Discovery Gaming Community

Hello everyone. Not many of you know me, or knew me back in the day. Perhaps that’s for the best; a lot happens in 10 years if you’re willing to accept changes in your life. I know I’m not the only one here who feels that way.

With 10 years of distance, some professional management experience under my belt, as well as having pursued game design and development for tabletop (the bread and butter of RPGs in the day), and with a healthy dose of humility, I want to share my thoughts on what Freelancer mod development could have looked like had the chips fallen differently. I speak as someone who was both inside, at Discovery’s height, and outside, as of right now. If “new blood” is of any value to any of you at all, perhaps these thoughts would be worth something to you. If you are pursuing your own mod, or games of your own making, or are even just a daydreamer like me, maybe you’ll get a kick out of it, too.

That said, I realize that Discovery’s culture has been one of the Status Quo. Very little has changed since I was more actively, dare I say “aggressively,” a part of what happened here on a day to day basis. The personal investment of time and energy that every “veteran” player feels is fundamentally at odds with everything I’m going to share here, and I fully expect either being completely ignored or facing serious backlash for daring to say anything at all. I get it. I was “there.” The more I play here and now, the more “there” I am again.

But life is a lot bigger than you, me and this game. There are things I’ve learned about project management and game design that came from sources I never could have anticipated ten years ago, let alone accepted as valuable or reliable. Maybe this thread can do a bit of that for you as well.

This thread will be an ongoing post, almost stream of consciousness. Were I a project lead, I’d have codified it into a design document, but as it stands that’s unnecessary. In the meantime, feel free to comment, even if it’s hostile. I’ve never been one for mincing words, and if the content of my posts contrast sharply with the criticisms they receive, then the sum total is worthy of study for anyone who reads it afterwards. All I ask is that you don’t push it to the point of being kicked from the forums. I’m not going to go out of my way to counter your posts, either. Ideas stand on their merits, or they don’t, and it’s for the reader to decide in the end.

Consider this a personal exorcism of everything I ever wanted for this game, after years of adding to its problems instead. By putting these ideas down once and for all, I’ll also be putting them to bed.

I’ll link to new posts here as they are written:

Many of you have heard of “mission statements” and “core values.” These are supposed to be the signposts of behavior and decision-making in an organization. More often than not, they are flowery boilerplate that made some executives happy and check a box on some performance report somewhere. But the idea wouldn’t persist if it didn’t have merit, and it’s not the fault of values that nobody pursues them.

Any project must be underscored, actually founded on, guiding principles. Many, many enterprises have failed due to a lack of this guidance, or to “losing their soul” by disregarding it, and game development is no exception. Whenever there is a roadblock of any kind, any conflict of opinion or interest, the principles exist to fall back on. In every such case, review the principles and ask, “In proposing, saying or doing this, am I following these or not?” These aren’t just the “how’s” but also the “why’s” a project is being finished, and so it is completely tied up in morale. Mod projects are almost entirely run by morale, given that it is entirely volunteer work. Without principles, morale slowly wanes as the “why” is never answered, or is contradicted, and with morale goes the team, with the team goes the project, and finally so does the community that gathered around it.

It goes without saying that a Freelancer mod would need guiding principles, but what are they? I’ll leave you to speculate about the principles, if any, that were decided upon by the various Freelancer projects over the years. Instead, I’ll outline the principles I’d use for this hypothetical project:


Integrity First

This is straightforward: Honor the principles. At any stage of development there will be a myriad of reasons to twist or to steer the project into different, usually individually-oriented, directions. That impulse must be crushed. Without adherence to the principles agreed upon from the beginning, nothing good can come of the project. This goes for every single member of the team and contributing community. A lack of consensus kills, but more often than not, consensus is lost mid-way through the endeavor. Make a deliberate effort to stop that from happening and you’ll have passed the first and most important barrier.


Plan Ahead

In keeping with the first principle, no consensus can exist for long if it hasn’t been put to paper. But don’t mistake this for holding a committee for five years and accomplishing nothing: There must be a plan, it must be signed off by an executive, and it must be executed. Period. Whether the general idea of a project was proposed democratically or not is irrelevant to the execution of the idea, because it is not the wider community nor the passerby who is ultimately responsible. The Plan is a distilled idea, not a disjointed pile of ideas. It is also a concrete idea, not one so constantly in flux that deadlines are never met, let alone established. Freelancer itself was the chief case study for this phenomenon, and the consequences should not bear repeating. Once a plan has been established and set in motion, changes to it should be resisted to the utmost except in cases of clear misunderstandings, resource limitations and the like. Even in those cases, the plan should be revised only by the chief development team and then re-signed off by an executive. So long as the initial planning was sound, it is unlikely that such changes would so catastrophically change the guiding principles and vision of the project, and so there ought to be no room for further committees and debates. Plan ahead, and stick to the plan. The mere act of keeping momentum is justification enough, no matter what “controversies” may arise from it. A finished project is better than one that is never finished. This is a post-Star Citizen world already, folks.


No Half Measures

In keeping with that line of thinking, the entire design of the project should embody it, too. Nothing should be designed or published piecemeal except in “complete portions.” Consider the embarrassment of “alphas” and “pre-alphas” that showcase a legion of bugs, missing elements and various other failures. Leaning on the “buy-in” value of showcasing a poorly optimized, hideously incomplete and utterly “tentative” build is asking for disaster in a world where consumers are becoming more savvy than ever. They are liable to see it as snake oil, and rightfully so. Ideally a game would be released all at once, but a mod project will likely move too slow to maintain momentum for it (at least a Freelancer mod certainly would). Instead, there is a compromise: Anything published must be “feature complete.” Players should not be misled about the scope of the game, or the capacities of the mod development team, by changing published content on the fly. Every act of doubling back to “well-trodden ground” not only wastes time, but also betrays the lack of professionalism by the team. When prospective players see updates on development, it should never be an announcement of something “new” that was already “new” and “finished” weeks ago. Whatever you make, get it right the first time, based on the solid plan, and move on to the next thing. And if it isn't totally right? Let tomorrow worry about itself. Perfectionism leads to infinite half-measures. Focus on the finished product that was described in the plan.


