I also third the idea that it may be best to ask the campaign creators before using them as examples.
I'll eighty-six my plans to do TAC in that case, especially since patch 3.0 appears to have bugged out a lot of the changes. Or maybe I'm just incompetent.
Again feel free to use any of my stuff. [...] In fact it may be interesting to see your take on the Marauders campaign which is far from serious but very cool.
I appreciate your volunteership. I'll check out Marauders in a few hours and see if I can construct a video from it.
I've never played Stukov and Pals, I was assuming it was comedic due to the title. My comment on 'hilarious bug-riddled disasters' wasn't relevant to that project either. Sometimes, purposefully putting bugs into your project is actually funny. I've done that countless times, as either comedy or satire.
You are deluding yourself to believe that you are being objective. Your analysis is deeply rooted in your personal prejudices, and your commentary and delivery carry those prejudices. If you want to provide feedback that is valuable to others, than you will need to moderate this approach.
You are making sweeping statements about things that require more evidence than what you've offered to prove. Where have I shown that I have personal prejudices when making objective statements? You later mention that you're 'probably done arguing about it', so I understand if you are unwilling to continue this discussion, but it feels odd to me that you'd make such statements without backing them up with examples and analysis of your own.
I accept that you would like to receive feedback in the manner that you offer it. I also accept that you genuinely wish people to grow. However, as someone who manages projects and developers for a living, I assure you that it is "objectively" wrong to do so. You fall into the trap that many people do of an idealized, purely rational vision of others. By ignoring the nuance and the realities of the nuances required for interactions with others, you instead alienate them.
I'm not dealing in analysing individuals. I'm analysing their body of work. There are plenty of poor character traits in every human being. Odds are, your favourite custom campaigner, music artist, movie director, etc. have insane religious beliefs, bigoted outlooks, or some other trait that would change the way you viewed them. Separating art from artist is a big part of what I do here, and it's made a lot easier by the fact that I know almost nobody on this forum. Outsider and yourself are the only ones I have any past conduct with, as the rest abandoned SC2 for greener pastures long ago.
If you want to elevate the craft of mapping, there's also an alternative to your criticism series. Why not build something and then do a series explaining your choices? If you can do that without denigrating others, then I guarantee we'd all find it much more interesting than this. It doesn't have to be big—just make something. I don't say this to in a "well, let's see you do better" manner—I honestly think it's a better approach for you.
I am considering a developer series on a serious project that I'm producing in the future, but I've never stopped creating custom content. I have been working on a single mission that I might release in the near future, but time will tell, I suppose. I tend to sit on developer materials until the project in question is completely released.
But, hey, you do you and I'll do me. I'm probably done arguing about it.
That's fine. Thanks for contributing to the discussion at any rate. I hope you'll find the next installment useful, since I know you're producing a brand new version of TAC instead of porting a previously-created one. Cheers.
In my opinion constructive criticism can always be good, key word being constructive, which I think this is. It isn't just 'it sucks' or anything like that. Personally I find it can hurt initially, and usually I have to sleep on it before looking at it objectively.
As a storied mapmaker I can easily separate criticism of my own project with criticism of me as an individual. I think that constructive criticism often gets conflated with personal attacks, and developers are very easily put into a defencive attitude rather than looking past their initial gut feeling (maybe they just need to sleep on it? haha) and trying to use criticism to improve their project.
You will always be biased. You will always lack the credentials to truly review your project. A second set of eyes is always necessary, and sometimes even that's not enough.
And I don't completely agree with that. There can be beauty in flaws. Like the ballooning death animation of a duplicated goliath that makes me chuckle in Stukov and Pals, haha.
Assuming Stukov and Pals is actually a comedic project, the term 'flaw' can apply differently there. Most campaigns are meant to be taken seriously so I structured my discussion and vernacular for the purpose of analysing serious projects.
With that said, all flaws that can be fixed should be, so the end product reflects the developer's vision of the project as closely as possible. Whether that vision is a hilarious bug-riddled disaster or a technical marvel with all the bells and whistles is up to the developer in question.
Frankly though, this community does not need a critical eye like this (at least not currently). Content quality is not improved by tearing apart what we have! We need to be cultivating excitement and attention, which incentivizes folks to improve and keep trying new things.
It seems that maybe I missed the mark when it comes to being objective and making sure that peoples' feelings were respected. At the very least, it is apparent that a lot of people got the wrong idea from my video. The reason I spend so much time early on explaining that I don't want to insult anyone's intelligence and that I'm going to great lengths to avoid my more common form of commentary so nobody feels attacked is precisely to avoid this kind of response - where individuals feel that a project is being 'torn apart'. In fact, I'm actually trying to accomplish the last sentence of the above quote, because I both want to see the community grow in both popularity and overall quality. I'm doing my best to keep things objective but I have no problem admitting that it is in fact a very new style for me, as I'm more used to offering misgivings and praise as soon as I see something deserving of either. Your point about whether or not the community 'needs' a critical eye in this manner is something that will likely be decided by simple turnout ('voting with your view', in a way), as it seems that plenty of people are genuinely interested in the future of this series and what it offers. Ultimately it seems that some manner in which I've presented the video's function - which is not to review an individual project but to use reference material to make a larger, objective, educational point about design in order to help others produce better-quality content - has caused almost everyone, including Jay, to miss the point. I'll be looking to make the next video far more concise in terms of its premise and its goals to avoid this kind of response in the future, though I don't know how much clearer I can make it from my perspective. Maybe someone here has a suggestion?
It may seem like I'm sometimes oblivious to design flaws, but the reality is that I know what my role is
Don't get me wrong, I know what your role is, too. And for your function to be realised you need to have a lower set of standards (or at least lead with that mindset), or you won't be able to generate the required hype and you'll ultimately fail to achieve the result you sought in the first place. I didn't mean anything negative when I said that you had lower standards because that's exactly what you need - I was just calling to attention a difference in our methods (or our philosophies, if you will).
I've seen it plenty of times - a new mapmaker creates something and it's buggy and not well put together. Telling them why everything sucks will not keep them going and this community is not big enough to risk forcing new folks away by being overly critical, even if the intent is to help them improve. I've seen huge improvements simply because people stick with it and make a second map.
