[Axem]

I think Battuta's comment was responding to the hilariously out of context words:

"I'd say that its time to retire"

or they just went for the tl;dr.

I'm not going to leave JAD unfinished like that, so I'm not ready to give up yet. I've still got campaigns planned after that too, so lets not get into hysterics.

And I didn't mean to come off completely doom and gloom, just opening a little reality of working in this niche market. Also it can be hard to be excited for new stuff coming out when you're apart of 4 high profile projects. I've been spoiled too much! Mjn, don't let me join BtA!

So I've released quite a number of things, how's my success been (judging by release thread activity)?

Shadows of Kraken: 25 replies
JAD1: 92 replies
JAD2: 92 replies
JAD3: 201 replies
Vassago's Dirge: 328 replies
JAD2.21: 78 replies

Looking at these numbers alone, I'd say that its time to retire. It seems ludicrous that I spent over a year working on something that gets less response than the first two installments of JAD. But I know people really liked it, I know people played it. But I can't really tell how many people actually played it and liked it. For every reply, maybe there were 10 that liked it but didn't say anything. Or maybe 50. Or maybe just 1 extra. I can't tell. I tried to gauge better reactions with a poll, but interest died out on that pretty quickly as well, so I ended it well before I originally intended to.

And herein lies one of the biggest problems in motivating the community. There is no easy way to simply say you like a campaign unless you are a member of HLP. Perhaps we should just give up and add facebook like buttons.

It's the same with Diaspora (although to a lesser degree). I get the feeling we were really loved on release but the Diaspora release thread has only 384 replies. So maybe you should use that as your comparison, Vassago's Dirge was almost as popular as Diaspora!
 Hell, given that many of the posters on the release thread are one-time posters, it's probably more popular amongst HLP members!

Two and a half small counterpoints

First, Diaspora has an entire forum dedicated to it. Some well-wishers and other discussion won't end up in the main release forum, but in the threads around it. Vassago has all of its correspondence in the single thread.
Second, the point I was trying to make is more the contrast between the visible reactions from Vassago to JAD2.21. If you tried to plot out a graph of expected replies before JAD's release, you'd maybe expect it to go over, but it... didn't.

But that's not to say I'm disappointed with Vassago's release. I was utterly thrilled with it, getting very brief mentions on other websites with it even! (More a consequence of posting it on ModDB mind you!) It's just, you know, I wanted more of that warm baskingness.

This might just be a problem that I created myself. I try to bring unique missions and gameplay to the table, but its hard to know where the line between "this 5 minute mission is worth spending a month on" and "this 5 minute mission is not worth spending a month on". You can be sure any game developer would not like 5 minutes of gameplay taking a month to do, so I probably need to... not do that.

Oh come on, you know you love the challenge about as much as I do.

I do indeed love the challenge! But I spent a few weeks and around 200kb of a mission to something that the player can storm through in 10 seconds. There's got to be some limit where you need to go "hey, stop clowning around" and release something this decade.


In any case, more random ideas to move to an upbeat tone:

Extend HLP to be a general space simmer modding community (grabbing ahold of old Freelancers, new Star Citizens etc). But extending out tends to not work out without a base ready to move. (But we've got a HW Mod, a Soase mod (maybe), a MechCommander mod so far...)

Create It/Play It Months
Months where we're all greatly encouraged to take a little time out and create a mission (maybe based on a common theme) or model (its Civ Transport month!) and just post something at the end of the month, get a participation badge or something. Like the FREDding contest... just no eternal judging.

Likewise, a month where we're all greatly encouraged to play a campaign. Old, new, just something that's not yours. Maybe encourage posting LPs on places like youtube.

More FSWiki drives, these are great to get categories of pages up to date and looking great.

