The Dark Mod Mission Stats for 2020

[Goldwell]

[demagogue]

Not bad, about a mission every 1~1.5 months for 11 years straight. As time goes on, we get more very ambitious ones too.

[Dragofer]

2021 should be quite a good year, as a glance into the betatesting forum and various other places on the forums and Discord would suggest.

[Bienie]

Looks like we're keeping this wonderful project going! I'll be happy to contribute a few under 2021 as well!

[Amadeus]

Pretty proud of myself to have finally contributed to this number  Hopefully I'll be able to get another one out this year too

[Xolvix]

Having followed this mod/game for roughly 8 years or so, I have to say that the general quality of first-time submissions from new map authors is really, really good. I don't know if the increased availability of tutorials and other resources has contributed to this, improvements to the editor, or maybe just a desire to keep standards high, but I am impressed with almost every new author's release these days. If I don't like a map it's generally due to the gameplay not being my preference rather than the quality of the map itself.

[tristamus]

Seriously, I wholeheartedly agree..

I don't care what they say, you guys are all a godsend to the stealth game community and game industry in general, and the art community.

[Shadow]

What made 2010 pop so much? Was there a contest that year? If so, what about a new contest to spur more missions?

[demagogue]

People had already started making missions in 2009 after the demos came out but couldn't finish them until the game was complete, and it was just the first year, so I think a lot of people had a lot of ideas they had been building up and could finally work on. We did have a good number of contests that first year too, I think.

This is an empirical question though. If one really wanted to know, they could actually look at the 2010 FMs one by one and think about why they came out that year but not others like it in later years.

[thebigh]

I'm still hoping to get another mission out this year. I just got a bit stuck and lacking motivation.

[SeriousToni]

1 hour ago, thebigh said:

I'm still hoping to get another mission out this year. I just got a bit stuck and lacking motivation.

Just start working on another part of the map. Or even work on some ambience sounds or textures, that's a whole new kind of work to get the air out of the head. Helped me a lot!

[thebigh]

I just end up fiddling around with details rather than doing the floor plan. When I make a room it just looks like a big empty horrible-looking room and I immediately lose motivation to put things in it and make it look nice

[Dragofer]

1 hour ago, thebigh said:

When I make a room it just looks like a big empty horrible-looking room and I immediately lose motivation to put things in it and make it look nice

There's copious amounts of inspiration to be had for medieval/renaissance rooms from projects made at the Feng Zhu Design school, like this one:

Definitely don't have to have that much stuff especially in a first mission (quite a few of their scenes are heavy on the clutter imo), but it gives plenty of primers for what could be done.

[demagogue]

Yes it's often a good idea to line up like 4 or 5 inspiration photos and basically copy the ideas from different parts of each one.

The other thing that helped me with my FM was making each room part of the story ... like "this family is rich, and the father is obsessive, so he should have x, y, and z furniture laid out in this particular style, and he'd hoard things like this.... He'd be reading through a bunch of books researching, so he'd have his chair like this, and all these books laid around it like this, with a pen and lots of notes strewn around them like this..." Or, this is where the meeting or a murder happened that was sort of cleaned up, but not so well, so there should be these things laid out that hint to that history...

When you think about designing rooms as part of visual story telling, then that can give you a lot of ideas. Even if it's not explicitly made clear to the player, just thinking about designing areas like that will make them visually more interesting. They may not know exactly who these people are or what happened here, but they'll get a sense that they're somebody, and something interesting happened here.

Speaking of a image like that, I've been noticing that there are a ton of 3D architectural models, and different knickknacks, little decorative things, that people are releasing for free at different places like on cgtrader, turbosquid, etc., especially a lot if it's for non-commercial purposes. Like if you filter objects on cgtrader to "free" at 20 a page, there's something like 7000 pages which is like, what, 140,000 free models.... And a lot of them are entire rooms (I mean "1 free object" can be an entire living room-bed room set) which contain 20 or 50 objects by themselves, any one object of which you can also use. You have to check the license for using them, but when they're free, then the license isn't usually an issue, just simple things like giving credit, which we should always do anyway. There's nothing really stopping us from dropping them into our FMs.

[NeonsStyle]

4 or 5 Inspiration photos? LOL I have hundreds for Venice which I'm still slogging away at when I get time and motivation. Back at it now. The
stats look like the games still quite healthy.

[demagogue]

Well, 4 or 5 photos per room, or corner of a room, or piece of furniture, or whatever thing you're building right at that moment, or basically what you have open on the side of the screen at a time while you have the editor running (i.e., laying down the concrete stage), out of a collection of 100s. In the inspiration (laying down the fertilizer) stage, you should definitely collect as many reference photos as you can find for each scene or object you have.