On some level I recognise what you're trying to say here, in that giving a mapmaker a laundry list of faults will not necessarily help them, as you say, stick with the community. This is why I selected a popular, complete project by an individual who seems very dedicated and unlikely to leave to begin this video series. I wanted to avoid just that response from the campaign creator. However, that being said, every producer here should want to have a list of their project's objective faults. That's not even really the purpose of this series, but I believe this wholeheartedly. If you aren't aware of a flaw, how can you fix it? You can't. And you should want to fix every flaw. That doesn't mean you will, because some flaws are much harder to fix than others; for example, the pathing system in Brood War would require recoding the assembly of the .exe from the ground up and then rewriting all AI orders in the extremely-antiquated scripting language that Blizzard hardcoded in, so obviously this would almost never be attempted despite it being a flaw in every project by virtue of them being made in the BW engine.
Nope! As mentioned above, your let's play series' function is simply different than that of this video series, and that's fine with me. I specifically designed these to be educational and thorough. Yours are more off-the-cuff hype-generating reactions, because you want to generate excitement through acceptance and through drawing attention to custom content. That's absolutely fine, but people should know that our goals are pretty much the same - our methods are all that differ, and that's simply because the manner in which you accomplish your goal is very different than mine. Which, again, is absolutely fine, given the fact that different people will always be different.
Further, many mapmakers are simply stronger in some aspects over others and there's noting wrong with being accepting of that if the campaign is still fun to play. You seem to stick to the tenant that a map is not fun unless it is strong in every category. This is fine as a personal standard you hold for what you like to play, but is certainly not applicable to most players.
Once again (and responses like these are why I feel I must have failed at elucidating the function/purpose of this series), I do not aim to provide a proper review, subjective or objective, of any project featured in this series. The purpose of these videos are to use a reference material (in this case Vortex of the Void) to explain larger educational points, e.g. the 'Show, Don't Tell' discussion I attempted to start very early on. While the discussions I attempt to have will deal with objective quality of the projects showcased in the videos, I purposefully do not run through the entire project simply because I am avoiding offering a complete review. We aren't so much discussing the overall quality of a project in every facet, but rather using it to focus our perspectives on information that we can use to learn new things. My personal, subjective standards don't matter in this instance because they are not what I am attempting to offer in these videos. I'll make a greater effort to minimise any point in which I mention my personal standards so this kind of confusion is avoided in the future.
Additionally, the series is designed in such a way that some problems with balancing ('this ability/hero/unit is too effective') and story ('this seems like a plot hole') could very well have been resolved by the time the campaign ends, but because we were able to experience them in a proverbial microcosm, we can learn from them - and so if we ever do play a project start-to-finish, we can identify whether or not a project resolved issues that cropped up in the earlier maps. Identifying potential or confirmed flaws is a huge part of any project's improvement process, so teaching this kind of philosophy is actually very key and was the reason I focused only on the early maps of Vortex of the Void.
If a producer wishes for their project to be reviewed piece by piece, they can contact me personally, and I can construct a more complex video surrounding that premise (which would likely not be released publicly), but that's not what I'm aiming for with this video series.
I think your style is something a much larger community could definitely benefit from. Our size here is too small and on the verge of collapsing if too much negativity and nitpicking gets thrown around. Don't take my comment as a personal attack on you - I'm just genuinely concerned that this specific style of critique can break the spritis of content creators. Everyone here just wants to help grow the scene and improve the content quality so I think we should all appreciate what your intent is!
With respect and understanding to what you are saying here, I think that any community of any size can benefit from this kind of educational developer content and believe that, upon watching the second or third installment, any concerns people originally had will be resolved on the basis that the purpose of the video series will become very clear. I'm glad I was able to pinpoint some of the flaws with my original approach so I can produce higher-quality educational content, so I will be taking all of this into account when I select and record a run through my next reference materials. Thanks very much for your attention to the topic, and I'll do my best to allay all of your concerns in the coming weeks!
I appreciate that you would like to help, but as Jay said, you are not doing so currently.
A toxic community is a massive bar to creativity. Helping someone does not require tearing them down—in fact, if you are derogatory, it's very likely that whatever you see will be ignored.
I would hope that it didn't come across that the multitude of my video was derogatory. I am normalised to such an approach, as this is completely new territory to me, so I will promise that this specific concern will not be a problem when I drop the second video in the series, and do apologise if it felt like I was being unfair or subjective in my less constructed, more off-the-cuff analysis in this video.
Be humble. You are one person. No matter how smart you are, you should approach others as if they too are experts. You never have the right to speak down to someone.
I am more than willing to admit that I am one person, but I take issue with treating everyone as experts. Most people are not, and are far from it. That is actually more exciting anyways, as it means that people who are new to the tools, the lore, or maybe even the game overall are attempting to get into custom content production. These newer individuals are likely to be impressionable, however, and playing any official Blizzard campaign can give you a very skewed standard that you may never let go of if it is never challenged. I have produced custom content for a decade. I have voice acted for over half that time. I have done every part of a 'high-end' custom content release - scriptwriting, voice acting, graphic and sound design, music production, mapmaking, modding, characterisation, the list goes on. I have useful experience in these fields and I am trying to give back to the community that allowed me to develop this set of skills.
Now, if the community themselves are overwhelmingly in favour of me cancelling the series, I will pull it from mapster in order to respect their wishes. Whether or not I continue it on my own is another story, as it is my decision in the end, but I would certainly not want to continue offering content to a community that doesn't want it, and I recognise that such a response could potentially happen even after the second or third episode is released. I am very excited to give back to the community that I've been a part of for over ten years and I hope that I can help at least one person with this video series, but if I can't, I'll accept that and move on.
Lead with praise. ALWAYS start with the things you like.
Be selective. There are things that aren't possible and things that just aren't worth the time to do. Figure out what should really be acted upon, and don't swamp someone with nitpicks.
