A case for game-design mentality in modding

If you don't have a clue what "modding" is and still want to read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod_(video_gaming)
Mount&Blade and M&B:Warband are sandbox computer RPGs set in a pseudo-medieval world.
http://www.taleworlds.com/
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Note: this post is inspired by the discussion about the differences between two LOTR mods. 
The Veiled Stars is a relatively new project in progress headed by Jarvisimo:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-veiled-stars

The Last Days of the Third Age is a mod originally for the older M&B, now also ported for Warband. I've been a member on the TLD team for quite a few years now, contributing everything from concept art and lore knowledge to writing and sound design.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-last-days

Understandably, there's a certain level of animosity between fans of these mods, as LOTR total conversions are hard to find and discussions online usually get quite heated. This is not meant to pour oil into the flames, rather I'm using the situation as a setup for an article I've been meaning to write for a while.

PS: Guys, remember your forums are public and anyone can stumble upon your bitter put-down posts about TLD. I understand where you're coming from, but it's still a bit rude. When we talk shit about you, we at least have the sense to do it in our hidden dev forum. ;P
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The background of The Last Days

TLD is actually three different mods. There are layers in both assets (visual/sound/writing..) and scripted gameplay features. This could be quite the history lesson, so I'll summarize in short:

1.) The good old TLD from when our leader Ancientwanker was still around. (2007-2009) For M&B 0.808, the mod became a real total conversion and not just the basic game with a few models swapped for orcs and Gondorian soldiers. (which is what it all began as, in the ancient beta days) 

AW (Ancientwanker) had big plans for a whole system of quests, for the War of the Ring and other features we sadly never learnt about. (due to him disappearing without a trace, it's quite likely he passed away) This layer survives in some of the assets (bits of orc equipment, lots of Harad's design, Rhun's entire style laced with Conan the Barbarian etc.) and in some features (the "Sorcerer of Mirkwood" quest is a remnant of a stealth system coded by Yoshiboy, which we sadly dropped in rest of the mod), but more importantly - in the idea of a design plan. Only when AW was gone, I realized we had little idea where to go from there. Or rather, everyone had their own ideas and no clue what AW's TLD was supposed to be as a whole. 

Here's an interesting video for comparison, someone playing the 0.808 version in 2011. :)

2.) TLD up to version 3.0 released for M&B 1.011. (2009-2011) This was the silver age. We mourned the loss of our glorious leader, wondered what his vision was and tried to reach it by running blindly into several directions. We had absolutely wonderful people on the team and what the mod is today stands on what they've done then. The war system, the quest writing, the companions, all the visuals and settlement scenes, all the custom sound work, animations and even entire pieces of development software created to make TLD. 

Lots of talented people also meant lots of arguing and design disputes. I like to believe it was necessary to distill TLD into greatness, but it wasn't always pleasant. Still, we agreed on the large concept, TLD was supposed to be a total conversion with emphasis on player immersion and focus on the War of the Ring, with occasional emergent lore-friendly roleplaying and exploration.

Mostly due to burnout, frustration caused by engine limitation and personal conflicts, the team fell apart after patching up the initial release. This is the TLD we've had and played for a few years.

3.) TLD up till now. Only a few people remain of the original team, active here and there when they feel like it. We've gotten a new programmer who's done great work in balancing the mod and adding a few new features (CppCoder). It's been mostly me posing as the voice of TLD for some time now, and I've been the annoying bugger who can't quite let go of this thing. Pushing and pulling everyone I could muster into working on the mod at least a bit. A few graphics assets have been redone, big plans were had in regards to finishing incomplete quests etc.

Then Swyter (of Star Wars: Conquest fame) decided to port the mod to Warband. I happily stayed out of his way and helped wherever my limited skills allowed it.

Keeping your core tight

I think the two major reasons why TLD is popular with players are:

1.) It's a LOTR mod. Hands down, this is the reason why people download it. There's a great hunger for LOTR inspired games, probably because there are so few actually good ones. Mods help fill this niche.

2.) It's designed like a game, (one that plays different enough to M&B itself) with a clear focus on a specific type of gameplay and player experience.

