I don't often open topics for discussion. I find that I am not good at finding topics people are interested in. This in particular is a very long stretch for a topic on SEN. But I'm gonna do it anyways because I'm very curious. So, some very brief history to start it off.

The select handful of you who know who I am what and I do know that I am a modder/designer by heart. I've spent my entire life since 1999 making total conversions for games like Brood War, Diablo 2, and lesser known titles. My strengths are writing, audio (including voice acting), and overall design. I dabble in graphics and at one point I was even composing music.

I strongly believe that if one is to devote himself to the cause of Creation, that is to bring his dreams to life, it is best to pursue this in the most absolute manner possible. So, to say, I don't like making "small" projects. To me, an individual "map" project is not really worth my effort - though at one point I thought otherwise, even going as far to make my own AoS in Warcraft 3. But I also treat gaming as an experience of art, and from this perception all of my opinions and designs are based. There is no room for cutting corners or rushing. At the same time, though, I fight impossible odds mentally and physically, and every day is a nightmare to endure.

When I was still strong I was able to challenge any avenue of learning. Unfortunately, the one thing I was never able to get into was programming. Today, unless you know programming you are in deep shit for making a significant project. In 2001 I was content to kitbash models and convert stuff from Lightwave to Rhino 3d and go from there, but by 2004 I was making my own models. By 2009, when I released my last public project and last Starcraft project, AO, followed by the mini-project ZAPOC, I had mastered all of Brood War except for ASM.

But AO was not a big project. It wasn't even a total conversion. It was a technical demonstration and a proof of concept, a half-finished concept. I had reached the limitations of Starcraft in many ways, exceeded them in others thanks to DoA's plugin. But the project itself was, in large, a meaningless waste of time and effort. I no longer had any project ideas that were possible in BW, and I moved on. After AO I privatized all future projects and do not plan to release any non-video content to the public ever again. I ended up privatizing all of my old projects largely because I was embarrassed of them and how bad they all were.

Before and after AO I was always planning and attempting projects of much larger scale. I planned to go into Project Offset and make a grand game project for many years. But Project Offset never came out except for licensing (Firefall AFAIK is still using project offset's engine). Ironically, the UDK, an even better solution, eventually appeared. But I was, and still am, unprepared to consider such a thing beyond concepts.

My concept for a UDK game is an ARPG in the vein of God of War and Alice: Madness Returns. Because my graphics abilities quickly stagnated in 2004 I have been unable to improve in any significant manner since then. I can make simplistic box-modelled objects and hack apart existing models to an extent. Thus, my concept proposes to rip and remaster characters assets from other games for a UDK project. This I know is doable, possible, and within my skill level. However, character assets are merely a component to such a huge project. I cannot simply rip my way out of programming. Black Sun Episode 1, a video project whose production was stretched across 4 long years, taught me I was unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with long productions or demanding productions. Even so, Black Sun featured three races worth of ships with sound data on a scale never before seen in a Sins mod and a massive amount of particle work. A far cry from an indie game, but still something.

In my game and mod design and in my game reviews I believe strongly in something I have summarized as a GEC. Gameplay Elements Concept. The four elements are simple - Graphics, Gameplay, Sounds, and Computer AI. My philosophy revolves around all four elements being equal, and all four elements being driven to delivering your story. If any element falters even the slightest all elements suffer. The reasoning for this is explained much deeper in the CC podcasts, the 2042 GEC, and lengthy articles I've made across the years.

So, when considering a UDK project like the 2042 project, I consider all four elements. The Gameplay is the easiest for me to figure out in the most basic respects because of my extensive experience in the genre. I have a very strong understanding of what makes or breaks games like these. Not the faintest clue how to actually program any of it, but I know what it should feel like in its final incarnation. I'm not too big on planning or scheduling shit. I do things as they come and as I feel like it. So that understanding is enough for me to say I'm very confident in how I want my gameplay to be like. Graphics is a mixed bag. I can only rip so much. Remastering means modeling a shitton of weapons, armor, doodads, buildings, everything I need to fit my concept. The workload for modeling is intense. I can model stuff in my skill level fast but I get burned out very fast, too. Audio would be easy. Computer AI would probably be extraordinarily difficult. Balancing these kinds of games is tough business, and computer AI plays an integral role in the overall presentation and challenge in the game. Even a game that is very easy, like Diablo 2, becomes much harder with retuned AI. But I'd be rather fucking with AI at the tail end of a prototype than trying to figure out how I'll even be able to start learning programming.

