[Wet Orange Ostrich Toilet]

So, I have a very big project in mind which should fill in about three acts with 20-40 missions each. For now, I'm still stuck at Act I with about 5 missions "complete" (as in, only 3 of them are actually fully complete, the other two require heavy reworks) and I have absolutely no idea what I should make for the next missions.

Therefore, I'm asking all the great Mission Designers (basically everyone on this forum), where do you get your inspiration from? I am currently lacking it and haven't had any for five weeks.

[AdmiralRalwood]

So, I have a very big project in mind which should fill in about three acts with 20-40 missions each.

This is a very bad idea.

For now, I'm still stuck at Act I with about 5 missions "complete" (as in, only 3 of them are actually fully complete, the other two require heavy reworks) and I have absolutely no idea what I should make for the next missions.

This would be why it's a very bad idea; without experience under your belt, making a 20+ mission campaign (let alone a multi-act campaign where each act has 20+ missions) may simply be beyond your capabilities. You wouldn't even know whether you could actually pull it off, and it seems like the answer is "no".

Or perhaps I should say "not yet".

My personal recommendation is to release some single missions, or short mini-campaigns. The important thing is that they be self-contained and not take too much time to make, so that you can explore concepts, release them, get feedback, and iterate that into further efforts as quickly as you can manage. Once you have more experience under your belt, only then is it a good idea (or at least not as bad of an idea) to try making a longer campaign. Alternatively, you could try joining a larger team (as I understand it, Inferno needs FREDers, for example).

[Wet Orange Ostrich Toilet]

Oh, okay. Thanks.

Yeah, I have the tendency to be a bit overambitious.

Alright... I'll just throw in some singular missions first.

Thanks again for the advice.

[The E]

I would first start out by cautioning against massive megaprojects as your very first foray into FSO mission design. 60-120 missions is a tall order to fill with engaging gameplay and storytelling.

So my first step in looking at this is taking a good long look at your story outline. What's the story you want to tell? What specific beats in that story can be told in missions? Which can be better told in command briefings, briefings, debriefings, fiction pieces or even Techroom entries?
Then ask yourself which pieces of the story are necessary. Cut everything that isn't. Be absolutely ruthless.
After this, you should have a list of story beats that you want to show the player. Now comes the difficult part. Look at each potential mission, and try to figure out what the gameplay should be to serve the story, on a very general level. Like, should this mission be an escort run? A combat arena? A stealthy recon thing? Tower Defence?
When that is done, you should have a general outline of your entire campaign from start to finish. You now have a rough idea of how the gameplay and story will flow from one mission to the next. Then you can get into the nitty gritty of actually making those missions. There aren't a lot of ways to make this process easy; at a certain level, it's very much a matter of gritting your teeth and powering through it until you have at least playable (if unpolished) versions of each of your missions.

I realize this is heavy on the process of making a campaign, and doesn't mention inspiration. I actually don't have an answer to that, but I will say this: Not every mission needs to be a super innovative thing. A good dogfight is a good dogfight. One of the main mistakes rookie mission designers make is to believe that they must be at least as impressive as Axem or Spoon or Battuta for their first project, or be at least as massive in scope as Derelict or BP. You need to work on your skills first. Make a small campaign, call it a teaser for a bigger project, and get the feedback train rolling. Find out what other people think about your work, and listen to what they think works well and where they think you need to improve. The biggest enemy you have right now is being overwhelmed by the scope of what you want to do.

[mjn.mixael]

I would first start out by cautioning against massive megaprojects as your very first foray into FSO mission design. 60-120 missions is a tall order to fill with engaging gameplay and storytelling.

So my first step in looking at this is taking a good long look at your story outline. What's the story you want to tell? What specific beats in that story can be told in missions? Which can be better told in command briefings, briefings, debriefings, fiction pieces or even Techroom entries?
Then ask yourself which pieces of the story are necessary. Cut everything that isn't. Be absolutely ruthless.
After this, you should have a list of story beats that you want to show the player. Now comes the difficult part. Look at each potential mission, and try to figure out what the gameplay should be to serve the story, on a very general level. Like, should this mission be an escort run? A combat arena? A stealthy recon thing? Tower Defence?
When that is done, you should have a general outline of your entire campaign from start to finish. You now have a rough idea of how the gameplay and story will flow from one mission to the next. Then you can get into the nitty gritty of actually making those missions. There aren't a lot of ways to make this process easy; at a certain level, it's very much a matter of gritting your teeth and powering through it until you have at least playable (if unpolished) versions of each of your missions.