TLD's focus on the War originated in the very first of the three ages (Three ages of The Last Days of the Third Age...get it? ;-P). The native game at the time didn't have a real war system, you couldn't win. All you could do was fight the never ending line of respawning enemy parties. To have sides in the war with the possibility of losing/winning the war by defeating enemies who can actually die was a new concept, so we built on it a lot in the future.

M&B later expanded on the sandbox element of the game, with owning villages and having obligations as a vassal of a lord etc. 

During the silver age, we discussed this and decided to keep everything like marriage and fief management out. As we say in the Manual, the mod is set during the War of the Ring and to settle down with a wife, to manage building of a church and fences and whatnot, it just doesn't make sense. 

Content and features making sense in the setting is key, when introducing new stuff we always asked if it's based on anything in Tolkien's books. If not, does it seem like something that would plausibly happen in Middle Earth? The resource/rank/influence points system replacing native dinar currency is a result of this process. Not many characters in the books actually ever talk about money and if they do, it's presented as a negative thing. When military tactics are discussed, nobody asks about costs and supplies. They know the stakes, it's all or nothing. 

So you're not being paid money, you don't "buy" items. Instead you're supplied by your faction, you requisition items from the armoury based on how much your faction appreciates you. Many heated discussions were had, some of our coders still disagree with the decision, but the system seems to get about an equal amount of positive and negative opinions from players, so I take it as a matter of taste and not a gamebreaking annoyance. 

Last Level Press - a review and a great analysis of TLD 

Setting is king, especially if you're doing LOTR. There are so many Tolkien nerds who will understand easter eggs, tiny references and nods. Who will spot the tiniest of inaccuracies. So we agreed to change as much writing to be setting appropriate as possible, we've added little touches like an ingame elven calendar, or messages telling you which microregion of Middle Earth you're entering. Which brings me to another aspect we tried to keep tight - the map. Comments about our map being too small amuse me. We still get questions if Eriador and other western areas will become available later. Nope, they won't. We actually downsized the map during development, because it felt too empty and we couldn't populate it with more moving entities for performance reasons. Besides "being able to go there", there wasn't any benefit in mapping the entirety of Middle Earth.

If The Veiled Stars map ends up a lot bigger (which previews indicate), I have to wonder - what are they going to fill it with? Unlike TLD, TVS keeps the town+villages model of Warband, so that's content we couldn't use. Will it be fun content? Enjoy making a bajillion custom scenes! Ask Triglav how fun it was making all our scenes by himself and how long it took. And thinking of ways to fill the map with fun and interesting content is important for TVS, as it's (so far) presented as a sandboxy roleplaying experience, not a wargame with a bit of exploration/roleplaying.

In conclusion - nobody's saying you need to read books on game design and write down pages and pages of design docs. Just sit down and write a page or two. Start with one or two sentences, summarizing what the mod's about and why anyone who's played hundreds of other mods should play it. Don't list features, write down what kind of an experience you want it to be.

When you have the essence, set limits of what's currently possible and add a pile of features you'd like to have. Then prune the pile and throw out the most difficult or labour intensive features. (or keep them for later) The pile will only grow taller in development, so being honest to yourself about what you're capable of is definitely an advantage.

When mods pretend to be games

Total conversions are extremely difficult to make and there are good reasons why most of them inevitably fail to deliver a playable version. There's a very quick turnover of people contributing, one has to be prepared to lose members all the time, due to a host of reasons. They come in wishing to help and leave a week to a few months later.
With a mod like TLD or TVS, you're building a library of assets (graphics, sounds, music, animations) and an underlying set of systems that make the game work. (programming) TLD started with AW doing the coding and contributors working on assets at the same time - this is a pretty great way to do things. You're not wasting time and you have something that works as a game and already looks like one too.
This is not the case with most mods though, many beginners start by learning 3D and making assets. They model a few items, put them in game and call it a mod. This kind of item swap is still useful, because pretty screenshots might lead supporters and contributors to you, even if the gameplay is just the same as the native game.