I actually do agree with the idea of leading with praise in a situation like this, given the stability (or perhaps lack thereof) of the current community. However, citing a point I made to Jay earlier, the identification of any and all potential objective flaws is a massive boon of a skill to have for anyone in any production position, whether it relates to StarCraft or not. Even if things cannot truly be fixed, such as the pathing AI in Brood War (or SC2, for that matter, as it performs very poorly), it is still important to recognise those flaws with your engine or your project so you can work around them if you cannot fix them. An example of this would be to avoid putting too many small corridors in a Brood War campaign to or placing additional ramps (or larger ramps, if the extended terrain is there) to minimise the amount of pathing errors. We can't fix that issue, but we can design our maps intelligently so that the impact of that issue is not nearly as high as it would be otherwise. Awareness of these issues does matter!
Eliminate value and qualitative judgments from your vocabulary—scratch "bad," "crap," "ugly," "boring," etc.
Speak in terms of only your experience—"I would like to see more rocks here," "I beat the attack waves very easily," etc.
Ask questions. "How did you pick these attacks?" "What would you think about XXX?"
Objective statements (which is what this series is built around) require good and bad as barometers of objective quality, so your first point is rendered moot simply by the purpose of these videos - I need some of those words to make objective statements that don't deal in subjectivity or opinions, and I don't need the others because I'm avoiding subjectivity entirely and focusing on educating the community and its developers. As far as experience goes, I can in fact say that I have experience with most facets of a custom campaign, as I elucidated to earlier, so my identification of potential or confirmed flaws should not come as a problem to anyone as I can back up what I am saying (which I do every single time, or at least attempt to). This should furthermore not be a problem due to the fact that the identification of issues and flaws is so key. Asking questions is a good tool in some cases for education but I feel that, overall, your points don't necessarily match up to the function of this series due to the fact that they are meant for subjective feedback of a campaign and I'm offering objective analysis to make a point - the reference material really is just reference material. It's to help us learn.
I have not seen any of your content. I will watch it once it becomes more positive. Here are some ideas on how to make it so:
Highlight what is fun. Ignore the bad parts. Mapper already knows about them. Perhaps mapper does not share your vision? Who is the owner of the vision? The maker of the game.
Suppress all criticism. If you have nothing nice to say - stay silent. No stars, no down votes.
Report obvious bugs Be detailed, to the point and unemotional. Attach screenshots. No screenshots -> skip filing the bug.
Suppress all "cool ideas" and feature requests. Those will derail the mapper from the core vision. It might also make mapper feel inadequate. By highlighting the fun and beautiful, mapper will focus on that.
I feel like most of your concerns here are moot because of the nature of this series. It is designed to be objective, to provide educational analysis. Your commentary here assumes I am reviewing the project in a subjective manner, which is in many ways the antithesis of what I am attempting to do. The function of these videos has nothing in common with a subjective, personal review. It has as little bias as possible. It revolves around the objective, the factual. Stymieing the chance at teaching valuable skills through this series by attempting to dress up the project is precisely what I want to avoid. Distracting from the message of the video by assuring mapmakers that it's okay if there are objective flaws is not constructive - it's just reinforcing the idea that you shouldn't want to strive for high quality.
Culture products are not some form of bacteria that needs to evolve by exposure to anger and passive aggressive slurs. Culture products comes from humans. Somehow the SC2 fans and gamers in general (me included) seem to have a hard time understanding how humans work. We give and care when we feel loved and needed. We stop caring and give up when we feel unappreciated.
Not necessarily. Without getting into my past, there were very few times in my life where I felt loved and needed, and that has not negatively impacted my ability to create custom content or form educational analysis. Dressing everything up with positive reinforcement will only get you so far if the foundation for your design philosophies is flawed from the get-go. People shouldn't take an objective analysis of their project as a personal attack - it's as far from subjective as you can get, and it is designed with the intention of improving the objective quality, which should make people subjective excited.
Obviously, Pr0no, you are not the only one who has fallen for pleasures of sinking other peoples work of passion. [...] Somehow I felt entitled to sink their work. Why? It felt good, made me feel intelligent and important and I could take out some frustrations on something that I did not care about. Somehow I felt like I helped them. What I actually did was leech of their passion and used their produce as a mental toilet. Not very nice at all.
This is not something I'm doing so I can feel better about myself or so I can validate my intelligence, or whatever you're trying to get at with this statement. My importance doesn't figure into it. I'm simply a person with a set of skills and lots of experience. I'm someone who's started countless projects in the past, all of varying degrees of quality. I'm someone who cancelled countless projects, as well, and they were all abandoned for various reasons. I'm someone who can provide useful analytical insight to avoid these problems, and hopefully, teach the community to identify and correct as many flaws as possible to improve the overall quality of their project. It doesn't matter to me whether or not I am the one to do this. I'm only doing it because nobody else seems to have done it, and I figured I might as well try and help the community out.
I have written multiple insulting pieces about Blizzard, their developers and their games. Perhaps not in caps-lock, but certainly passive aggressive rants. Since Blizzard is a publicly traded company with a reputation; they can't go after individual fans like you and me when opinions are crossing red lines. I guess it should be fans defending them when it happens (like in the case of Starbow). Instead we do the opposite and we join the bully ranks. If the Starcraft franchise ever really "dies", the main culprit would be us fans who hated it to death. Why invest money and passion in something people do not like?
No, when StarCraft dies, it will be because of Blizzard's poor handling of the IP from both business and design perspectives. That's a fact. The production value of StarCraft has never been spectacular and always held some pretty massive failures when it came to objectively-graded assets (art, sound, etc.), but they have really hit new lows with SC2 and I don't think there's any way back for the IP as of right now. Even so, this is irrelevant to the discussion of the video series and its function, and I feel like you're trying to make a point that doesn't really pertain to this topic. If you want to talk more about this you're more than welcome to shoot me a PM or start your own discussion thread elsewhere, though, as perhaps what you're saying has some merit as a conversation or debate amongst the community.
Although I will say that one of your points is interesting from my perspective. 'Why invest money and passion in something people do not like?' I invest countless hours into projects that get very little exposure despite being a huge feedback junkie. I am constantly striving to improve, and player feedback is one of the best ways to do that. But if nobody ever plays a campaign that I produce, I will still feel accomplished in that I produced a campaign, because it's a personal passion of mine. I make campaigns because I want to play good campaigns, and (at least for Brood War) none yet exist. If only to have something to play later on, creating a campaign is worth it.
