Let's Make A TC

[Flippant Sol]

I want to make a Marathon TC
I have positions open for
>story and terminal text(not super deep stuff, just something to glue everything together)
>level designer (more levels = more game)
>graphics designer (new guns, enemies, walls)
>I will accept a few ideas guys if they make interesting and plausible concepts
Me personally I will make levels and am project lead


I'm hoping for about ten to twelve levels, each lasting about 10-20 minutes

I am collaborating between here, some other message boards, and a couple discords. Will appreciate efforts large or small.

[Flippant Sol]

It's not much, but I got started on a level. I wanted to recreate the oldschool bungie fuckery so I made a door where you get overwhelmed by pfhor and will die if you don't find the AR

[ravenshining]

A TC of what?

I could use a level designer for M1R...

[Wrkncacnter]

Sounds good. I will do all of those things.

[Meerjel01]

I've had a-lot of thinking and planning ideas for years. Maybe I can help here when it goes for story concepts.

Have the project some concepts already?

[Adminn_1]

Settled on a name for it yet?

[thedoctor45]

There're already a bunch of Work-in-Progress scenarios in development around here atm so why not contribute your time and effort to help get one of those finishined instead of starting another name- & plotless scenario with little chance of ever being completed?

[Shocktart]

I could write you a story, I should clarify upfront that the story will be insanely bleak.
We're talking about all of humanity being enslaved for something you the player did, it will work with any set of levels.

[The Man]

As a person who’s currently involved in… let’s say three and a half of these projects (Chronicles, Eternal, Where Monsters Are in Dreams, and I’m sort of at the periphery of Marathon 1 Redux at the moment, but some of my content is liable to make it into the finished game), I’m going to second thedoctor45. Most of the people in this community with game development abilities are already involved in major projects that are in need of further contributions. It would be a much more productive use of one’s time to contribute to one of those projects; as a person who’s gone down the road of starting my own TC (Chronicles), there’s an immense amount of labour needed to make one. It’s not something one can do on a whim; Hofstadter’s Law (“It always takes longer than you think it will, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law”) certainly applies to scenario creation. It will eat up years of your life to make a finished total conversion.

I’ve been around this place for quite some time, so I’ve seen quite a few people start threads like these, and naturally, very few of them lead to something like Rubicon, Eternal, Phoenix or Tempus Irae; most people lose interest fairly quickly, because it’s way more work to build something from the ground up than they expect it to be. WMAiD will definitely be mentioned in that company if it ever gets finished, and I hope that Chronicles will as well, but that remains to be seen. (People have liked my contributions to Eternal, at any rate.)

I’m not trying to be a cynic here; I’m just speaking from experience. Few of these projects get completed, and hardly anyone plays unfinished Marathon scenarios, which means that the work involved in constructing them goes more or less to waste (unless people offer the parts of their unfinished games for other scenarios to repurpose; we have actually been given several complete and several more incomplete levels from an unfinished scenario for WMAiD, and Rubicon was the result of two originally unrelated projects merging). That isn’t a particularly rewarding use of one’s time. It is rewarding, however, to contribute to something people play and enjoy; Rampancy.net’s stream of Eternal has been one of the highlights of my year.

So yes, if you’re interested in creating a total conversion, you’ll have much more luck joining one of the ongoing ones than you will starting a new one. Chronicles is ongoing, as is M1R; both are sorely in need of contributors. raven (M1R director) and I are both committed to seeing our respective games finished at some point. WMAiD’s development process is a bit more closed than Chronicles or M1R and is currently fairly dormant, but it will reactivate once those of us who’ve been working on it deal with some other obligations we have, and I suspect thedoctor45 would invite any interested parties who demonstrate sufficient skill in mapmaking, art, writing, or other aspects relevant to game content creation to our Discord server. (Eternal is also an open-ended development process, but… there really isn’t too much more to be done for it, honestly. We’re not going to add any further levels, so it’s mostly just a matter of a few tweaks to levels here and there, plus things like fixing the bug with the HUD in network games.)

An ongoing joke on this forum is that a project isn’t real until it has a title screen, though. So y’know, once you have a title screen, we’ll know it’s legit.

[General-RADIX]

I take it this is a piss-take of all those "I have a lot of ideas for a fan game but neither the expertise to do the heavy lifting nor discipline to work on it for long, so everyone else handle those for me" threads, here or elsewhere.

[Shocktart]

I take it this is a piss-take of all those "I have a lot of ideas for a fan game but neither the expertise to do the heavy lifting nor discipline to work on it for long, so everyone else handle those for me" threads, here or elsewhere.

What is the scenario completion rate?
0.007%?

Collaborative scenarios have worked in the past, I think there are maybe 2 scenarios I can think of that were completed by a single person those being Eternal and RED.

I don't know, maybe the lack of tutorials is the reason Marathon died while Doom keeps going?

[Adminn_1]

I made Marathon: Shadervoid and Marathon: Green (You Snooze, You Lose) all by myself. I'm still really eager to know what the title of Flippant Sol's scenario would be. :3

[Wrkncacnter]

Why haven't you made Doog (You Snooze, You Lose), Adminn?

[Adminn_1]

That's a good point.

[Pfhorrest]

I think there are maybe 2 scenarios I can think of that were completed by a single person those being Eternal and RED.