Pretty visuals are often the first goal of a mod. It's not wrong, we definitely wanted TLD to be as pretty as it possibly could. It's equally important to create graphics assets with optimization in mind. Especially if you're not making a game where you can adjust how the engine handles assets, keeping stuff tidy, clean and lean is essential. Often it's a performance-driven choice between a handful of beautiful items and a variety of lower resolution ones. It's about the time it takes to create them and also the final combined effect they have in game. TLD (while being made by many contributors) tried to keep a unified style to the graphics. The models are low poly, the textures are small and we don't use normal maps. I still maintain that they look good, even nicer now, in Warband's superior rendering engine.
I suppose there are different kinds of modders and different kinds of players. We aimed for player immersion and a powerful roleplaying experience. On the other hand, mods for Skyrim adding incredibly pretty items are very popular. Some players simply want to admire their own character, take pretty screenshots and dick around in the sandbox.

The Veiled Stars: Gorgeous Isengard

Eventually, you want to release something people could play. All too often, mods with ambitious plans try to embrace the development model of actual games. They publish previews, go into alpha and beta releases and keep patching after the actual release. TLD did this as well, but we've been always quite good at keeping development details to ourselves until it was time to release.
With TLD being open source since last year, I expected TVS to use our graphics assets at first while building their own code systems and implementing various features. And replacing them with their nicer Warband-specific assets in the process. This is after all how game development usually goes - you build a prototype first and start expanding and polishing it later.

If Jarvisimo isn't too mad at me at this point, I'd offer this as a suggestion. Spend more time planning, designing systems and coding, leave assets for later or have someone else make them. Since you're already releasing alpha versions, you'd benefit from having something fun to play, something different and new and interesting. Warband in a different map with a bunch of pretty models won't hold interest for long.
That said, player responses and feedback are a difficult aspect of modding. I'm infamous for being a horrible prick to everyone on our forums. Answering the same ignorant questions over and over and dealing with lazy anonymous internet entities can be very tiresome, so beware! If you can, get a PR person to do it for you. Your mental health will thank you years from now.

Almost the end

We're fully aware that Swyter's port of TLD put Jarvi and TVS into a difficult position, I've actually read your disappointed post on your forums. Still, us talking about it is not just empty words. There truly is no reason why there should be space for only one LOTR mod for Warband, or why we should measure their worth by pretty graphics or size of the map. If you have a vision, if you design with that vision in mind and if you keep hammering at it, it'll end up as something  you and others will want to play. That (not praise or ratings), to me, is the ultimate goal of modding.

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I've been meaning to write about the history of TLD for a while, a bit of a post mortem. What it was like with AW, after he left, to spill a bit of the behind the scenes gossip and so on. If there's any interest in that, I'll do it. Or I could record another podcast. We'll see if any fans read this far. ;)

Oh the Banter, Lord!

If you haven't noticed by now, I adore the Mount&Blade series of games. And joy oh joy, yesterday the sequel to MnB was announced - Mount&Blade: Bannerlord

http://www.taleworlds.com/

I was so happy I decided to spend a Friday evening by painting a bit of fanart. We have no idea what the setting of the game will be like, but I took it in a general mix of migration-era way, slightly Germanic/Arthurian and viking vibe. It was also a good exercise for trying to get faster and more efficient at painting.

For a Few Sword Myths More

Because my sword related posts seem to be more popular than the rest of my rambling, here's a new one! ;)

Especially popular was my list of sword mistakes artists quite often make, so this is a bit of a sequel to that. Today we'll be talking about one general art issue and two specific fun bits from my favourite movies.

1) Cracked and chipped blades

Ryan A. Span suggested this and I thank him for that - it's a good one. While I couldn't find a good representative example of this issue right now, I'm sure you've all seen this a lot. Maybe you've even drawn this way? I know I used to. ;P

Nicks and cracks are painted or drawn on sword blades to make them look used, as real objects. To make the blades seem less boring and artificial.
I would suggest learning more about how real swords change with use in the hands of a person who cares about his tools, how they're sharpened and polished. (and what else you can do to your drawing of a sword to make the boring parts more interesting)

Nicks will happen even if you're careful, but one usually tries to grind them out if they're small enough. Cracks are not good, you do not use a cracked sword. Scratches happen too and while you could polish them out, they don't really hurt the blade much.
Any reenactor, or a sword enthusiast will tell you one thing - if a sword blade has a crack in it, or a large chunk chipped off, YOU SHOULD NOT USE IT. It is most likely going to break and even if the blade bits don't hurt you while flying off, you'll end up with a broken (useless) sword.