Most map makers (creative people in general) tend to work alone or in small teams. They expose their content to others for free or for some pretty small fee considering production costs. Mostly because it is fun to see someone enjoy your produce and get some attention. In return these people tend to get negative reviews, suggestions of improvements, feature requests, anger and frustrations over bugs. In the echo chamber of the lone mind they all implies: "Your work is not done, your are not working hard enough, why are you not doing more? Your work is full of flaws, not perfect, not acceptable, how dare you expose me to this: please stop doing that"
Again, I am not offering any of this besides perhaps suggestions to improve. It is one hundred percent your decision if you watch my videos. It is up to me to attempt to provide a compelling analysis in order to teach the community, but if they don't watch, they won't learn - and that's totally valid. They choose whether or not they want to watch the video series and explore the projects of their peers (or potentially their own). Once they click onto the video, however, the onus is on me to produce quality analysis and allow them to gain something from watching the video. The function has never been and will never be to be subjective in any way.
Stop making games is what I have done and many with me. Usually people mention work, studies and life in general as reasons. It does not change one of the sad truths about game development. Fans are one of the worst parts of the job. Only say positive things about others work of passion
There might be more grounds to this argument when subjective praise or complaints are being levied at a project, but as I've said countless times, that's not the function of this series. Hopefully, going forward, you can see that in the future installments.
Again, I appreciate everyone's continued interest in this topic and will be attempting to allay everyone's concerns in the next installment of the series. Thanks to everyone who has responded as your commentary does help me gauge where I succeeded and where I failed, which will help me to do more of the former and less of the latter as time goes on. Cheers!
I like the idea. I know it's hard to come across as objective while still giving people the feeling their work is being treated fairly. After all nobody here has the ressources a professional video game company has to create high quality on every aspect of a campaign.
It's still quite possible to improve upon everything that I point out in the video. But yes, I do try to make sure that people know that it's not an attack on their project, but that I'm simply using their project as a vehicle to explain my points and help educate others.
Unfortunately the video was so long I could only pay attention to the beginning where you say there is no reason to put text on a loading screen. That was interesting for me because in WC3 I used to have more and longer cinematics than I do now in SC2. I do that because I put more emphasis on gameplay and I don't want players to watch cinematics for too long.
If you plan on focusing on writing and executing a well-constructed story, there will be lots of dialogue and lengthy cinematic experiences. That just comes with the territory. They wouldn't complain about it if Blizzard did it, so if you can produce a well-choreographed cinematic that explores a portion of your story in such a manner that it sheds more light on it for your players, there's no reason to not take that opportunity and run with it. It ultimately comes down to what kind of focus you have as a developer. I'm of mind that all three disciplines, story, gameplay, and aesthetic, should all be equally considered during the developmental phases of a project and should all be of comparable quality.
I put text on loading screens, epilogue text at the end of each map, and 2-3 codex-items players can find so they have more stuff to read. Also the loading times of SC2 are so long, I think it's good to put something there other than a nice background.
While 'codex' items aren't a bad idea for non-critical story elements, anything you can offer players through text can be better presented through a cinematic (or a briefing, in the case of SC:BW). The only reason you'd need to include prologue/epilogue text, as you referred to it as, is if you're offering a recap to refresh players in between missions - and even then, an argument can be made that attentive players won't need it, thus encouraging inattentive ones to pay more heed to the dialogue and the story. Still, I understand why so many people believe that text has merits. It's one of the reasons I spent so much time explaining why it's better to show than to tell.
I skimmed through the video a bit but I couldn't find any of my critic points I had for Vortex of the Void chapter 1
In the future I'll play through the reference material to completion in order to better encapsulate my points without being distracted. I had a lot of commentary on my mind and was only able to select a few choice bits. I'll likely take some of your suggestions for the next episode, to help streamline its efficacy as an educational tool.
Play first, take notes on 4-6 bad things but also 4-6 good things
Replay and record, cut the video length down to 10-30 minutes (and send the creator the original 2 hour video)
Focus on one map at a time
Understand the stand point of the background of the common SC2 modder/campaign creator. If you don't, you only set unrealistic standards and don't really help them. For example, we can't do cinematics like the Raynor-drinking scene, we have to rely on ingame models
Sending the creator the longer video is an interesting option. I'm thinking about having a 'long-form' live recording where I explain in detail what I mean (in the same style as the single video that's up for Vortex of the Void), and releasing it to the public alongside a shorter, more condensed video that offers the same points with more brevity for those who are less interested in the finer details. That seems to run counter to my original 'in-depth' approach, but I think it'll offer something for every kind of viewer, which will help teach them regardless of which video they choose to watch.
And here're the good things:
A video series like this exists. I want to see the next video asap
Your point aren't generally invalid. One should strive for the best possible and not settle for medium quality
Good ideas on how to improve story-telling
If you cut the video from minute 20 to minute 50 (which is just chapter 1) it's actually not that long
I appreciate both the praise and the suggestions! I'll definitely be working towards the next video very soon, so hopefully you'll see more in the coming weeks and months. I'll post here when there is an update. Thanks for your interest in both the community and the series itself!
Jayborino takes maps that are in BETA stages as well as finish project. He also takes maps that are from new people starting projects. It really seems that your interest is to bully creators and other people. Your first video proves that you can do more than just talk. I will say that since you dont know the difference between good critic and bad critic ask first the creator before putting them on your "playlist".
I specifically chose Vortex of the Void because it seemed like a stable, final version of a project so that I wouldn't be spending all this time explaining the positives and negatives of a map or series of maps that could potentially be updated to fix several flaws (or even introduce new ones). Additionally, I explicitly stated early on in the video that I was attempting to make this series a departure from my normal, caustic commentary in order to explain in an educational manner what the objective good and objective bad of the reference material actually is. The latter half of your paragraph here is difficult to understand, so maybe you can reword it. What do you mean that I can 'do more than just talk'? And how have I demonstrated an inability to tell the difference between good and bad critique? My ultimate goal is to use this video series to improve both my ability as an entertainer and the overall ability of the community to produce quality content.
I think your videos can turn off the new people in to campains.
If anything, the goal of these videos is actually to get people more excited for custom content, because the better the projects are, the more enjoyable they will be to all kinds of players. Hopefully, once I iron out exactly how to produce this kind of content, the videos won't run any risk of turning people off to the scene, as that was not my intention at all. I simply wanted to start discussions regarding the steady improvement of custom campaigns (and other custom content) from the ground up, through design philosophies.