I realize this is heavy on the process of making a campaign, and doesn't mention inspiration. I actually don't have an answer to that, but I will say this: Not every mission needs to be a super innovative thing. A good dogfight is a good dogfight. One of the main mistakes rookie mission designers make is to believe that they must be at least as impressive as Axem or Spoon or Battuta for their first project, or be at least as massive in scope as Derelict or BP. You need to work on your skills first. Make a small campaign, call it a teaser for a bigger project, and get the feedback train rolling. Find out what other people think about your work, and listen to what they think works well and where they think you need to improve. The biggest enemy you have right now is being overwhelmed by the scope of what you want to do.

Not to mention that few (maybe only 1 or 2 over the course of HLP's entire history) large ambitious projects like this are ever finished. That's why we say it's a bad idea. We know it's a bad idea from experience. I can only think of two massive projects that ever released and they were... OK.

EDIT: Turns out Derelict was 45 missions, so that makes 3 I can think of. I thought it was much shorter. IMO, most of the missions aren't that memorable and I was never as enamored with the mod as most of the community seemed to be.

The really good campaigns tend to be shorter OR as the BP team has shown as a good model, released in very polished 15-ish mission chunks.

It's entirely anecdotal, but I set out to build a 15 mission campaign after doing exactly what The_E posted above to the story I wanted to tell. It later ballooned to 19 missions. It's taken 4 years to finish the FREDing and that was with 2 FREDers that are generally pretty competent in their ability with FRED and very familiar with FSO Modding. Motivation ebbs and flows. Some weeks you FRED.. some you don't. Some months you FRED.. some you don't. I can't imagine trying to finish a 40+ mission campaign in a timeframe that even matters. But that's just my experience.

[Axem]

I second, third and fourth everything that's been said already. Start slow, start simple.

Motivation is like a plant. You need to constantly water it with any ideas, sometimes its a bad idea and it runs off, sometimes its a good idea and it helps your motivation grow. Motivation is just very needy, and you don't need to wait for an idea rainstorm to reap the harvest. Play campaigns, play games, look to see how they do things and borrow (steal) those ideas. What if you did this, what if they did that? Wouldn't it be really cool if? But don't hold any idea or moment to be sacred, let things develop naturally. If you've got an idea, just make a quick mock up mission first and see how it plays. Let it evolve.

And it doesn't matter if you have a giant 100 mission campaign or a tiny 5 mission campaign, its very easy to get lost in the whole scope of things. So take everything in small chunks and focus your scope.

You'll get it done!

Signed,
Person who had this as one of their first campaign outlines. (Spoilers: It never got made (I never even made a mission))

[Buff Skeleton]

Everything said here is solid gold truth and applies to way more than just FRED. It really speaks to broader truths in modding or creative development of any sort.

Always start small, and if you don't even have a full story to tell, then that's your first step. Except in the case of Fredding, where story is not absolutely required per se, just gameplay. But even the best gameplay is shallow if you don't feel like there's much of a purpose to what you're doing. So you may want to start off storyboarding before you do anything further. Just jot notes down in a text editor or something, move things around, experiment.

As for inspiration? That comes naturally from just living life. When something really stands out in your mind, be it a problem in the world you wish could be solved or something that happened in your life you wanted to share in some way, those are the things to "write" about. Trying to just invent an epic story to have an epic story is going to fall flat. The best epic stories are very much a labor of love, based on something the creators are extremely passionate about. Even with that drive, it still can take ages to make measurable progress.

I'd say, play some games, watch some movies, and when something stands out that makes you think, "wouldn't it be cool to be able to PLAY something like this in Freespace?" Go forward with that idea. Write it as a single-mission short story, or maybe two or three. Make separate, unrelated "episodes" of content, short but sweet, polished and fun to play. Eventually you'll start to get an idea of what you'd want a larger-scale project to be like. As an added bonus, you'll have more practice, more feedback, and actual released content to help motivate you toward bigger ambitions. Just don't start off cranking the dial to 11 and you'll do much better

[procdrone]

Like others have said, dont throw yourself on a big one just yet. build up your experience with shorter ones, and actually make releases.

Look on my project (in the description), its about 17 missions, which took me like 2 years to "complete" (bug and balance ridden). keeping inspired to keep going here is very very hard. Im almost sure to guarantee you that you will fail if you take up on 60-80 missions behemot by yourself.

Myself, having people working with me gave me enough inspiration to pull this through, thinking myself that I shouldn't put their work to waste, playing some other fs2 great campaigns in the meantime also can give a kick. But thats only from my own very little experience.