Another thing I strongly believe in is strength in individuality. I don't like teams. I find that in every circumstance I've been in a team, "formed" a team, or helped a team, it has always detracted from a project. I believe that if someone is going to start a project, much less "recruit" for a project, they should from the start be able to carry the project 100% to completion on their lonesome. There is no room for "idea" guys, a leader is a leader in true form, carrying the project on his shoulders. To extend upon this, I don't have team members regardless. I outsource specific odd jobs, like voice acting lines, and keep all production completely internal. This is another big thing I've talked about in the past. Some people work differently, and surely have had different experiences than me here. But most people also never get their projects past concept stages. Working solo means no obligations, no stress, no communication bullshit. When you outsource you tell your buddy all he needs to know and that's that. He doesn't need to keep up or feel obligated to help you otherwise. Additionally, my failures are my own. I don't let anyone down when I inevitably fuck everything up. I depended on a guy for data editing in sc2 and the data editor broke his spirit. Now I'm at a very tough part of the project and I have no data experience at all. I'm in serious shit. I should have taken it up from the start. Even the most trustworthy people you know can't be depended on 100% of the time. A project needs total conviction, devotion, and passion. Or you're better off not starting at all.

I'm going on 25 years old, so I'm pretty old to be in this business now. I have outlived the modding lives of virtually every single person I was associated with from 1999-2004, and only 2-3 people I talked to since that era are even associated with modding anymore, and only ONE person is actually, tangibly active now. I've received multiple industry commission offers from indie devs and others, and have turned them all down. It's because I don't believe in working for other people, only myself. Over the years I've become stricter and stricter in my views because of my experiences and overall mindset to creation. In many ways I am just bitter than I haven't been able to improve any of my skills for so very long. In others because every time I see laziness it just pisses me right off. I live for Creation. My life's work is a novel I've not touched for two and a half years. I will die having failed the ultimate goal I set off to do when I took my first breath as a free-thinking child. For that there is no forgiveness.

So to me, the prospects of large projects, and the creation of large projects, is an hourly subject. I don't play games much. The last game I devoted serious playtime to was Halo PC/CE. I was pretty good at it. Nowadays if I'm not making commented game playthroughs (LP's), which are the only reasons why I pick up a game now, I'm sleeping or dreaming of the next thing to attempt.

At this point in time I am slowly working on a Starcraft 2 campaign and am considering attempting a new Black Sun video. I felt I learned a lot, grew a lot, during Black Sun's production. I feel that I am better prepared for a new Black Sun project. A lot of the pitfalls and software problems I ran into I have solutions to now. I'll share my considerations for the purpose of this thread.

Black Sun originated as a Total Conversion for Homeworld 2. It transitioned to Sins due to engine limitations. Sins is more limited than Homeworld 2. Comparable to Brood War in how archaic it is. But I ended up sticking with it. I produced a demo video and then focused on sc2 casting. I returned to Black Sun and produced another demo video. After a time I realized my conversion concepts were not possible in sins because the computer AI is 100% hardcoded. No scripts, no build orders, nothing. That killed the project as a conversion. I decided to switch it to a video project. But I handled the production very poorly.