2) Conan the Barbarian - casting of the sword.

(roughly from 1:20)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_OkMan3kkM

(sorry, Blogger won't let me embedd this as a video.)

It's a well known scene - Conan's father makes a sword while Conan and his mother watch. First he casts the iron in a mould cut in a stone block. Then he beats it on an anvil and reheats it a couple of times. (Mysteriously, the engraving on the blade appears before one of these reheats, but we'll not talk about that.)

Can you in fact cast an iron sword?  The answer is complicated, as always with swords.
Yes, you could do it, but it wouldn't be a good sword, if you could use it at all.

Now we see the blade is getting some treatment after the casting, so that would be ok, that would produce a sword like object indeed.

The funny bit is the casting itself.
If we agree that what was used in history was something that was proven possible and useful at the time, we should conclude that casting iron swords is unrealistic.
I'm told that casting certain parts of swords can be done - crosspieces and pommels for example.
The problem with casting iron is the temperature. Iron's melting point ranges from 1200 to 1500 degrees Celsius, depending on the amount of other metals in the alloy.

("WAIT!", I hear you say, "iron is not an alloy!" Well, yes, but a swordmaker would not usually have a chunk of pure iron to work with, nor would he want to. We could call it steel, but that's another can of worms I'm not yet ready to open)

Achieving this kind of temperature for successful casting seems to be rather difficult (for the smiths of old, of course we do cast iron nowadays).

Here's an insteresting discussion on this topic:

http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=147825

edit: As pointed out in the discussion - beside the temperature, other problems arise while casting iron swords. Iron swords tend to be longer and thinner - you'd need to achieve such casting technology that you'd avoid bubbles/porosity and other casting artifacts. You would also figure out a way to cast iron so that it doesn't pick up a lot of carbon. 

Bronze for example melts at about 800 degrees Celsius, depending on the tin-to-copper ratio. (copper has a higher melting point than tin)
That is why bronze swords were indeed made by casting into clay moulds.

Smiths have always had a specific status in the society - very similar to shamans and mages. Alchemy itself arose from the practice of smithing. A smith, a metal worker is able to do transmutation - to change one substance into another. To speed up a process which was believed to happen over thousands of years in the vomb of mother Earth - the purification of metals.  (the common belief from antiquity to medieval times was that metals grow in the ground - from low metals like lead into perfect metals like gold)
What else do you call someone who takes a pile of rocks, puts them in a fire, performs a lot of strange actions and transforms these rocks into a shiny sword? He's a magician.

Steel/iron swords are not usually made by casting. (I'm not aware of any instances of that, please correct me if I'm wrong in thinking this.)

Then again, it'd be kinda bogus if Conan's dad taught him the "Riddle of bronze", wouldn't it? ;P

3) 13th Warrior - The Scimitar Grinding

I love the 13th Warrior. It's one of my favourite movies ever. And I love this scene - it's funny, but it also shows Antonio Banderas' character getting some respect from his viking companions.

(from about 1:20)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkTxBCxKg5g

(again, can't embed this video. Sorry!)

Sadly, as with the rest of the film, it's not very historically accurate.

A) He grinds the sword into something resembling a shamshir/scimitar - a curved sword we westerners associate with islamic warriors. BUT, by this time and a few hundred years later - Arabs were using straight swords - very similar to their western counterparts.

The dimensions of the sword were fantastical to begin with, real viking swords of this time were rather smallish.

B) Grinding is a useful technique which has been used in sword making and which is in fact prevalent in sword making today!

But considering the construction of viking swords of that time, grinding it down to this shape would mostly likely ruin the blade and make it near useless as a sword.

Pattern welding (often wrongly called Damascus steel) is a huge topic which could easily take a whole post to explain at least roughly, so here's a link that explains it rather well:

http://www.paul-binns-swords.co.uk/Pattern_welding.htm

If you ground off the hard steel edges, you'd end up cutting with the twisted core. While I'm not sure what the exact result would be, it wouldn't be pretty I think.