[Nuke]

i think everyones just getting old. i know when i made the bulk of the nukemod content prior to 2006. when i finished something, i was like yea, thats awesome. fast forward to a few months ago when i was rolling out a ****ty ksp mod, it felt more like, yay its done! i can finally go do something else and forget about this ****. somewhere down the line mods stopped feeling like a hobby and just started feeling like work. something to be avoided like the plague.

now this may sound like im taking an old dieing cat out back and shooting it. but i can always go get some new kittens. and by that analogy i mean new modders. i still see that every now and again when i scan through the modding board occasionally someone asks a really stupid question, but then i come to the realization that its new blood looking to mod this fine game, and hopefully they will be as enthusiastic as i used to be about modding.

obligatory will finish nukemod when i find a meth dealer.

[Scourge of Ages]

Create It/Play It Months
Months where we're all greatly encouraged to take a little time out and create a mission (maybe based on a common theme) or model (its Civ Transport month!) and just post something at the end of the month, get a participation badge or something. Like the FREDding contest... just no eternal judging.

Likewise, a month where we're all greatly encouraged to play a campaign. Old, new, just something that's not yours. Maybe encourage posting LPs on places like youtube.

More FSWiki drives, these are great to get categories of pages up to date and looking great.

I really like these ideas.

[Black Wolf]

I really want to get more involved with this thread, but I don't have the time right now. That said, more wiki drives are definitely possible, I think we had reasonable success with the WoD drive, and the recent additions to the User-Made Ships page (neither of these are complete, but they're a hell of a lot better than they were, thanks to collaborative effort).

A drive to update the pages of released campaigns could be something tot think about.

[Goober5000]

http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Silent_Threat:_Reborn <- This is a released 18 mission voice acted campaign
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Between_the_Ashes <- This is for an unreleased campaign with a 2 mission demo

With zero knowledge of FreeSpace and HLP, which to you looks more interesting? You have 5 seconds to decide before your interest makes you close the tab.

Well poo.  Clearly I need a better publicist.

Actually, this is not far off the mark.  Back in days of yore Setekh was really involved in this sort of thing.  He was always popping into hosted project forums, asking how things were going, asking if people needed renders or hosted stuff.  He was really good at fostering community spirit and promoting members' work.  And he did all those project-specific board themes.  (Maybe we should try bringing those back.)

[karajorma]

Extend HLP to be a general space simmer modding community (grabbing ahold of old Freelancers, new Star Citizens etc). But extending out tends to not work out without a base ready to move. (But we've got a HW Mod, a Soase mod (maybe), a MechCommander mod so far...)

I've been saying that we need to expand beyond being a Freespace community and become a Freespace Engine community for ages. Freespace is a great game, but we've outgrown it slightly and it's become a barrier to entry. I'm not saying we should ignore it, or forget about it, but I think we should stop acting like it's the main entry point to the community. Let's rope people in with our stand alone stuff and then once they're hooked start pointing them at Freespace.

There's a reason why Diaspora starts with mentions of the SCP and Hard Light Productions. Those are the brands we should be marketing, not Freespace. Trying to grab people with a "This is a great game. But if you want to play it you need to pay $10 to GOG first" is the wrong way to drag people in.

Likewise, a month where we're all greatly encouraged to play a campaign. Old, new, just something that's not yours. Maybe encourage posting LPs on places like youtube.

Absolutely, I mentioned doing much the same thing on IRC. This one is especially good as there is no reason people can't start doing this right now.

[MatthTheGeek]

While I typically consider myself to be the target audience of my mods, its wonderful to share and see my works be discussed and be, generally, successful. So I've released quite a number of things, how's my success been (judging by release thread activity)?

Shadows of Kraken: 25 replies
JAD1: 92 replies
JAD2: 92 replies
JAD3: 201 replies
Vassago's Dirge: 328 replies
JAD2.21: 78 replies

I still think thread activity is an utterly irrelevant factor. Probably one of the less relevant of all. For example, I've played almost everything that was released since I joined the community plus nearly everything I could find on the wiki. Did I make review posts for them ? Hell no, I'm no native English speaker and most of the time one awesome reviewer like Spoon already said what I would have said long before I do and much better than I would have. There's a point where there's no need to repeat what's been said. If you start demanding that each guy playing your mod go post in a thread, you're gonna have a bad time.

If you want more relevant numbers, you'd want downloads numbers. I need to bug achtung to see if there's a way to track DL numbers on FSMods...