Not only was I trying to shoehorn in dialogue and other junk I didn't know how to present, I wanted to avoid telling a lengthy story. I ended up wasting insane amounts of time and energy on recording during production only to replace those recordings anyways. At least several times. 20-30 hours of recording turned into 1 minute of video in the composition at max during any given recording sitting. I got very depressed and very burned out extremely early into this part of the project. I projected a 1 month, 3 tops, production life. I spent a whole. Fucking. Year. I couldn't improve my modeling to make complex ships, I couldn't get control of the composition, and above all I lost sight of what it was I even wanted to do. At the end of the road I wanted to simply prove to myself I could actually finish it. I did finish it. I destroyed myself to finish it.

In the insane idea I actually seek to redo/remake Black Sun I would approach the production from a different point. I would not attempt any ingame recordings until all asset creation was 100% finished so I could focus exclusively on recording and cherry picking recordings. I would do dialogue differently. I would mostly have it narrated by 1 character. Think Marius in d2. I am thinking of trying to represent characters by rendering ripped assets from Lineage 2 (the Lizardmen look close enough to Anahn) with very specific settings, 2-tone colors. Blacks and whites, mostly. I can use overlay and blending stuff in Vegas to give the blacks effects, kind of like how I did the special effects in Episode 1. I have not actually tried to do this yet, but I'd need to make sure it'd turn out the way I am hoping before I put down my wallet on Rebellion.

The second thing I would change is how I actually introduced assets. In Episode 1 I bounced back and forth revising stuff in a never-ending cycle of perfection seeking. Since I'll be building off of Episode 1 assets I will immediately start with a huge revision like when I left Episode 0. But I will invest much more time into this revision and seek to make it the only revision necessary until the end of asset production. The third thing I will change is how I recorded fights. Episode 1 had 50/50 decent/bad camera work. I know what was bad and what was good.

The hardest parts of Black Sun will be doing the things I couldn't do in Episode 1. That means the Bloodstone Caverns environment. I have not even the slightest clue how I'd make that. I think I would make a custom planet model that is very large and manually set the collision to zero. I'd need to hand model the caverns and then give them reasonable texturing. This is going to be insanely hard, probably the hardest part in all of the graphics other than making pre-rendered stuff. Above all, though, the hardest part will be keeping heart in the difficult times and not allowing myself to slip into total machine-mode marching again. I lose all sense of quality control when that happens and I really lose sight of what I'm doing.

It is my hopes that if I decide to go through with this idea, and I do have these problems, I can switch back to sc2 to take a break from that work. But my future with sc2 depends on two things - if their 3ds max exporter is any good, and if they make the data editor less sluggish. The sc2 project is something I'm not really going to talk about because a lot of it is very uncertain, other than my testing elements.

Well. There's not much more to say at this stage. Do you have aspirations for a large project? Why? How you will approach it? What are you aiming for? A project could constitute as many things. A novel, conversion, indie game.

Reference material for my work ->


(This video is nearly 4 hours long, so set aside some time if you're genuinely interested)

tl;dr I'm a colossal asshole who pisses away his life trying to make stuff I can't make. How about you?

Mesk i just had to say this...

Even with your problem you are still the most intelligent person i have had the pleasure of meeting along with some other people on here and other forums. And i look forward to reading your novel in the near future. Although it would be nice if you could somehow shorten your video or novel because even with the great content you offer its still no where palatable to most people.

Well. The novel won't be public even if I finished it. I don't like ending stuff quickly. As for the video... it's a making of video that covers pretty much every corner I had accessible in the making of the project, it's not really geared or designed for a general audience.

I think building projects for "most people" and not yourself is a bad way to start off. :3

Oh Mesk your unique work ethic is what i so much.

