really slowed down due to some bugs and limitations of the engine, and the 3D models don't look too good because of GZDoom's limited support for models and general opengl effects like shaders. If your game is not gonna be a 90's Doom clone, don't bother using GZDoom as an engine.

[Ænima]

you just gotta do it for yourself, bro


more than likely, your mod will never be played by any more than 5 people at any given time. 98% of the day your servers will be vacant when you host it.

Don't waste your time pandering to this "community", all of the chill open-minded players are gone and the tiny crowd of people you see in the server list are all there for their one thing, be it MM8BDM, Brutal, or LCA.

Take it from me or Ivan or Catastrophe or Bob or Zanieon or Fabysk or MadCat or Empyre or anyone who's even bothered to make non-Complex/Brutal mods in the last 3 years. You have to do it for your own satisfaction. Because there are zero players left here who are willing to break from their mod of choice for more than 30 minutes, and the only players who will genuinely appreciate and follow your mod simply aren't online often.

[Empyre]

Take it from me or Ivan or Catastrophe or Bob or Zanieon or Fabysk or MadCat or Empyre or anyone who's even bothered to make non-Complex/Brutal mods in the last 3 years.

I am thrilled to be mentioned in such great company.

To basically echo what others have said, make the mod that you would want to play, and make it because you enjoy making it. It will also be a great exercise for you to make you better at such things. It might even look good on a resume, depending on what kind of job you are looking for.

To help a little bit with the audience, make it so that not only does it work in coop but also in single-player. Advertise it in the forums of all the ports where it will work, and in Doomworld, but not too early in the process of making it, lest it die from over exposure.

When it is ready to beta test, host a server with it (or use TSPG) and play on it to attract players. When enough players are on that they can do fine without you, spectate and watch them play. That will give you great insight on what needs to be tweaked.