Hey everyone, welcome back! Today, we’re going to talk about game mods, which we think are a required feature for social games in 2021.
But first, we want to answer one of the big questions we got from last week’s post. Anacrusis is pronounced like it’s spelled: anna-croo-suss.
With that taken care of, let’s talk mods. At Stray Bombay, we love mods! We love to play them because we love to see what players do when given agency over their favorite games. Heck, some of us even got started making games in the mod scene. We love mods so much, we’ve hosted weekly mod nights for the last year. Every Thursday, we get together with the community and try out a different mod. (Would you like to know more? Free up your Thursday nights and join our Discord!)
In the dawn of the first-person shooter, mods started with simple texture swaps and gun tweaks. What started by replacing Imps in DOOM with Barney the dinosaur became talented teams building entirely new mechanics, games, and even genres using the bones of their favorite game as the base. The grappling hook? Came from a mod. Class-based shooters? Came from mods. Asymmetric multiplayer modes? You guessed it, mods again. The mod scene was filled with bright-eyed dreamers, making the games they wanted to play, without the pressures of commercial success or AAA budgets on their back.
One of the earliest mods we saw for DOOM replaced demons with Barney the Dinosaur.
In those early days, mods lived on the fringes of gaming—they were the domain of creators who wanted to push gaming’s boundaries and players who couldn’t get enough of their favorite games. Eventually, those mods went mainstream—Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and League of Legends were built on the bones of successful mods. But in the last decade, mods have gone mainstream. Minecraft and Roblox have become the game-of-games for entire generations. And where there are players, there are also steady revenue streams that allow talented modders to convert passion projects into successful careers.
So what does that mean for The Anacrusis? We think mods are vital for the success of our type of social multiplayer game. Mods give us the opportunity to let players decide how they want to play our game.
We enjoy shooting thousands of aliens over lunch, but if you'd rather shoot thousands of velociraptors or Minions™ instead, who are we to say no? That’s why we decided support for mods was a core requirement for The Anacrusis. Because we’re working in Unreal, it was important to make that decision early. Including mod support shaped the way we built the game.
We're excited about user-created clothing for our characters. Here are some concepts we made for Nessa to get you thinking.
Eventually, we want to support the entire range of mods—up to and including new campaigns and distinct game modes. But we’re going to start with cosmetic items like costumes and gun skins and maybe include a map or two or new weapon or grenade effects. As always, we’re going to work with the larger community to figure out where to focus our efforts, but as it stands now our post-launch plan is to focus on adding support for new weapons, perks, and game variants.
To make that process easier, we’re ready to share the tools we use to turn the raw 3D geometry of a map into a space that the AI Driver understands well enough to create challenging, fun combat encounters for the player. We put a ton of work into building tools to make map creation faster and easier. There’s a lot of technical detail that we’ll get into in a dedicated post in the future, but the upshot is that we can build a map, markup a few special areas, then run tools that automate person-weeks of tedious labor so you’re ready to playtest your map in a matter of hours. We love our tools, and we think modders will love them too.
We can’t wait to see what the mod community comes up with. We just want to play other people’s maps, try their gun skins on, and see what weird game variants they come up with. And if you want to try something that wouldn’t work within the limits of our current mod support, give us a call! We’re all for turning the Terminal into a food court simulator, we just want to be the first in line to order space pizza! (Hrmm, would our heroes call space pizza, space pizza if space was the only home they’d ever known?)
Isn't all pizza served in space inherently space pizza?
We’re still a small team, so we have to be strategic about every choice we make. But we’re committed to mods. That’s why we’re going to launch with a handful of cosmetic mods that will be available on both PC and console when the game is released later this year. And because we firmly believe that modders deserve to get paid for their work, we’re going to launch with both paid and free mods in the store. This decision is entirely up to the creators—mod makers will decide whether their work will be free or paid.
One last thing. Because we’re making a co-op game, we think that mods should be cooperative too. For most of the mods in the store, if one person on your squad owns a piece of content, it will be accessible to everyone else in the game. Don’t worry, we’ve got a lot of Buy One, Get Three Free stickers printed up and ready to go.
Our mod tools are in private beta now, and we’re already talking to a small, dedicated team of external creators, but there’s always room for more. If you’re interested in building mods for The Anacrusis, we’d love to meet you. Fill out this quick form and we’ll get in touch with you when we’re ready.
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