Oswald Rant: Managing the Mod: Part 1
Introduction and Background
This paper is an adaptation of a talk (with the same name) presented at the Australian Game Developer’s Conference in Melbourne, November 2001. The paper focuses on some of the key aspects to managing a mod team, and aims to highlight the importance of management even in so-called amateur game development teams. This should be of immediate interest to individuals who are developing a mod. It should also be of significant interest to the game development industry, as it highlights a range of key skills that exist in successful mod teams.
Before the paper continues into the detail of managing a distributed team of amateur game developers, it is necessary to define a few key terms and references that will be used throughout. The first term is “mod”. The term is short for “modification” and refers to a game that is based on the code of an existing game. Mods are normally developed by amateurs developers who use a software development kit (SDK) released with a commercial game title. Commercial developers are increasingly releasing their internal development tools to consumers after a game release because community developed content can extend the lifespan and broaden the appeal of a game. Valve Software’s Half-life, for example, has been heavily modified into numerous mods, the most ubiquitous being the mod called “Counterstrike”.
There are a number of features of mods that need to be pointed out. Mods always require a retail version of the base game to be installed on the player’s system. A successful mod can thus boost sales of a game well after its initial release. The continued popularity of Half-life is testament to this. Another points is that new code based on the SDK released by a commercial developer normally prevents the makers of mods from releasing their creations commercially. This helps to boost the mod community because mods are thus free for players to download from the Internet, and at the same time allows the commercial developers to maintain intellectual property (IP) rights over their base code. Additionally, SDKs only provide limited access to the game code. The most sensitive IP is normally wrapped into the game engine, which is hidden from mod maker access.
These factors quite obviously make commercial sense for a professional game publisher. Not only does releasing development tools allow the game developer to show a committment to the game playing community, but it can pay off in terms of increased sales and game longevity. The provision of an SDK can require extra work for commercial developers (for example, post-release patches will also require a re-release of the SDK), but in general this extra work in small comapared with the potential benefits.
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of mods: the total conversion (TC) mod, and the standard mod. The standard mod makes minor changes to the overall game code or graphics, but does not affect the overall concept of the base game. An example of a standard mod might be adding a new level or side plot onto a game, or modifying game physics in some way. By contrast, a total conversion modifies every aspect of the game to produce something that is for all practical purposes a completely new game.
The mod that is the subject of this paper is called “Urban Terror”. Urban Terror is a total conversion mod based upon Quake 3, a game developed by Id Software. Urban Terror is loosely based around a real-world combat theme, and draws upon themes from other games and mods such as Action Quake 2 (a mod for Quake 2), Counterstrike (a mod for Half-life), Solider of Fortune (commercial title) and Rainbow 6 (commercial title). Urban Terror’s emphasis is on gameplay over realism. It aims to provide players with a fast-paced fun game that emphasises gameplay over simulation. Urban Terror is based heavily around networked multiplayer team-based games, and is widely played on the Internet. It is worth noting that Urban Terror is supported on the PC, Mac and Linux platforms.
The Urban Terror team is made up of some 27 team members located across seven countries and at least as many time zones. Team ages range from late teens to early forties, with the median around the mid-20s. This is obviously a highly distributed development team that could not exist without access to a global digital communication network like the Internet.
The development of Urban Terror has been an evolutionary process. It was not mapped out from the start. There was not initial clear objective about what was to be achieved, nor was their a well-defined team. These things developed along side the mod itself.