Eternal wasn't completed by a single person. Even in the eight years that nothing got released, there were other people helping out here and there, or other dead scenarios being cannibalized for their parts. Then when I finally "gave up" and dumped what I had cobbled together online for scraps for others to cannibalize, a sudden outpouring of help and support is what actually pushed it to its first completed-ish version. And then a bunch more help over the next four years more or less completely redid almost all of my own contributions besides the textures, which I mostly redid myself, for Eternal X. And then more help here and there plus more of my own redoing things I didn't like over the next seven years for 1.1. And then of course a ton of additional help on top of my own further redoing the textures over again completely for 1.2. The only things in Eternal that are my work are the textures, most of the writing, most of the term picts, the interface graphics, and bits and pieces of map work. Almost all of the mapping is other people's work, all the monster changes and weapons are other people's work, all of the music is other people's work. Eternal is highly collaborative.

[Lion O Cyborg]

I take it this is a piss-take of all those "I have a lot of ideas for a fan game but neither the expertise to do the heavy lifting nor discipline to work on it for long, so everyone else handle those for me" threads, here or elsewhere.

What is the scenario completion rate?
0.007%?

Collaborative scenarios have worked in the past, I think there are maybe 2 scenarios I can think of that were completed by a single person those being Eternal and RED.

I don't know, maybe the lack of tutorials is the reason Marathon died while Doom keeps going?

Except Doom doesn't have tutorials either. I'm pretty sure the actual reason is because not a lot of people use Macs for gaming (or at least they didn't back in the day) so they missed out on it until Aleph One came out, only hearing about the game thanks to Halo and to a lesser extent, System Shock 2, Bioshock Infinite and DUSK making shout outs to it. After all, I'd only heard of Marathon when googling Halo on wikipedia and the 2 Halo wikis back in school and despite wanting to play it, I was only able to when I discovered Aleph One in 2012 which I snatched up for Windows. Before then, my first 2.5D shooter was Duke Nukem Advance, followed by Duke Nukem 3D.

Since the latter was on DOS and windows, most people with PCs and/or consoles only assumed that Duke did things Marathon did first, even though they were wrong. I should know: I was one of them until I first played the trilogy. The Build engine also handles some features more clunkily than Aleph One and Vulcan/Forge, especially rooms over rooms and liquids.

[The Man]

I think Shocktart may have meant a lack of mapmaking tutorials. Which is fairly true - most of the existing tutorials are for Forge, and a lot of stuff has changed since then. But I suspect it's some combination of the above - Marathon was on a niche platform to start with, so that doesn't help.

Anyway, yeah, Eternal was highly collaborative. I'm responsible for the remastered music, some scripting, about 1/3 of the changes to maps between 1.1 and 1.2, most of the changes to difficulty curve between those versions, and various other odds and ends here and there. raven did a lot of scripting, some new artwork, a couple of new terminals here and there, and again about 1/3 of the changes to map design between 1.1 and 1.2, and no doubt some other stuff I've forgotten. About 13 people all told made maps for Eternal over the years; the soundtrack was mostly Craig Hardgrove with one to four tracks each from Nick Singer, Thomas Livingston, and Eike Steffen; Tacticus made most/all of the weapons and several other assets, at least for 1.2; and so on.

The closest any TC besides Red comes to being one person's vision is Phoenix. I think RyokoTK did most/all of the map design on that himself. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong on that.) He still had help with graphics, music, etc., though.

(edited to fix typo - how teh f00k did my phone keyboard get "Yuge" out of "the"?)

[Shocktart]

Mapping and Physics require very little in the way of tutorials, you can learn those just by playing with them.
I'm going to throw the scenario Shadervoid under the bus as an example of how anyone can create a scenario very easily, however, most people want their scenario to have a plot presented within it.

That's where you get into the realm of merging other files into maps such as terminals, heaven forbid you to want to change how something in the game sounds.

I just don't think a scenario has been scrapped because the creator had his mind blown by how complex Weland is, more likely they were stopped dead in their tracks trying to make a terminal work.

[Lion O Cyborg]

Mapping and Physics require very little in the way of tutorials, you can learn those just by playing with them.
I'm going to throw the scenario Shadervoid under the bus as an example of how anyone can create a scenario very easily, however, most people want their scenario to have a plot presented within it.

That's where you get into the realm of merging other files into maps such as terminals, heaven forbid you to want to change how something in the game sounds.

I just don't think a scenario has been scrapped because the creator had his mind blown by how complex Weland is, more likely they were stopped dead in their tracks trying to make a terminal work.

I can attest to the terminal part, as I had a nightmare of a time trying to edit an Eternal terminal in my copy to include a new image: despite trying both Vasara & Visual Mode when setting the terminal script (it's broken in the 1.2 scenario file by default, due to having dark lighting and being set as "light dependent"), and making sure to include the image in the resource folder of the split scenario file and the map's terminal script with the right code, the changes were never applied when merging, either keeping the default terminal text with no image at best, or breaking every terminal in the map (level) at worst. I eventually gave up and stuck with the default fixed terminal as the constant failures pissed me off too much. I couldn't extract the map geometry and add the terminals plus the edited one back in with visual mode by hand either, as unlike Forge, Welend doesn't have a single map (level) export option: only one to export the objects.

I think Shocktart may have meant a lack of mapmaking tutorials. Which is fairly true - most of Yuge existing tutorials are for Forge, and a lot of stuff has changed since then. But I suspect it's some combination of the above - Marathon was on a niche platform to start with, so that doesn't help.

I see, sorry. I thought he meant in-game tutorials but that does make sense about the lack of mapmaking ones (and the punishing lack of 3D texturing and height adjustment ala Forge but functioning like Vasara instead of the old visual mode built into Weland while we're listing faults). To be fair to Marathon, Build doesn't have good mapmaking tools these days either: Mapster 32 for Build is barebones and impossible to figure out.