[karajorma]

I think it already does actually.

[Nuke]

what about more standalone content? standalone mini-mods and standalone multiplayer arena type mods might draw in a lot of people. your campaign need not be epic to be stand alone. im thinking some kind of team fortress in space kinda game, no plot, just epic arena play. graphics would be optimized for speed rather than for pretties. i actually thought about this kinda thing for nukemod on and off over the last decade, but didnt think the community would find it interesting at all.

[karajorma]

It would certainly give me something to use when testing the multiplayer code that was easier to work with than any of the existing games. It would also go a long way towards reviving the multiplayer side of the game.

If anyone is interested in slapping together something quickly, you've got my support when it comes to coding stuff (and maybe even a little light FREDding).

[Black Wolf]

My big effort to retain talent has been the 'history of HLP campaigns' thread. I wanted to give everybody's work a place in the narrative, a sense of what it contributed and did beautifully, and a positive sense of 'people pay attention, in depth, to what I do'.

I still plan to keep going on it, but damn, I was expecting a little participation.

Well, in this case, I never even noticed that you had asked for help. Maybe this is a situation where we can make use of the wiki? It's ideal for collaborative writing, and not everything on it has to be permanant. Maybe post what you have into a temporary page, create a new thread in the wiki forum or GenFS askng people to contribute and see what we get. The wiki is a great tool that I often think we underutilize.

We need current events! Yes, NEWS. Make site news much more prominent, like the highlights! Get dedicated people to trawl topics, see new and neat stuff, grab pics, and previews for news articles. Gather up information in threads and summarize it for people who don't want to go through a 400 post thread. Maybe every month or two, an article for what's been released, and what's coming up. Years in review! Ships, campaigns, everything. We need to increase our internal visibility to ourselves. And it needs to be consistently updated, weekly at the very minimum.

This is a good idea. I think it's easy to forget that HLP is, for a lot of non-community people, a website with a forum. For a lot of us - certainly for me - it's a forum that happens to have a website too. I had entirely forgotton that I could post website news from the announcements board - this has made me remeber, so that's a good thing. I think a lot of cool stuff - ship releases, single missions, new tuts, that sort of stuff - doesn't neccesarily get noticed because it doesn't justify a highlight. But a post to the announcements board, and, by extension, the main page, will give some degree of exposure to less prominent achievements and show off the activity levels to casual browsers.

Semi-related to that: I think we need better showcases of our released content. The wiki is great, but some of it seems too encyclopedic. Custom ships has come a long way recently, but the campaigns are still pretty bare and uninteresting.

http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Silent_Threat:_Reborn <- This is a released 18 mission voice acted campaign
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Between_the_Ashes <- This is for an unreleased campaign with a 2 mission demo

With zero knowledge of FreeSpace and HLP, which to you looks more interesting? You have 5 seconds to decide before your interest makes you close the tab.

Of course we can't depend on people finding the wiki first:
"I liked that freespace game, i wonder if there are any mods! i will search teh googles for freespace mods...aha a hit. what new map packs do they have???"

http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.863
http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.24

First one has nothing that would make me download it. Second line looks pretty bad too. No pics, a 1 star review. Better not play that either!

Well, while updating FSMods isn't something we can do without the collaboration of their staffers, as I mentioned earlier, updating the campaign pages on the wiki shouldn't be too hard, especially if we get some collaboration from the wiki editors (and we have a few really dedicated iki editors). It doesn't neccesarily have to be up to the campaign staff to maintain them, especially tentpole campaigns like ST:R

Create It/Play It Months
Months where we're all greatly encouraged to take a little time out and create a mission (maybe based on a common theme) or model (its Civ Transport month!) and just post something at the end of the month, get a participation badge or something. Like the FREDding contest... just no eternal judging.

Likewise, a month where we're all greatly encouraged to play a campaign. Old, new, just something that's not yours. Maybe encourage posting LPs on places like youtube.

These are both good ideas, and I would supposrt/participate in both.