Yea, I love big projects, but I map out my progress, and when I can I like to mitigate responsibilities. I took project management as an elective in college, and I ended up learning a lot from it. If you want a cliff notes edition on how to manage a project so it doesn't seem so unconquerable I can email you a document I'm putting together for some people I'm working with. (or I could send you my OneNotebook of lecture notes - but seriously it's an eyesore). Sounds like you're going at it alone, so certain things and formalities you'll never have to worry about, but if you're serious about taking on a project you should create a well thought out timeline outlining milestones, deliverables, 'acceptable quality standards,' and termination. Otherwise it may become difficult...especially when you're talking about something like this. Of course, wikipedia as a page on project management...but I don't like it. It's a huge explanation without giving you a whole lot of information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management

As for a major project, I like having them around. Right now I'm trying to do several things all at once, and so they've all erroneously been put on hiatus because I haven't aptly mapped anything out. I have a webpage I should have gotten up by now, and my business that I want to grow to have a more useful local implication (like shows and such), and of course I'm writing some things that require new universes...big ones. I'm really excited for one in particular. I'd like to adapt my stories into comics, but I am going one step at a time. And truly I should be focusing on the shop. Ugh. So much to do, so little time that I gave myself to do it.

I'm a lazyassfuck, so if a project can't be done in one, maybe two sittings, I can't finish it. I'll probably start it though, and then wallow in despair after I inevitably fail.

Sure! My e-mail is .


Well, I generally have a strong idea in my head of what I want to achieve, how I'll get there, and the kinds of sacrifices I'll have to make. In the example of Black Sun, I can't really do anything about UV's or textures because I am not really capable of doing either. I also know that recordings will be very tough to get right, there's very much a diminishing return on how much time -> quality I'll get.

With something like my UDK project I planned out a lot more thoroughly various development stages. My first goal was to establish some functional mechanical concepts to learn programming. Simple stuff, like a TPS camera, a very basic melee combat, introducing an animated character and tying animations to actions, and then finally a very basic AI enemy that can melee with you. After that I would seek to introduce gameplay mechanics. Ranged combat, environmental hazards, stuff like that. Just doing these two phases alone, hell even if the first phase, would probably be 1-2 years of work with my current skillset and how slow I learn things just because it's all super programming intensive.

I work a lot by gut feeling and intuition. I'm very bad at writing out stuff and actually sticking to it, even with something like scripts.


I'm a bit scared of running a sc2 project and Black Sun at once. I haven't often run many projects at once, as I am always afraid they'll burn me out, or one gets shelved for a long period of time and interest dies out. But I think that now, since I'm older, I'm more ready for long-term commitment. I only have the one novel right now, TOA, and an offensive community slash fic for CC. But neither I've touched in many years and they'll probably never be finished. So I don't really worry about them. I figure, if I can write, I'll write, if not, I won't worry about it. I'm going to approach future projects much this way.

Feeling stress and obligation is certainly a potential killer for stuff like this. Passion must be your driving force, not exhaustion.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 21 2012, 7:27 pm by IskatuMesk.

I don't see any secret Kame e-mails yet.

I have however begun my experimentation phase for Rebellion, gauging the prospects of an Episode 2 project. This effort is two-pronged and seeks to challenge two questions.

When I begin or think of beginning a project I essentially ask myself a series of questions. If I can find reasonable answers to those questions I may think of devoting energy to creating a Conceptual phase. The questions for Black Sun ep2 are fairly simple.

Q1 - Can I make something reasonable to portray characters, and does it flow well?

Q2 - Does Rebellion offer enough of a change to SoaSE to warrant a new project? Would it actually be worth the effort to do this? (SoaSE is very, very limited).


The first question was the most important. Because Ep1's script was weak and the largest complaint was lack of things tying voices to characters or events, I sought a means to conquer this foe first and foremost. If Ep2 was only to be a rehashed Ep1 it was not worth making. However, I'm no animator, character modeler, whathave you. But what I do have is access to a shitton of game assets and a bit of a knack for cleverness. I sought immediately to make a two-tone, comic-like cinematic kind of approach. Extremely simple, with animations being powered almost entirely by simplistic overlays. The effect was straight to the point, but satisfactory.



With some fooling around I got the colors close to where I wanted to start the blending and mixing process. Then the magic came.



The first element of this question is reasonably under control. The only thing I'm yet unsure how to do is multi-component compositing. What if I want some parts to remain black but the other feature the animated overlay? This would involve some kind of multi-rendering hackery I don't know yet how to approach.