Honestly, Narudek's campaign isn't strong in it's story, but I always felt it was really cool in its visuals, both units and terrain. Of course every part of making a mission has its costs (mostly time to produce) and benefits, and each person needs to decide where to put their time. Do you think Narudek's campaign would have been better with basic terrain and default SC2 units, but a better story? I don't know myself. Perhaps you could create a hierarchy of importance.
I mention this above but my 'hierarchy of importance' would actually involve placing all three disciplines - story, gameplay, and aesthetic - dead even with one another. They are all equally important, as they all immerse the player in the overall experience and they all lend to the objective quality of the project as a whole. Each individual discipline might have more important focuses, such as ironing out the main premise of a story before handling the smaller details or planning out the flow of a mission's gameplay before testing comparatively minute tasks like difficulty scaling, but the holistic focus of your project should be to create as close to a perfect balance of quality between all three disciplines as possible, so as to make your project more consistent (and thus, more immersive).
I find one of the difficulties of making an immersive story myself is that I'll have all these ideas in my head about the characters and where the story is going, that I can find it hard to figure out if I ever communicated this vision to the player. It seems impossible to figure this out without a fresh pair of eyes.
One of the focuses of the developmental stage of any project is figuring out an overarching plan for how you will go about creating the characters, the story, the maps, and any additional mechanics (new units, new abilities, etc.). Maybe coming up with a more concrete plan would help you out?
Thanks everyone for your interest. I'll do my best to deliver a more cogent video next time around!
if you read through the history of Narudek projects you can familiarize with the struggle to make such projects.
I understand what you are trying to say with your post, but ultimately, in terms of objective quality, the struggle you go through doesn't matter unless it impacts the quality of your project. I can definitely understand and respect the struggle of creation and all the problems that arise if you seek to add voice acting and complex story/gameplay/aesthetic elements but we're just talking about the end product. In fact, it's that struggle that makes it almost impossible for developers to be objective about their own projects, so maybe that's something I'll talk a bit about in my next episode.
As for being like Jayborino, there's almost no chance of that, as he has far lower standards than I do and doesn't seem as interested in cultivating a community that produces high quality content. He's very accepting of poor execution and poor writing (as is anyone who thinks Blizzard did well with SC:BW/SC2), and that is his decision. The issue is that lower standards are the standard, so I have to go into detail as to why the objective quality is so low, as well as how to avoid falling into that trap as a developer.
The main reason the first video was that long is due to it also containing a primer, but I will be running through the reference material content before I record so it's easier for me to make clear points in the future. Will definitely be cutting down on the video length in the future.
Hello everyone! I'm Pr0nogo, a longtime voice actor, Brood War campaigner, and general StarCraft enthusiast. I've played a slew of custom (and official) campaigns for Blizzard games in the past, as well as separate titles in my Let's Play series, and have started a new project called 'Philosophy of Design' with the goal of helping the community flesh out higher-quality campaigns from the ground up. Topics of each video will often involve what I'm calling the three disciplines: Story, Gameplay, and Aesthetic (audio-visual), and explain the objective good and the objective bad with the intention to help other custom content producers deliver better content in the future. It is a stark departure from my normal content, which is rarely politically correct and often a lot more caustic, which causes it to be perceived as 'hostile'. I'm doing my best to avoid such comparisons with this new series.
While only one episode is out as of right now (using Vortex of the Void as reference material for the first discussions), I do plan on continuing the series and would appreciate any and all feedback. I can answer questions here, on YouTube, or via email at [email protected]. Additionally, if you would like to recommend a specific project as reference material for a particular subject matter, feel free to drop the suggestion and I'll look into it! Content isn't restricted to just SC2, or even just Blizzard games, as the discussions are meant to apply to all types of media.
Each episode will likely be longer than an hour and can be viewed at my YouTube channel. Here's a playlist link, which you can check out every so often if you're looking for more episodes!
I hope this series helps people as they strive to produce quality content and I'm glad to see that more projects are being worked on every time I come to SC2Mapster. Cheers!
I'll eighty-six my plans to do TAC in that case, especially since patch 3.0 appears to have bugged out a lot of the changes. Or maybe I'm just incompetent.
I appreciate your volunteership. I'll check out Marauders in a few hours and see if I can construct a video from it.
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I've never played Stukov and Pals, I was assuming it was comedic due to the title. My comment on 'hilarious bug-riddled disasters' wasn't relevant to that project either. Sometimes, purposefully putting bugs into your project is actually funny. I've done that countless times, as either comedy or satire.
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You are making sweeping statements about things that require more evidence than what you've offered to prove. Where have I shown that I have personal prejudices when making objective statements? You later mention that you're 'probably done arguing about it', so I understand if you are unwilling to continue this discussion, but it feels odd to me that you'd make such statements without backing them up with examples and analysis of your own.
I'm not dealing in analysing individuals. I'm analysing their body of work. There are plenty of poor character traits in every human being. Odds are, your favourite custom campaigner, music artist, movie director, etc. have insane religious beliefs, bigoted outlooks, or some other trait that would change the way you viewed them. Separating art from artist is a big part of what I do here, and it's made a lot easier by the fact that I know almost nobody on this forum. Outsider and yourself are the only ones I have any past conduct with, as the rest abandoned SC2 for greener pastures long ago.
I am considering a developer series on a serious project that I'm producing in the future, but I've never stopped creating custom content. I have been working on a single mission that I might release in the near future, but time will tell, I suppose. I tend to sit on developer materials until the project in question is completely released.
That's fine. Thanks for contributing to the discussion at any rate. I hope you'll find the next installment useful, since I know you're producing a brand new version of TAC instead of porting a previously-created one. Cheers.
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As a storied mapmaker I can easily separate criticism of my own project with criticism of me as an individual. I think that constructive criticism often gets conflated with personal attacks, and developers are very easily put into a defencive attitude rather than looking past their initial gut feeling (maybe they just need to sleep on it? haha) and trying to use criticism to improve their project.
You will always be biased. You will always lack the credentials to truly review your project. A second set of eyes is always necessary, and sometimes even that's not enough.
