Stellaris Mods - Experimenting With A More Engaging Release Schedule (Patreon)

It's May! In fact, it's... been May for a while now so that means it's time for another mid-monthly Mod Report!

Alright, alright, don't worry, that's not going to be a permanent thing. I'm happy to say that Monthly Mod Reports will be shifting back to the beginning of the month starting next month, in June.

But aside from its nonstandard scheduling, this will also be a bit of nonstandard report. Rather than break it down by individual mods, I'd like to talk about Team Nessassity's modding in general. Namely, the way  we develop and release content, the issues it comes with, and my little experimental plan to hopefully, maybe start addressing them.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, the chaotic circumstances surrounding the release and post-release period of Le Guin opened our eyes to a lot of problems inherent to the way we conduct development. Although always looking forward and trying to incorporate future changes coming to Stellaris in the design of our mods had always served us well up to that point, Le Guin/Megacorp was the first time we were forced  to confront the reality of a large-scope failure to predict and pre-plan our development.

While there were issues with the original Le Guin patch itself that we had no way to predict and certain things were simply out of our hands, other problems (such as those born of committing to a single, complete update no matter how long it might take) were very much self-inflicted.
Looking back on it now, I still believe that we made the correct choice in terms of eventually leading to a worthwhile payoff. However, the extended period of disorganisation and stress that the process put the team through, as well as our attempts to mitigate it by reducing direct communication with users and resorting to PR tactics that ultimately distanced us from the very community that supported us, those were factors that made the success taste somewhat bitter in the end.

Over the couple of months since then, as we were taking our well-deserved breaks, cleaning up the remaining bugs and issues and (hopefully) repairing the community relations damage, I was trying to think of some way to avoid another situation like that in the future.

The result is a plan I would like to share with you today, which I intend to put to the test on a limited scale over the next couple of months.

Parallel Content Stream

At the core of this initiative lies the idea that our mods can be broken up into two loosely defined types of components: Primary Content and Secondary Content.

For example, let's look at MEC: Asari.

Primary Content of Asari have for the longest time been the ships, and to a lesser extent portraits and trait mechanics. Those are all things that take a lot of time to develop or cause a chain reaction that forces us to update other things to match, but whenever we release something new in those areas, it has a significant impact on the overall value of the package.

Secondary Content is what could be also be called fluff, or optional content whose presence or absence does not change the nature of the mod. Up to this point, MEC: Asari has not had anything of the sort because we considered everything to be Primary Content.

However, coming very soon (in fact, it was supposed to come this week but I messed up again so it may get delayed a little bit) is Asari's first narrative update, containing various anomalies and small events meant mostly to provide flavour and immersion while playing one of the prescripted empires or asari in general.

And it is that update which will mark the beginning of Parallel Content Stream for MEC; Asari. So, what does that entail?

Having clearly divided aspects of the mod into core and optional, I will also adapt the development process accordingly. As you may have noticed, our updates tend to be big but spread very far apart. We fail to provide perpetual engagement to our users and do not really live up to the monthly generosity of our Patrons.

By implementing PCS, I am hoping to change that without derailing the development of the actual meat of our mods. Here's how:

Primary Content will continue to be developed on a long-term schedule, taking as much time as it needs and only  coming out of the oven once it reaches all of our quality and completeness standards (AKA Princess' OCD Check).
These updates may also include narrative and other secondary content, but if they do, it will most likely be something inextricably linked to core gameplay.

Secondary Content on the other hand will have a much more flexible and (if everything goes right) frequent release schedule. And by that I mean, something new every month or two. I don't want to commit to an exact frequency, especially during the trial period, but the entire point of this is to give our users something to play with during periods of drought when we're either working on major updates or focusing on other projects.

For the time being, as I said earlier, this system will be limited to MEC: Asari, starting with the first narrative update coming, at the latest, next week. A few months later, we will evaluate the results and see whether the model can be adapted to our other projects.

TL;DR:

We want to start releasing small, non-essential pieces of content on their own, as minor updates on a frequent schedule, while we're working on bigger more important stuff that takes months to develop.

And this concludes our nonstandard May Monthly Mod Report! Thank you for your continued interest and support <3 I hope that if this experiment succeeds, I'll be able to feel less negligent in producing  actual content for you to enjoy instead of just vaguely talking about it every month!

The next Monthly Mod Report will be posted at the usual time, the beginning of June, and its two main topics will be the upcoming Ancient Relics Stellaris DLC as well as (at long last) some news on Omega! Additionally, I have a certain... unannouncement that might NOT interest some of you, also coming sometime in June!

In the meantime, thank you for putting up with this extraderpestrial derpform, and as always, have as much fun playing Stellaris as we do modding it! <3