Make it Fresh

Is this mod different? I mean really different? What does it feel like? If you close your eyes, does it sound like the same old game? If you open them, does anything catch your eye? Freelancer had its day, which came and went a long time ago. The same is true for anything and everything else. But if you’re going to pick it up and modify it, then you’ll need a damned good reason as to why you wouldn’t do anything fundamentally different. I’m among the first to hate “new for the sake of being new,” but when it comes to mod projects I find it inescapable: The only reason people modify anything is because the original wasn’t good enough, and the closer it is to being good, the fewer modifications are required. A large mod project assumes, by definition, that the original was nowhere near good enough, or at least isn't anymore, and so what you fundamentally want is a new game. A fresh game. Refer to the Medal of Honor series if you really want to debate this; Stagnation isn’t your friend. The only limitations on “freshness” should be practical ones such as boundaries of engine editing, resource limitations of both technical specs and team skills, and perhaps the core story or motif of the original (though even this has been utterly trumped by some game mods in my experience). If it isn’t new enough, then why bother? Huh, good question... and there goes the morale. See what I mean?


Make it Count

Making everything count isn’t just a rousing speech you give to men about to jump over the trench wall. It’s also a statement of intent and a philosophy for design. Nothing, absolutely nothing in the game should be useless. And no, “eye candy” doesn’t count. As a videogame, eye candy is superfluous. As a mod of a game from 2003, eye candy may even be impossible. Stop thinking in terms of how it “looks” and think instead of how it plays. What’s the impact of owning a ship you know is pointless? Better yet, what is the ramification of winning or otherwise “earning” a pointless thing? It’s degrading, to be frank. Some people are still susceptible to Skinner Box tactics, but not many of those willing to install mods are by now, so don’t even try. Nothing in the mod should be useless, and at every possible place, useless things from the original game should be modified or removed entirely. This is not a movie, and this is not a painting: this is a game. People interact with its components to achieve or arrive at certain ends, and anything in the way of that which serves no function becomes conspicuous for doing so. Every station should have a distinct reason for docking there. Every ship should be competitive in some way or another. Every AI bot should be a meaningful encounter... You get the picture. For every element in the game, ask yourself if it has more than one purpose. If it doesn’t, be ready and willing to ditch it in favor of something that does. All of this would be according to the plan, and with no half measures. Noticing a trend?


Make Sense

This is more nuanced and setting-specific than the previous principles, but it deserves to be mentioned. Does this make sense? Does this fit? Even if a mod diverges from the source material, it must be mechanically and tonally consistent. Game mechanics follow the same pattern: Just as no ships should be utterly useless compared to the others, so too should no ships be so out of place in role or capability that you question why it’s in the mod. How about for art or music? If the same level of detail or style isn’t present throughout, then it leaves onlookers suspicious of the quality of the workmanship, certainly jarring them out of whatever immersion they experienced up to that point. Even a combined effort from a widely dispersed mod team or series of contributors must be ruthlessly filtered to prevent the hodge-podge situation seen in Discovery’s earliest days (the move of many models from imports to thematically appropriate ships in recent years is great, except it should have been that way from the beginning, and there are still designs that don’t quite seem right to my eyes). The same goes for any narrative carried forward: I know that many people liked the wheeling and dealing of open-ended roleplay for all kinds of crazy character imports, catgirls and cross-dimensional tomfoolery, but these extreme outliers of ideas should not in any way dictate a project unless the very essence of it is one of those ideas. The United Federation of Planets should not exist in the story unless that’s actually the story. Freelancer has a decently established lore both inside the game and from its predecessor, Starlancer. Any deviations from this setting must be made ahead of time with the greatest care; under no circumstances should massively reality-bending situations be dropped on unsuspecting players.


Make it Fun

This is the most subjective of the principles, which is why it’s at the bottom of the list. In fact, precisely because of how it can be abused, it’s the last resort. Games are meant to be fun. Believe it or not, you can actually quantify fun for most folks. How, you ask? Simple: Fun = ( Player Actions + Player Rewards ) / Time, where Fun should be equal to 1, as opposed to either greater or lesser. Fun is wrapped up in the so-called “Gameplay Loop,” where actions lead to rewards which encourage more actions, but never with so much time involved between actions and rewards that players feel frustrated or lose interest. In addition, the nature of the actions and the rewards should be tailored to the mechanics and number of players available. Generally speaking, more players involved can all for an increase in the amount of time between actions and rewards so long as both are made better for it. So when you boil it all down: The single-player side must have a baseline of time-efficient fun, and all mechanics besides must improve on that baseline in proportion to the number of additional players involved. This is an interesting conceptual tool to play with, and of course the inherent design of the game ought to have taken this into account at every step... but what if it doesn’t? Then this principle comes into full force on its own: The developers/game manager must make it fun. Whether that’s by post-release patches, moderation of player events, or what have you. And if they can’t? Then they should allow players to make it fun for themselves. Allow the structure of the game to set the baseline, but remove externally enforced roadblocks to fun as they are uncovered by experience. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."


In these principles I touched on a few specific ideas as they relate to a Freelancer mod. We’ll get back to each of those in due time.