A Call To All Mod Authors

[Sir_Brizz]

Here at BeyondUnreal, we love to give high honor and love to our content creating community and provide them with promotion and support as much as humanly possible. There are several ways we try to do this, but all of them seem to have stifled lately and that is why we need your help!

We would love to write features, conduct interviews, post postmortems, host your website/forums, or whatever else you need to get your community going and build interest in your mods. We can post videos, developer diaries, etc but here are the main things we are looking for.

1. Postmortems - A few years back, we commissioned a few mod teams (yep, and others) that had completed and released mods to write up a postmortem about their experience developing games. We definitely would love to keep this going! If you are a mod team that has ANY releases, or an indie developer that wouldn't mind writing up a few talking points (in Gamasutra style) to help out fellow up and coming development teams recognize and overcome some of the hurdles of development.
2. Developer Interviews - Sometimes simply contacting us can get you A TON of promotion on our front page. Do you have an interesting game concept that you've modeled out and not released? We'd love to talk to you about it and give you some free promotion!
3. Gameplay videos - We want to show off some gameplay of your mod. We can talk and show pictures till the cows come home, but what will really sell the community on your mod/game is seeing how it plays, and we'd love to show them.

I realize that there are lots of other venues that you can try to show off content, but here at BeyondUnreal, you have a front seat to one of the largest communities devoted to the engine you are building your content with on the web, second only to the Epic Forums where you are sure to get lost among the noise. Let us give you a front page feature! Let us host your forums or give you a small amount of web space. We are sure your mod will be better for it, and we have no better interest than for your mod to succeed.

As for the rest of the community, we could use your help, too. News posters are, as usual, in short supply, so if you like to sit in an IRC channel and spend a few minutes a day clicking links and making short news posts, we'd love to hear from you. Just send me a PM on the forums!

Now, please mod teams, CONTACT US!

 

[akstylish]

Wow, great idea! We should've done this a long time ago, but better late than never.

 

[Juggalo Kyle]

Great offer Brizz. I'll talk it over with my team. Some of us wanted to switch to a better forum than what we are using now, so this might just be what we need.

 

[[NBK]Rattman]

The more new content we have access to the better....bring it on mod teams!!

 

[SmokeRingHalo]

Here at BeyondUnreal, we love to give high honor and love to our content creating community and provide them with promotion and support as much as humanly possible. There are several ways we try to do this, but all of them seem to have stifled lately and that is why we need your help!

http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=182414

Yeah, you can just feel the high honor & love emanating forth from BU in this poor guys thread, lol.
No one wants to post content on a site that overly criticizes & bashes that content & author.
Instead of being encouraged, this newbie would be mapper was made fun of, and harshly discouraged.
BU has unwittingly stifled themselves.

 

[hal]

It's an offer to help. I think the vast majority of the community would disagree with you.

Your issues were brought on by your own behavior. Let's not have selective memory here.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=182414

Yeah, you can just feel the high honor & love emanating forth from BU in this poor guys thread, lol.
No one wants to post content on a site that overly criticizes & bashes that content & author.
Instead of being encouraged, this newbie would be mapper was made fun of, and harshly discouraged.
BU has unwittingly stifled themselves.

If you're posting something on a forum, you're going to get feedback about it. If you don't like that feedback you have two choices.

1) Take the feedback, improve your workflow and make something much better the next time.

2) Cry and whine about it, leave in a fit of rage, don't improve yourself, never make anything you're proud of and sit around depressed and angry at a few people that said something you didn't like on an Internet Forum.

We like to help modders and mappers, however the map in the thread in question we probably would not post about on the front page. If you can't figure out a reason why we would want to avoid that which has nothing to do with whether or not WE like the map, then I'm very sad for you.

 

[Mozi]

back on topic, the CBP 3 team is planning a post-mortem of sorts. Still working out the details with the team.

 

[elmuerte]

* elmuerte puts on his invisibility cloak

 

[N1ghtmare]

Just a note here to all mod developers...