That's it for today. If you have any questions, if you think I'm wrong and want me to know - the comments are right below. :)

Clever blog post title

Not much yappin' today, mostly art!

Did you know that roughly (a couple of years here and there) at the time Caesar got stabbed in the Forum, something similar happened to Burebista - a Geto-Dacian king who united the various Dacian tribes?
(he was so busy fortifying his kingdom against a quite possible roman invasion that he totally missed a conspiracy by a group of unhappy chieftains)
(yep, I'm doing reading on Dacians because of my thesis. Very cool stuff.)

DRAWINGS NAO!

(more fairly quick encounter paintings for TLD. First two are shown when you're defeated as human or orc, other two are victory screens for orcs and dwarves.)

Now dinner and paint some more. Byeeee!

Getting old in computer years

This is mostly about TLD, so if you're not interested, maybe skip this one.

One thing I like about painting is - you can't really stay behind rest of the world very much. Sure, there may be kids painting with their minds wired straight to the computer, but if you do an oil painting, people will still like it and you won't embarrass yourself (unless you're a bad painter).
Computer games are different. You can't even claim to be retro in games, retro games have pixel art graphics and rip off pong or Megaman. If you get old in computer game years, you're simply a sucker.

When we started TLD these five years ago, we were setting the trends for MaB and even for its time it wasn't a bad looking mod. We were exploring the crap out of the technology, we had enthusiasm and thought we had all the time in the world.
Five years later, we're still pushing the technology and setting (some) trends, but it doesn't feel like being a giant space man fighting his way through a wave of star dust towards a shiny future. It's more like pushing a creaking wagon full of stuff that's breaking apart faster than you're fixing it.

We know, the MaB engine is old and not really supported and developed anymore. Warband is out there and most of the cool mod kids are there with it. Luckily, the MaB/Warband scene is not full of the bros who need to have a 3D shooter more realistic and hitech than the previous one every three months. But still, the old age is creeping on us.

We like to throw our 5 years of development around as a proof of being oldschool and therefore awesome. But it's also a stigma - fans expect nothing less than a LOTR roleplaying nirvana. And while I'm confident we'll release a good mod, I have no doubt we'll disappoint many people. It's just been built up too much. The more work we put into it, the more we realize we're pretty limited by the old clunky engine. (how awesome would it be to license the engine and be free to do our own modifications! Like getting rid of that nasty limit on number of usable races, or a bug with overflowing vertex buffer...DREAM ON, PUNY ARTIST!)

Sometimes I feel like whining (this post is a proof of that) about modding being hard and unrewarding. And then I take a look at our competition. It has two types of effect:
1) HOLY SHIT! Their models/textures/sounds/battle features/neat improvements are SO GOOD! Why aren't our as good?
2) How can we beat this?!

The first type happened with the Star Wars mod, which has an amazing amount of quality models, textures, working lightsabers, speeders, all the various aline races, jedi force powers, it's awesome. Recently this first type also kicked in while playing Rus XIII, which is still in beta as well, but is already AWESOME.
If you're into early medieval battles, you NEED to play it. Absolutely gorgeous models and textures of consistently good quality, great soundtrack (medieval music mostly), good features changing gameplay a LOT, it's the real deal.
I think I can let you guys know we're being inspired by the Rus guys in many ways. (and of course stealing their ideas. I'm only half joking. :D)

I'm sorry, no art today, I won't leak any secret info from TLD development either.
But be sure to check out those mods I wrote about:

Star Wars Conquest on ModDB (check out the video section)
Rus XIII 1st video - the Mongols
Rus XIII 2nd video - the Teutonic knights
Rus XIII - battle of Rakvere
Rus XIII - battle of lake Peipus

I promise there will be some art in the next post! :)

Personal vaporware

I think it's appropriate I do the first real post about something personal and important.

The Last Days - of what?!

The Last Days of the Third Age (or TLD) is a full conversion modification of a PC game I love.

