I'm currently uploading all of the Nightblade content onto Neko's SVN server. This will free up the disk space on night-blade.com so we can release a map/texture pack and at some point, the first (pre-)alpha. We've got 400 megs of uncompressed content so far. Whoo.
I wanted to talk a bit about the Quest gametype that we have planned (for after Guild War and TvG). Making mods is a funny business. Everyone is contributing because they enjoy the work, enjoy creating things. However, as no-one is getting paid, keeping everyone coherent can be tricky, this is especially true if you want to create a story-driven mod. You could get the best writer in the world to think up an awesome plot, to reveal all the locations and things in your game world, but as soon as you give that out to mappers, everything would go wrong. You'd be effectively taking a large chunk of the creative process out of the mapper's hands, reducing his work to plugging polygons together. The mappers would get bored and simply stop working on it - they like to think up their map's content, to put in their own little bits of plot and story, characters, goals, etc.
This is a big part of their motivation to build the map. Very important if you want to see finished maps.
The other hard part of creating a story-driven game is that it requires a lot of content. Your average story-driven FPS has lots of maps, huge levels you work your way through as the plot reveals itself, with voice acting, new characters, enemies, etc. This kind of thing is hard to do at a consistently high quality, with a small mod team working for free.
So, how does this relate to the Quest gametype? How do you work a story into it while still giving mappers freedom to create their own ideas? How do you make it high quality but end up with more than a couple of hours worth of play?
Stay tuned.
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