Almost all of the mods I play are because I see them on the BU frontpage. Rather than have to check each website constantly, I cna easily browse all the updates and developments of every mod and keep a mental tab of the ones that I find interesting. By appearing on the frontpage, the likely hood that your mod will gain recognition increases dramatically.

This is the largest Unreal-related fanpage, and I am definitely not the only one who uses it to keep tabs on mods.

 

[SmokeRingHalo]

It's an offer to help. I think the vast majority of the community would disagree with you.
Your issues were brought on by your own behavior. Let's not have selective memory here.

The thread I pointed out is just one example of the "help" BU has offered in the past.
It has nothing to do with my "issues". BU hasn't chased me away like it has others. I've endured the abuse and gone on to win twice in the MSUC. But others who may have actually been starting to create some decent stuff by now have been long chased away by their first attempt due to BU's style of "help". I wouldn't expect the BU admins to agree anyway because that would mean accepting responsibility for the kind of actions demonstrated by the thread example I pointed to earlier.

 

[SmokeRingHalo]

If you're posting something on a forum, you're going to get feedback about it. If you don't like that feedback you have two choices.

Somehow I'm not amazed that you could read that thread and still consider all the harassment and abuse given to that guy "feedback".

We like to help modders and mappers, however the map in the thread in question we probably would not post about on the front page. .

Did I ever suggest it should be on the front page?
No.
But could you have left the guy a little dignity to want to try again?

If you can't figure out a reason why we would want to avoid that which has nothing to do with whether or not WE like the map, then I'm very sad for you.

Speaking of figuring out reasons (which I'm trying to help you with btw). You need not feel sad for me, as I'm not the one who's stifled.

 

[Mozi]

Just saying the forum posts feedback and project/mod postmortems are two different things. Brizz was looking for:

Postmortems
Developer Interviews
Gameplay videos


Not trying to be the forum cop but seeing this thread go downhill is sad. Basically this is an open call to share knowledge. What you speak of seems to be just poor feedback for a map. **** happens. Good feedback, bad feedback it's all part of making content.

If someone needed help and did not get it or did not get what they were looking for should be a separate discussion topic in OT or the Content releases.

Me personally I am looking forward to reading the documentation other mod teams share about their projects. How that "helps" is learning what they did, what not to do and just gaining new knowledge about game/level design development.

/end rant.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

Somehow I'm not amazed that you could read that thread and still consider all the harassment and abuse given to that guy "feedback".

He was given lots of feedback, and if you'd read the thread instead of just trying to find things to whine about, you'd realize he basically told everyone to stuff it.

Did I ever suggest it should be on the front page?
No.
But could you have left the guy a little dignity to want to try again?

You can see my previous post. If you post something on the internet, you are going to get feedback, whether you like it or not. If you want to be a successful person, you will take that feedback and improve what you create further invalidating the criticism. You can't blame people for not liking something you produce and telling you about it.

Anyway, I'm talking about giving people (mainly) front page promotion, so, if you're not suggesting posting things like this on the front page, I don't see how your example has any relevance to this at all.

 

[Flak]

* elmuerte puts on his invisibility cloak

*Flak peeks

 

[Cryton]

I want to read a UT3 port-mortem from Epic/Rein to see if they understand where UT3 went wrong and why they were wrong and what they could have done to fix it.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

They would never write the things you want to hear. They have written a postmortem for it (though it was Jeff Morris).

 

[elmuerte]

I want to read a UT3 port-mortem from Epic/Rein to see if they understand where UT3 went wrong and why they were wrong and what they could have done to fix it.

That never get's old














</sarcasm>

 

[Zur]

Post mortem = After death ? How about using epilogue instead ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epilogue

 

[elmuerte]

Post mortem = After death ? How about using epilogue instead ?

No, post mortem. It is after death. It's the death of the product development process. The death occurs after the product has been released and the team moves on to the next product. The post mortem is about the development process and not the game itself.