It's called Mount and Blade and probably everyone into indie games knows about it. I won't write about that, if you're interested in free roaming medieval mercenary simulation/RPG where you can fight on horses, google it, read some reviews and try the demo of Warband. Warband is like a sequel of MaB with multiplayer options and better graphics.


However, we're making our modifications for the old MaB - (there are technical issues preventing us from porting to Warband.)
 The official website of MaB and Warband

What is TLD about? It's a bit like MaB, but set in J.R.R.Tolkien's MiddleEarth and much improved. In MaB you ride around as a mercenary, doing quests for various lords, fighting enemy kingdoms, raising your small band of soldiers and the general goal is to become a powerful warlord, have fun and roleplay your own story.

TLD takes the engine of the game and makes it all about the War of the Ring. You've seen the movies, right? Sauron and his orcs are evil, elves, dwarves, humans and little hobbits are good. They fight.
TLD is based on the Lord of the Rings books - we're trying to come up with our own designs for costumes and weapons, we try to show stuff they didn't put in the movies.

I started doing concept art for TLD five years ago and it's kinda cool seeing how I progressed from those first drawings I did at the dorm instead of studying.

My TLD concept art gallery on DA

To show something more up to date - here's a batch of very fast little paintings I did this week for ingame encounters (you can see some ents attacking the player's party, some tribal orcs, raiders and so on)

(they're all done in ArtRage with the watercolors and pencil, all under an hour.)

Here's another sub-project I'm trying to start for TLD - portraits of all the NPCs in the game. It could take another 5 years to do them all though :D
In this sped up video I draw a sketch for prince Imrahil of Dol Amroth. Music and editing included!
Prince Imrahil - sketched in 14 minutes

Interesting and/or useful links I found this week

1) A bronze sword maker. Wonderful replicas, a must see for any sword enthusiast and fantasy painter
2) Plumtree - Scott Pilgrim (nice moosec)
3) MaB: Warband launch trailer
4) TLD forums (the public info is sadly quite old)

What else am I doing?

I'm repainting a cover of STREET: Empathy, the first book I did a cover for - written by my friend Ryan A. Span. (there will be a new edition of the book and they want a nicer cover. Can't blame them, the old one shows it's age.)
STREET website - you can read the book online (if you're into cyberpunk, I can only recommend it)
I'm also drawing and painting class illustrations for Dračí Doupě 2 ("Dragon's Lair 2"), there are quite many.
DrD2 website (czech only)
And last but not least - I go to school. ;) Mostly regularly. And researching stuff for my masters thesis - I'll write about that in a future post I'm sure.

YOU CAN STOP READING HERE IF YOU'RE NOT INTERESTED IN TLD

...continuing my TLD story:
Being a huge Tolkien fan and enjoying the game, I simply had to get involved. I drew some elves and asked the mod leader if I could be a concept artist. Seeing no harm, he kinda agreed and I never stopped drawing stuff for the mod since.

I think I'll post about the process of making designs and putting (or not) them ingame some other time, this blog update is more about the whole idea.
We've had a couple of big releases, the last one a few years ago. And of course, without showing previews every week, people start to talk. "The mod is dead!", "It's vaporware" (google if you don't know the term) and so on.
It's not easy to keep calm facing such allegations, but we do. Mostly. ;) We've been through a lot - our mod leader disappeared a year ago, along with all our code and his unique vision. (we think he must've passed away, he wasn't a person to just walk without a word), so a majority of the mod had to be remade from scratch. Members of the team come and go, some stay for years, some contribute a bit and lose interest. We've had a great old time member leave us recently, which was a really unfortunate and sad thing for all of us. Creative disagreements happen.

But I've been very pleased with recent progress, we're finally getting to the phase of a playable mod, features are popping up and being tuned, most of the graphics are in and looking very cool. It all starts to feel like Middle Earth.
Beside doing concept art I also did texturing, model adjustments, feature design and recently also GUI adjustment and repainting of menus and such.

We still don't show much progress to the public, but we slip screens and info here and there. If you haven't yet seen it, take a look at our last official preview:

TLD: game locations preview thread

I think I'll post this now before it becomes even more obscenely old. If you've read past here, you deserve a giant cookie and a hug!
(ask for it in the comments. :D)