WRT multiplayer stuff, I have to dmit ignorance - I don't play much multiplayer on any game - I prefer to follow an unfolding storyline as part of a single-player campaign than play a multiplayer dogfight. But I do see the alue in something like this. Perhaps we could combine it with one of Axem's ideas and have a month-long "contest" (if that's the right term) for people to design and create multiplayer "arenas" - big bits of geometry - either built from existing ships in FRED or modelled specially - around which to dogfight. Open space is fine, but when I did used to play the occasional MP round, I always had more fun playing the Old School dogfight around the Arcadia than I ever did in open empty space.

[Axem]

While I typically consider myself to be the target audience of my mods, its wonderful to share and see my works be discussed and be, generally, successful. So I've released quite a number of things, how's my success been (judging by release thread activity)?

Shadows of Kraken: 25 replies
JAD1: 92 replies
JAD2: 92 replies
JAD3: 201 replies
Vassago's Dirge: 328 replies
JAD2.21: 78 replies

I still think thread activity is an utterly irrelevant factor. Probably one of the less relevant of all. For example, I've played almost everything that was released since I joined the community plus nearly everything I could find on the wiki. Did I make review posts for them ? Hell no, I'm no native English speaker and most of the time one awesome reviewer like Spoon already said what I would have said long before I do and much better than I would have. There's a point where there's no need to repeat what's been said. If you start demanding that each guy playing your mod go post in a thread, you're gonna have a bad time.

If you want more relevant numbers, you'd want downloads numbers. I need to bug achtung to see if there's a way to track DL numbers on FSMods...

So why did 300-some people bother to comment on one mini-campaign and just 70-some on another around a year later? A lot of the posts in the Vassago release were all variations of "I loved the campaign". If no one wanted to resay whats been said, there would be nothing past Battuta's first post. Even a simple "played it, loved it, do more" would do a lot to motivate anyone.

And in my paragraph after that, I admitted, yeah more people could have played it. But I can't tell! FSMods does keep raw http logs, but I tend to find them... not an accurate picture of what actually happens. I saw BP's access logs for after WiH was released, the smaller base VP had a much much much less access count of the larger visual VPs. Surely everyone didn't need to retry downloading the visual VP 10 times for every base VP.

[redsniper]

Goddamned vultures, man.

[NGTM-1R]

Okay you know what?

Somebody nominate a campaign I can play and do another Good/Bad/Ugly on it. One I haven't already done. And isn't WiH because I'd like to finish it within the next week and I'd be there for at least eight days with WiH taking notes on everything.

AXEM, THIS IS YOUR CUE.

[General Battuta]

I still believe the best thing we can do is foster a culture of pluralistic, heterodox appreciation - in-depth, thoughtful posts even when something didn't really work for you, and a recognition of how the campaign in question advances and speaks to others in the medium. The BP forum thrives on its excellent, thoughtful posters, and I've tried to bring some of that to other campaigns via that one thread. Having someone think in depth about your campaign makes it worth it like nothing else.

[Goober5000]

Somebody nominate a campaign I can play and do another Good/Bad/Ugly on it.

Another?  How many have you done?  Did you do one for ST:R?

I can nominate a single mission: "The First Piece of Hell", published in the FS1 days.  I think it got ported to FSPort at some point, but I could be wrong.

[NGTM-1R]

Another?  How many have you done?  Did you do one for ST:R?

Total? I'm not sure. I adopted the format for the campaign where you play escort for the NTC Trinity (which I obviously can't remember the name of) and I think I've used it for every serious campaign review I've posted since where I actually completed the campaign. Campaigns I know I've done off the top of my head are both Wings of Dawn and Stranded (but not AND), Dimensional Eclipse. Anything before the release of WoD is fuzzy.

I know I haven't done it for ST:R because troo faxes, I didn't actually finish it for some reason.

Time to check my Port folder!

[Spoon]

I am actually still eagerly awaiting your GBU on stranded.

[NGTM-1R]

I am actually still eagerly awaiting your GBU on stranded.

Apparently things after the release of WoD are fuzzy too, then.

[karajorma]

If there are no other ideas, I'll bump this up to the admins and we can decide which ideas are feasible right now and which ones can be put into practice later.