Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Approach

We've all been a part of the single player debates. Will Uber have enough money to do a single player campaign? Even if they did, do we really want them to do it? etc. We've been going in circles for a while now.

I would like to propose an alternative approach, which could potentially cost Uber as little as $0. Let the community write the single player campaign. Let the most enthusiastic fans write the single player content, and I'm sure they'll step up the challenge.

I'm not talking about a "campaign" in the broader sense of the word, with a story line and cutscenes and all that. I'm talking about a "campaign" at it's most bare essentials--basically just a progression of fixed scenario maps, which are ordered roughly by how hard they are.

How would this work? First, release the map editor to the alpha and beta kickstarters along with the alpha and beta releases of the game (respectively). Give users of the map editor a website to upload finished maps to, and allow people to vote on what maps they like, write comments and suggestions, and upload improved versions of maps.

Then choose a few trusted moderators to curate content, and make the final call on each map. These don't even have to be Uber employees, if you trust people outside the company to do the work.

The maps that are finally chosen are ordered by how hard they are and added as a "Community Campaign" to the alphas and betas, so that they can be play tested by the rest of the community.

And presto, a single player campaign of high-quality maps, created by the community, at close to no cost to Uber. This is a great way to support single player mode, and also a great way to engage the community in the development process.

What do you say?

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

I really like the idea but i think the biggest problem would be a map editor with all the Features to create a szenario. Besides all the tools to create the terrain and solarsystem. You would need a toolset for triggers, a basic scripting method for events and so on... its not as easy at its sounds.

And developoing a toolset like that would acually cost uber something as they don't need it at the moment. For them a basic map editor for multiplayer is totally fine.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

I guess this wouldn't be too hard, even a free game like Zero-K has its own mission editor, I would like to see this as a stretch goal.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

I like the idea but the editor capable of creating scripted scenarios is not an easy task. It would be very nice to see it as a stretch goal.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

First of all the Developers of the Spring RTS Engine and Zero K didn't recieved any payment for thier work. In my personal experience as an artist and designer developing tools is not an easy task and can be very expansive(time and money).

With such expirienced designers at Uber it might be less a pain but it will nedd at least a new streckgoal of 200.000 $.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

I'd like to point out that the map editor has been confirmed from the beginning of the Kickstarter drive. See the "Confirmed features and suggestions" thread for links ("Mapmaking support", under "Important"): http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=34022.

Now, there are a number features that a map editor needs in addition to what they've talked about to actually make this work. At the very least it'll need support for placing initial unit configurations on the map. But it'll also need scripting support in order to set up more complicated scenarios.

These obviously cost money. But I think the amount of money required is still significantly less than designing an entire campaign in house. At any rate, Uber can decide how far they want to take this, based on how much money they get. If they decide to make a map editor with support for unit placement, but no scripting, I think we'll still be able to create some pretty interesting maps.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

I agree with the "designing scripting support for the in-game designer would probably fall under another stretch goal" but I'm still +1'ing this idea because if they CAN handle this without to much hastle, then it needs bumped till they get around to readin it

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

We might don't need a toolset, if the game support custom missions and campaigns, and support mission scirpts (they would be needed for a tutorial anyway) that are accessible by the modders, the modders might develop a toolset by themselves.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

True, but we're thinking more along the lines of "how to get a decent campaign SHIPPED with the game" I might be underestimating the community, but I don't believe they'd get that done in time for the custom campaign thing to be viable. Of course it's a good back up plan

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

Yes your right. That would be a option but i püersonally think an "official" tool that is designed more for the avarage gamer would boost the community more than the hardcore SDK for a modder.
Maybe something like a viual scriting tool (kismet or construct comes to mind)
But now i started a complete new topic.

Do we think think like that? I thought of it more like a set of comunity scenario packages.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

In his interview with Shacknews, Mavor hinted a bit at the possibility of a mission system being a stretch goal:

I would love to have this, but I'd rather people stick with things like "a rival Commander is in the area and plotting an attack on us, take him out", not go with a whole story that connects to PA itself. IMO, if the game doesn't come with a story, it should stay without a story.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

Let's be careful not to conflate "story" and "campaign" here.

I absolutely agree that a story is neither necessary nor desired. But I think that as long as we have a map editor, we might as well let the community upload maps that they find interesting and challenging (and that's what I'm calling a "campaign").