Assuming Stukov and Pals is actually a comedic project, the term 'flaw' can apply differently there. Most campaigns are meant to be taken seriously so I structured my discussion and vernacular for the purpose of analysing serious projects.
With that said, all flaws that can be fixed should be, so the end product reflects the developer's vision of the project as closely as possible. Whether that vision is a hilarious bug-riddled disaster or a technical marvel with all the bells and whistles is up to the developer in question.
:^)
Doing that now.
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It seems that maybe I missed the mark when it comes to being objective and making sure that peoples' feelings were respected. At the very least, it is apparent that a lot of people got the wrong idea from my video. The reason I spend so much time early on explaining that I don't want to insult anyone's intelligence and that I'm going to great lengths to avoid my more common form of commentary so nobody feels attacked is precisely to avoid this kind of response - where individuals feel that a project is being 'torn apart'. In fact, I'm actually trying to accomplish the last sentence of the above quote, because I both want to see the community grow in both popularity and overall quality. I'm doing my best to keep things objective but I have no problem admitting that it is in fact a very new style for me, as I'm more used to offering misgivings and praise as soon as I see something deserving of either. Your point about whether or not the community 'needs' a critical eye in this manner is something that will likely be decided by simple turnout ('voting with your view', in a way), as it seems that plenty of people are genuinely interested in the future of this series and what it offers. Ultimately it seems that some manner in which I've presented the video's function - which is not to review an individual project but to use reference material to make a larger, objective, educational point about design in order to help others produce better-quality content - has caused almost everyone, including Jay, to miss the point. I'll be looking to make the next video far more concise in terms of its premise and its goals to avoid this kind of response in the future, though I don't know how much clearer I can make it from my perspective. Maybe someone here has a suggestion?
Don't get me wrong, I know what your role is, too. And for your function to be realised you need to have a lower set of standards (or at least lead with that mindset), or you won't be able to generate the required hype and you'll ultimately fail to achieve the result you sought in the first place. I didn't mean anything negative when I said that you had lower standards because that's exactly what you need - I was just calling to attention a difference in our methods (or our philosophies, if you will).
On some level I recognise what you're trying to say here, in that giving a mapmaker a laundry list of faults will not necessarily help them, as you say, stick with the community. This is why I selected a popular, complete project by an individual who seems very dedicated and unlikely to leave to begin this video series. I wanted to avoid just that response from the campaign creator. However, that being said, every producer here should want to have a list of their project's objective faults. That's not even really the purpose of this series, but I believe this wholeheartedly. If you aren't aware of a flaw, how can you fix it? You can't. And you should want to fix every flaw. That doesn't mean you will, because some flaws are much harder to fix than others; for example, the pathing system in Brood War would require recoding the assembly of the .exe from the ground up and then rewriting all AI orders in the extremely-antiquated scripting language that Blizzard hardcoded in, so obviously this would almost never be attempted despite it being a flaw in every project by virtue of them being made in the BW engine.
Nope! As mentioned above, your let's play series' function is simply different than that of this video series, and that's fine with me. I specifically designed these to be educational and thorough. Yours are more off-the-cuff hype-generating reactions, because you want to generate excitement through acceptance and through drawing attention to custom content. That's absolutely fine, but people should know that our goals are pretty much the same - our methods are all that differ, and that's simply because the manner in which you accomplish your goal is very different than mine. Which, again, is absolutely fine, given the fact that different people will always be different.
Once again (and responses like these are why I feel I must have failed at elucidating the function/purpose of this series), I do not aim to provide a proper review, subjective or objective, of any project featured in this series. The purpose of these videos are to use a reference material (in this case Vortex of the Void) to explain larger educational points, e.g. the 'Show, Don't Tell' discussion I attempted to start very early on. While the discussions I attempt to have will deal with objective quality of the projects showcased in the videos, I purposefully do not run through the entire project simply because I am avoiding offering a complete review. We aren't so much discussing the overall quality of a project in every facet, but rather using it to focus our perspectives on information that we can use to learn new things. My personal, subjective standards don't matter in this instance because they are not what I am attempting to offer in these videos. I'll make a greater effort to minimise any point in which I mention my personal standards so this kind of confusion is avoided in the future.
Additionally, the series is designed in such a way that some problems with balancing ('this ability/hero/unit is too effective') and story ('this seems like a plot hole') could very well have been resolved by the time the campaign ends, but because we were able to experience them in a proverbial microcosm, we can learn from them - and so if we ever do play a project start-to-finish, we can identify whether or not a project resolved issues that cropped up in the earlier maps. Identifying potential or confirmed flaws is a huge part of any project's improvement process, so teaching this kind of philosophy is actually very key and was the reason I focused only on the early maps of Vortex of the Void.
If a producer wishes for their project to be reviewed piece by piece, they can contact me personally, and I can construct a more complex video surrounding that premise (which would likely not be released publicly), but that's not what I'm aiming for with this video series.
With respect and understanding to what you are saying here, I think that any community of any size can benefit from this kind of educational developer content and believe that, upon watching the second or third installment, any concerns people originally had will be resolved on the basis that the purpose of the video series will become very clear. I'm glad I was able to pinpoint some of the flaws with my original approach so I can produce higher-quality educational content, so I will be taking all of this into account when I select and record a run through my next reference materials. Thanks very much for your attention to the topic, and I'll do my best to allay all of your concerns in the coming weeks!
I would hope that it didn't come across that the multitude of my video was derogatory. I am normalised to such an approach, as this is completely new territory to me, so I will promise that this specific concern will not be a problem when I drop the second video in the series, and do apologise if it felt like I was being unfair or subjective in my less constructed, more off-the-cuff analysis in this video.
I am more than willing to admit that I am one person, but I take issue with treating everyone as experts. Most people are not, and are far from it. That is actually more exciting anyways, as it means that people who are new to the tools, the lore, or maybe even the game overall are attempting to get into custom content production. These newer individuals are likely to be impressionable, however, and playing any official Blizzard campaign can give you a very skewed standard that you may never let go of if it is never challenged. I have produced custom content for a decade. I have voice acted for over half that time. I have done every part of a 'high-end' custom content release - scriptwriting, voice acting, graphic and sound design, music production, mapmaking, modding, characterisation, the list goes on. I have useful experience in these fields and I am trying to give back to the community that allowed me to develop this set of skills.
