[DEVBLOG#200] Designing mods - Notions (Patreon)

It's 200th Devblog! Woohoo!

Hey folks and welcome to this very special development blog. I would like to teach you all about Notions - a powerful tool for developing mods. It will come in handy, trust me, as in the near future I will ask you to take part in a special vote that will help dictate the shape of a yet unnanounced mod.

So, make yourself some tea or coffee and pay attention. This will hopefuly shed some light on how we develop mods, and the sheer amount of work that goes into it!

When designing mods, from the very early notion idea to the finished product, I use something called a Double Diamond design method. It is the name of a design process model popularized by the British Design Council in 2005, adapted from the divergence-convergence model.

It essentially breaks down the design process into four different stages:

Discover - Understand what you want to do and what is already done. Don't just come up with an idea, come up with an idea that's relevant, that's needed, that has an audience and that will overall contribute in a positive way to the modding community. 

Define - Come up with solutions to the problem. Define what mod you're looking to create based on the research from the discovery phase.

Develop - Work on developing the mod as per the design documentation.

Deliver - Test and analyze finished mod. Create detailed infographics to help the community understand what it is that you have to offer. Look at your work critically. If the mod is satisfactory, it's releasin' time. If it's not, return to step one: Discover.

In the middle of it all, a design document is created. This document is essentially a compendium of all the notions turned into written down, concrete game mechanics. Such a document is a crucial tool for all the VE team members, as it outlines HOW things should be implented.

If you'd like to see an example of a full design doc, check out our Vanilla Psycasts Expanded development doc.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vyi7Md_Gk1Pk63ox-U6yPNqBB7ZrCuWTL5nfEqbyMM0/edit?usp=sharing

Yes, these docs are rarely less than 100 pages long. Some of them are over 200 pages long. The bigger and more complex mod, the longer design doc it gets.

Notion is the idea for an idea. It's a thing that kicks you in the butt to design a whole mechanic. It's not only what, but also why and when. For example, you're probably familiar with the VFE-Mechanoids Total War mechanic. Notion for that was:

'End game threat scaling independently from wealth, creating a sense of urgency and impending doom if out of control.'

As you can see, Notion isn't a full blown idea. It's not developed into one. It's the first step to an idea, but not just to an idea - it's a first step into a mod!

Once we have a notion of some kind, we build a design around it. This means that we are essentially expanding just a simple idea floating around into a fully fleshed ingame mechanic, with clear instructions for artists (me, usually) and programmers.

For example, a notion: 'Androids should overheat' turns into that:

Some notions sometimes merge into singular mechanics. For example, a notion of 'Solar-flare immune structures' and a notion of 'ancient, forgotten technology' merged into 'Ancient, solar-flare immune rusty structures' in VFE-Ancients.

Some notions get discarded. This usually happens when I can no longer justify spending resources on them - and usually happens on low priority things. Did you know that VFE-Ancients was meant to receive ancient weapons? Well, I just didn't think they're needed, and I couldn't find the niche for them.

Once a notion turns into a mechanic design, it goes into a development stage. In this stage, we create all the required art assets, procure sounds and write the code as explained in the development doc.

Sometimes we decide to merge whole mechanics together. This process is similar to merging notions, except a lot of design work is already done. It takes some adapting, but overall usually results in a more sophisticated and all-round complete mechanic.

It's important to never underestimate how much time something will take. A simple notion can sometimes blow up to be an extremely big design task, and a big design task can sometimes blow up to an extremely difficult development task.

Did you know that a simple notion to 'Add superpowers' turned into a task that took 85% of total development time of VFE-Ancients? That's right, the sheer amount of patches this mod had made Legodude17 spend sleepless nights on it, for a few weeks. It really puts everything in perspective: The new structures, new vaults, new quests, all that was merely 15% of the actual work.

Never assume that a short notion is a short task.

When a completed mechanic enters testing (and I don't mean beta testing, I mean us checking if it works and how it works in the context of the rest of the mod), sometimes we can perform design changes. This usually means a notion remains the same, but we are taking chunks of the design out to replace them with new ideas - a fresh view so to say.

This often means that large chunk of actual development work gets invalidated - scrapped - and we have to start sometimes even from scratch.

But Aubrey de Grey said “Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.” That's why we're not afraid to go back to the drawing board to make our work easier and the outcome better.

When we come up with notions for a mod, we always have a specific demographic - a target audience - we aim towards. Generally there are three types of people you can impress:

Vocal Minority, Quiet Majority and Yourself. We always aspire to impress at least two of those, and never make mods that only apply to one of them.

For example, Rim-Effect mods were developed specifically for Vocal Minority and Ourselves, whilst Furniture Expanded mods were developed for Quiet Majority... and ourselves.

Vanilla Vehicles Expanded I'm sure will satisfy all three of those parties.

Some notions are big, and some are small, and I'm not talking about the amount of words in them.

Lets take a look at these two notions:

'Add breedable dinosaurs'

and

'Unique quests to visit ancient vault systems and procure forgotten technology'.

It would seem that breedable dinosaurs is easier to make because it sounds shorter, but in reality, what the notion doesn't say, is that we have to design 20, 30 or even 50 new animals, each unique in their own way, with a way of obtaining them, breeding them, selling them etc. They probably need their own biomes or some way they appear in the game.

Unique ancient vaults also leaves a lot unexplained. They need custom structures, floors, walls, a quest that ties them together etc.

What I'm trying to say here is this: Notion is meant to be short, but it doesn't mean it's a small notion. 

That's why sometimes we have to make decisions. It would be awesome to add aerial combat where your airplanes can intercept and fight other airplanes that aim to bomb your base, but we can spend this time adding two, three or four different smaller notions.

At this point we need to evaluate which notion carries more impact. There isn't a mathematical way of doing it - it's all done by heart. In reality, not a lot of people would use the aerial dogfighting - it would happen rarely, only for players with airplanes. Why not spend this time adding new tanks, artillery, trucks, motorbikes etc instead?

All these notions, expanded with their own designs, developed and tested eventually form a full mod. Some notions are small, with small mechanics, some are grand, but every single one of them is a brick in the giant structure that is a mod.

And everything is built on a simple notion encompassing it all, for example:

Expand the Empire faction

Thank you very much for reading. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments. I will try to explain them to the best of my ability - I'm in no way an expert, but I've been designing mods for a while now, so hopefully at least some of it is true.