Obviously the more support we get from Uber, the more deep the experience can be, but there's no reason not to have at least a shallow campaign even if the game doesn't get enough funding for better scripting tools, etc.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

not to be mean, but have you seen community created content before? It's never balanced, it's often half done, in short, it's really really bad.

And this is still not free to the team since they still have to develop the mission editor, which frankly, is often more work than just making the campaign in the first place.

I see no good in this idea.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

I submit the following as counterexamples:

The TF2 community maps, which are high quality and are bundled with TF2 by default.

The various Total War mods, like Darth Mod for Empire, which include custom campaigns.

The Sorian AI mod for SupCom 1. (Not a map or campaign, but still required a lot of time from a (at the time) non-GPG developer.)

The original DotA. (Again, not a campaign in the normal sense, but still essentially consisted of volunteers adding stuff the game didn't originally intend to support.)

Perhaps these examples are not representative of the average community scene. But it seems to me that when people are excited and motivated, then cool stuff will happen. Yes, it might not be 100% polished, but is it better than nothing? In all of the above examples, I would say yes. Will it happen for PA? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

As I have said before, how "free" this is depends on what Uber wants to put in.

Imagine the following scenario:

Uber ignores this forum post. Uber does not include a single player campaign of any sort. Uber does not include a mission editor, or a scripting interface, or anything tailored to designing campaign missions. But Uber does include a modding interface, and a bare-bones map editor. Then a modder comes in and adds a bare minimum interface for scripting. That's enough to start working on a campaign, and various community members write missions for the new system.

That might seem like a long shot, but my point is (a) this has happened before, in the form of mods for Total War (and in those cases without any help from the developers), and (b) it costs Uber exactly $0 to ignore this forum thread, so on that front we take nothing away from Uber's funding.

That said, if Uber did want to help out on this front, there is plenty they could do. And they wouldn't even have to go all the way to a full-blown mission editor to make something useful. As I said before, the minimum we'd need to get started would be a deterministic procedural world generator (so that you get the same world every time you enter the same "seed"), and a unit placement interface. I think that's significantly easier to pull off than what a full-blown editor would require.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

People are going to write their own stories, this is just going to happen.

Even if there is no scripting in the map editor modders are going to pick out the scripting triggers used to make the tutorial (unless it's a bunch of youtube videos, an in game tutorial is just going to have scripting and triggers)

Then they are going to take their single player campaigns and put them up on their own personal web sites. Then people playing PA who like skirmish but really want a single player campaign are going to hear about, and go out looking for, single player campaigns on the internet. This is an eventuality that cannot be avoided.

Yes there are going to be a slew of terrible single player PA mods out there. But for every 100 awful mods there is going to be a good mod. A "Dear Esther", a "Day Z", a "Counter Strike" the first "DotA". Technically the first Half Life could be considered a Quake mod.

So if single player mods are an inevitability then the only thing we can do is get out ahead of it and help people make better mods. If PA had a more fully featured map editor or even a well documented scripting API with more commands and triggers then it's only going to result in higher quality single player maps because people will have better tools to work with.

If we made an official site where people could submit mods, maps, and even entire campaigns then we could have a rating system where the community votes on what they think the best mods are. So when someone buys PA and goes looking for mods they'll find the best ones all in one spot rather than having to sift through a dozen different download sites.

If people are going to make content for PA no matter what you do, then all you can do is try to help them make the best content possible.

Oh and as far as canonical lore goes, I'd take a minimalist approach to the official game. If you just buy vanilla PA with no mods then there are differently painted robots who are angry at one another for no discernible reason. Then when people make their own single player campaigns they can make up whatever they want.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

I'm going to cast my vote with the people who want the ability to make custom campaigns. If it doesn't take too much time away from other matters, then it would be nice for the community to be able to make their own campaigns and tell their own stories within the larger PA world.

Re: Community Campaign -- An Alternative Single Player Appro

I for one do not care much for the story itself actually unless it REALLY shines. Very few RTS games have a story that really impress you and I think the best story an RTS have ever seen is from Warcraft 3. For me, it was only the only game I have ever played that I genuinely cared about the characters in it. (Note that this was before WoW).

A single player champagin do not necessarily need a good story as long as it have good and interesting mission design, like StarCraft 2. Story is as mediocre as it gets but it got very well designed and interesting missions in it.

I personally think a community effort on the single player would be really cool, allowing the devs to instead focus on the core game mechanics and multiplayer balance. I do not know much time it would take to develop an actual toolkit but many of RTS games I have seen do not have a very extensive one, instead running events within the game as embedded LUA code or something similar.