For our second question I decided to drop bank on Rebellion for the beta, since I won't be buying Diablo 3. My efforts focused on first assessing their updates to the game and how those updates may impact my project. Because porting my project involves a huge update process whose variables remain uncertain I can only build my assessment on conjecture. I came to the following conclusions;

- Rebellion offers no change to the AI. However, they did change the pathing, so ships no longer turn in huge arcs. This benefits the AI largely.
- Rebellion rose the weapon type limit from 3 to 5. This is very significant for Black Sun.
- An unverified observation is a charging activity for a very small handful of weapons. I need access to uncompress entity files to verify if something new was introduced. If this is true, it is also huge for Black Sun. I could make weapons "charge up" before firing without tying them to an ability. Abilities can only utilize one hardpoint. You see where I'm going with this. Freespace-styled beam weapons, for starters.
- The lighting engine is the biggest and most prominent effect. I got some of my models into the game but the shadows seem very buggy/low res. Even so, they look leagues better than before.





My assessment of Rebellion thus far is reasonable, with further investigation likely to await the game's release and release of an updated convertxsi.exe to see if the shadow bugs can be fixed.

The possibility of making an Episode 2 seems rather high now.

Only problems with black sun ep1 was the zal cranasha (don't know how to say this) and undead ships were way too dark although i know this was their design it would of looked better if they were simply just organic looking. and the camera angles were horrible to watch... if your having trouble with a good shot try to avoid circling camera angles. Move over the model at a moderate pace than speed it up to avoid any slow than fast camera angles as this is annoying.

Good luck i know you can do it.

Because the limitations of the camera I cannot speed it up or slow it down without zooming in and out, and the zoom is insanely abrupt. But you're the first person to say anything negative about the camera work so far, so... yeah. I have a stronger plan of what to do with the composition overall now.

The Undead will not change in their current scheme if it still works, but the Xy will get a new texture.

Sorry, my 'quick explanation' has exploded, because now I'm helping someone run their project, so I needed to include a little more. . . can you read .docx? (you can delete your email address if you want, I got it)...

I have open office, so it seems so (I see docx under the list of formats).

Big projects like this require discipline, something that I have to admit that I severely lack.
You should be proud to be able to put so much effort onto something like this.
Btw, it was tl;dr. Sorry :C

Improving my personality. My physical body. My passion (music). That's my project.

I think your problem is:
- You can't summarize (your thinking, plans, stories, or anything)
- You're not exactly a narcissist, but you talk about yourself too much
- You're too negative/bitter

I genuinely think you should see a psychiatrist.

Been there, done that.

You can't take on the biggest baddest project on your own and expect it to work out how you planned. You need to be flexible whenever you start a project, and plan for failures. You need to be able to change directions quickly and efficiently, so that when the mistakes arise they don't cause a big issue and can be moved on from.

Working with a team is also something you should get used to. I hated working on teams as much as the next guy, but eventually got over it.

Planning for a big project is a pretty bad idea in my opinion. Instead, plan for something very small, simple, and very cool. Something you truly like or enjoy. Once this smaller task is completed, then think about what you can add onto it. Eventually the project will become the size it's meant to be, and it will get there by the proper fluid means.

If you can see what's holding you back, then make the decision to fix or get over it. Just do it. It's about self-control.

I don't think that except in the most extreme circumstances would a team be necessary for anything. If we're talking business-level solutions then probably. Anything like the scale of what I do, or want to do (e.g. a UDK project) is completely reasonable to do solo. The key is to be patient and stable and, as you say, able to be flexible.

Most things that involve making money require a team

You know there's also some interestingly good money in action script if you're interested. You can PM me about it.

I have no experience in flash; I planned to tackle that at the tail end of such a project, given that UI elements would be at a very low priority.

Nothing I do or have ever planned/attempted to do has been for money. Just as I've turned down indie commission offers I'm afraid I'd turn down any team invitations or commission offers from you, good sir. I don't do this for money. My apologies.