Oswald Rant: Managing the Mod: Part 6
There are still a number of unresolved issues and things the team could have done better. Among these are the need for a better overall game design, and a better distribution of skills. In terms of game design, Urban Terror, as mentioned, has developed organically. While this has many benefits for a mod team (nothing is set, so there all developers can participate in the design, which makes the development experience far more immersive), it also has problems. A major issue is that the future is uncertain. The developers do not know where the game is heading.
The second issue, distribution of skills can also be referred to as a bus-event factor. A bus event is what happens when a team member stumbles out onto the road and gets run over by a bus. Such a tragic incident is infinitely more tragic if that team member is also the only member of the team who knows how to do a certain thing. Each time we lose team members who hold a lot of knowledge, it sets the team back a long way. Urban Terror still has too much knowledge with too few people. The team’s bus event factor is too high. The team needs to spend more time sharing knowledge and distributing work so that it is more robust.
On the whole, however, it is highly doubtful that the mod would have achieved its goals without the kinds of management structures outlined in this paper. A mod like Urban Terror is amateur only because the participants make no money. In many other respects mod teams are every bit as professional as paid development teams. For Urban Terror, management of each facet of the mod helped the team to craft a game that people actually play.
For Urban Terror at least, the ideal of having a mod in which everyone did what they wanted when they wanted was replaced with a desire to build a professional quality game. Management did not end up making the mod stale or cramping anyone’s style. Instead, it helped give the team, and the players, a certain amount of faith in the direction of the mod.
This faith helped the team get through tough patches and also helped keep the team working towards a common goal, and to present a consolidated public face and a cohesive game. In the long run, the satisfaction that the team has obtained from seeing a solid professional quality game being downloaded and played by thousands of people far outweighs the few compromises that have had to be made from time to time.