Now, if the community themselves are overwhelmingly in favour of me cancelling the series, I will pull it from mapster in order to respect their wishes. Whether or not I continue it on my own is another story, as it is my decision in the end, but I would certainly not want to continue offering content to a community that doesn't want it, and I recognise that such a response could potentially happen even after the second or third episode is released. I am very excited to give back to the community that I've been a part of for over ten years and I hope that I can help at least one person with this video series, but if I can't, I'll accept that and move on.
I actually do agree with the idea of leading with praise in a situation like this, given the stability (or perhaps lack thereof) of the current community. However, citing a point I made to Jay earlier, the identification of any and all potential objective flaws is a massive boon of a skill to have for anyone in any production position, whether it relates to StarCraft or not. Even if things cannot truly be fixed, such as the pathing AI in Brood War (or SC2, for that matter, as it performs very poorly), it is still important to recognise those flaws with your engine or your project so you can work around them if you cannot fix them. An example of this would be to avoid putting too many small corridors in a Brood War campaign to or placing additional ramps (or larger ramps, if the extended terrain is there) to minimise the amount of pathing errors. We can't fix that issue, but we can design our maps intelligently so that the impact of that issue is not nearly as high as it would be otherwise. Awareness of these issues does matter!
Objective statements (which is what this series is built around) require good and bad as barometers of objective quality, so your first point is rendered moot simply by the purpose of these videos - I need some of those words to make objective statements that don't deal in subjectivity or opinions, and I don't need the others because I'm avoiding subjectivity entirely and focusing on educating the community and its developers. As far as experience goes, I can in fact say that I have experience with most facets of a custom campaign, as I elucidated to earlier, so my identification of potential or confirmed flaws should not come as a problem to anyone as I can back up what I am saying (which I do every single time, or at least attempt to). This should furthermore not be a problem due to the fact that the identification of issues and flaws is so key. Asking questions is a good tool in some cases for education but I feel that, overall, your points don't necessarily match up to the function of this series due to the fact that they are meant for subjective feedback of a campaign and I'm offering objective analysis to make a point - the reference material really is just reference material. It's to help us learn.
I feel like most of your concerns here are moot because of the nature of this series. It is designed to be objective, to provide educational analysis. Your commentary here assumes I am reviewing the project in a subjective manner, which is in many ways the antithesis of what I am attempting to do. The function of these videos has nothing in common with a subjective, personal review. It has as little bias as possible. It revolves around the objective, the factual. Stymieing the chance at teaching valuable skills through this series by attempting to dress up the project is precisely what I want to avoid. Distracting from the message of the video by assuring mapmakers that it's okay if there are objective flaws is not constructive - it's just reinforcing the idea that you shouldn't want to strive for high quality.
Not necessarily. Without getting into my past, there were very few times in my life where I felt loved and needed, and that has not negatively impacted my ability to create custom content or form educational analysis. Dressing everything up with positive reinforcement will only get you so far if the foundation for your design philosophies is flawed from the get-go. People shouldn't take an objective analysis of their project as a personal attack - it's as far from subjective as you can get, and it is designed with the intention of improving the objective quality, which should make people subjective excited.
This is not something I'm doing so I can feel better about myself or so I can validate my intelligence, or whatever you're trying to get at with this statement. My importance doesn't figure into it. I'm simply a person with a set of skills and lots of experience. I'm someone who's started countless projects in the past, all of varying degrees of quality. I'm someone who cancelled countless projects, as well, and they were all abandoned for various reasons. I'm someone who can provide useful analytical insight to avoid these problems, and hopefully, teach the community to identify and correct as many flaws as possible to improve the overall quality of their project. It doesn't matter to me whether or not I am the one to do this. I'm only doing it because nobody else seems to have done it, and I figured I might as well try and help the community out.
No, when StarCraft dies, it will be because of Blizzard's poor handling of the IP from both business and design perspectives. That's a fact. The production value of StarCraft has never been spectacular and always held some pretty massive failures when it came to objectively-graded assets (art, sound, etc.), but they have really hit new lows with SC2 and I don't think there's any way back for the IP as of right now. Even so, this is irrelevant to the discussion of the video series and its function, and I feel like you're trying to make a point that doesn't really pertain to this topic. If you want to talk more about this you're more than welcome to shoot me a PM or start your own discussion thread elsewhere, though, as perhaps what you're saying has some merit as a conversation or debate amongst the community.
Although I will say that one of your points is interesting from my perspective. 'Why invest money and passion in something people do not like?' I invest countless hours into projects that get very little exposure despite being a huge feedback junkie. I am constantly striving to improve, and player feedback is one of the best ways to do that. But if nobody ever plays a campaign that I produce, I will still feel accomplished in that I produced a campaign, because it's a personal passion of mine. I make campaigns because I want to play good campaigns, and (at least for Brood War) none yet exist. If only to have something to play later on, creating a campaign is worth it.
Again, I am not offering any of this besides perhaps suggestions to improve. It is one hundred percent your decision if you watch my videos. It is up to me to attempt to provide a compelling analysis in order to teach the community, but if they don't watch, they won't learn - and that's totally valid. They choose whether or not they want to watch the video series and explore the projects of their peers (or potentially their own). Once they click onto the video, however, the onus is on me to produce quality analysis and allow them to gain something from watching the video. The function has never been and will never be to be subjective in any way.
There might be more grounds to this argument when subjective praise or complaints are being levied at a project, but as I've said countless times, that's not the function of this series. Hopefully, going forward, you can see that in the future installments.
Again, I appreciate everyone's continued interest in this topic and will be attempting to allay everyone's concerns in the next installment of the series. Thanks to everyone who has responded as your commentary does help me gauge where I succeeded and where I failed, which will help me to do more of the former and less of the latter as time goes on. Cheers!
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It's still quite possible to improve upon everything that I point out in the video. But yes, I do try to make sure that people know that it's not an attack on their project, but that I'm simply using their project as a vehicle to explain my points and help educate others.
If you plan on focusing on writing and executing a well-constructed story, there will be lots of dialogue and lengthy cinematic experiences. That just comes with the territory. They wouldn't complain about it if Blizzard did it, so if you can produce a well-choreographed cinematic that explores a portion of your story in such a manner that it sheds more light on it for your players, there's no reason to not take that opportunity and run with it. It ultimately comes down to what kind of focus you have as a developer. I'm of mind that all three disciplines, story, gameplay, and aesthetic, should all be equally considered during the developmental phases of a project and should all be of comparable quality.
While 'codex' items aren't a bad idea for non-critical story elements, anything you can offer players through text can be better presented through a cinematic (or a briefing, in the case of SC:BW). The only reason you'd need to include prologue/epilogue text, as you referred to it as, is if you're offering a recap to refresh players in between missions - and even then, an argument can be made that attentive players won't need it, thus encouraging inattentive ones to pay more heed to the dialogue and the story. Still, I understand why so many people believe that text has merits. It's one of the reasons I spent so much time explaining why it's better to show than to tell.
In the future I'll play through the reference material to completion in order to better encapsulate my points without being distracted. I had a lot of commentary on my mind and was only able to select a few choice bits. I'll likely take some of your suggestions for the next episode, to help streamline its efficacy as an educational tool.
Sending the creator the longer video is an interesting option. I'm thinking about having a 'long-form' live recording where I explain in detail what I mean (in the same style as the single video that's up for Vortex of the Void), and releasing it to the public alongside a shorter, more condensed video that offers the same points with more brevity for those who are less interested in the finer details. That seems to run counter to my original 'in-depth' approach, but I think it'll offer something for every kind of viewer, which will help teach them regardless of which video they choose to watch.
I appreciate both the praise and the suggestions! I'll definitely be working towards the next video very soon, so hopefully you'll see more in the coming weeks and months. I'll post here when there is an update. Thanks for your interest in both the community and the series itself!
I specifically chose Vortex of the Void because it seemed like a stable, final version of a project so that I wouldn't be spending all this time explaining the positives and negatives of a map or series of maps that could potentially be updated to fix several flaws (or even introduce new ones). Additionally, I explicitly stated early on in the video that I was attempting to make this series a departure from my normal, caustic commentary in order to explain in an educational manner what the objective good and objective bad of the reference material actually is. The latter half of your paragraph here is difficult to understand, so maybe you can reword it. What do you mean that I can 'do more than just talk'? And how have I demonstrated an inability to tell the difference between good and bad critique? My ultimate goal is to use this video series to improve both my ability as an entertainer and the overall ability of the community to produce quality content.
If anything, the goal of these videos is actually to get people more excited for custom content, because the better the projects are, the more enjoyable they will be to all kinds of players. Hopefully, once I iron out exactly how to produce this kind of content, the videos won't run any risk of turning people off to the scene, as that was not my intention at all. I simply wanted to start discussions regarding the steady improvement of custom campaigns (and other custom content) from the ground up, through design philosophies.
I mention this above but my 'hierarchy of importance' would actually involve placing all three disciplines - story, gameplay, and aesthetic - dead even with one another. They are all equally important, as they all immerse the player in the overall experience and they all lend to the objective quality of the project as a whole. Each individual discipline might have more important focuses, such as ironing out the main premise of a story before handling the smaller details or planning out the flow of a mission's gameplay before testing comparatively minute tasks like difficulty scaling, but the holistic focus of your project should be to create as close to a perfect balance of quality between all three disciplines as possible, so as to make your project more consistent (and thus, more immersive).
One of the focuses of the developmental stage of any project is figuring out an overarching plan for how you will go about creating the characters, the story, the maps, and any additional mechanics (new units, new abilities, etc.). Maybe coming up with a more concrete plan would help you out?
Thanks everyone for your interest. I'll do my best to deliver a more cogent video next time around!
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I understand what you are trying to say with your post, but ultimately, in terms of objective quality, the struggle you go through doesn't matter unless it impacts the quality of your project. I can definitely understand and respect the struggle of creation and all the problems that arise if you seek to add voice acting and complex story/gameplay/aesthetic elements but we're just talking about the end product. In fact, it's that struggle that makes it almost impossible for developers to be objective about their own projects, so maybe that's something I'll talk a bit about in my next episode.
As for being like Jayborino, there's almost no chance of that, as he has far lower standards than I do and doesn't seem as interested in cultivating a community that produces high quality content. He's very accepting of poor execution and poor writing (as is anyone who thinks Blizzard did well with SC:BW/SC2), and that is his decision. The issue is that lower standards are the standard, so I have to go into detail as to why the objective quality is so low, as well as how to avoid falling into that trap as a developer.
Thanks for your comments!
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The main reason the first video was that long is due to it also containing a primer, but I will be running through the reference material content before I record so it's easier for me to make clear points in the future. Will definitely be cutting down on the video length in the future.
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Hello everyone! I'm Pr0nogo, a longtime voice actor, Brood War campaigner, and general StarCraft enthusiast. I've played a slew of custom (and official) campaigns for Blizzard games in the past, as well as separate titles in my Let's Play series, and have started a new project called 'Philosophy of Design' with the goal of helping the community flesh out higher-quality campaigns from the ground up. Topics of each video will often involve what I'm calling the three disciplines: Story, Gameplay, and Aesthetic (audio-visual), and explain the objective good and the objective bad with the intention to help other custom content producers deliver better content in the future. It is a stark departure from my normal content, which is rarely politically correct and often a lot more caustic, which causes it to be perceived as 'hostile'. I'm doing my best to avoid such comparisons with this new series.
While only one episode is out as of right now (using Vortex of the Void as reference material for the first discussions), I do plan on continuing the series and would appreciate any and all feedback. I can answer questions here, on YouTube, or via email at [email protected]. Additionally, if you would like to recommend a specific project as reference material for a particular subject matter, feel free to drop the suggestion and I'll look into it! Content isn't restricted to just SC2, or even just Blizzard games, as the discussions are meant to apply to all types of media.
Each episode will likely be longer than an hour and can be viewed at my YouTube channel. Here's a playlist link, which you can check out every so often if you're looking for more episodes!
I hope this series helps people as they strive to produce quality content and I'm glad to see that more projects are being worked on every time I come to SC2Mapster. Cheers!
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