Blogs - Kralich/David

Blog number nine is here a bit late and with lots to mention, so let's get this party started.

Annual Bells

It's coming up on December which means it's Indie of the Year and Mod of the Year time. There's a hell of a lot of work involved setting up the profiles, articles, and media content, not to mention the fact this year we're giving videos a go to try and hype up the event even further. I've taken part in these events before - placed in the rankings a few times too - but not actually run them, so there's a lot of learning to do and ground to cover. To focus on these events, I've paused polls and videos, and might be pausing and/or retiring these weekly blogs, too, for a few reasons I'll get into later.

Vidi, Vedi, Video...Did I do that one already?

The big ship was a new video, released on Friday, and I wanted to keep it relevant to this time of year so I focused on new mods for old games, since most of the really great mods on ModDB are for old games.

This video is performing better than the puzzle video, but it's not exactly "popping off". However, what I've identified is there's a small but very dedicated fanbase for these videos - the people who like 'em, love 'em, even if they're not getting a lot of initial viewership. A few hundred extra visits and a new medium to take advantage of is worth it, and consistently hitting a thousand, whilst being a long-term goal for any video that underperforms, can come with time.

Writing Up, Not Down

Besides the video, five articles have reared their head in the last few weeks; Aliens vs Predator 2's 20th Anniversary; 5 AvP2 Mods That Revive The Classic, SWBF2 (2005) Celebrates 16th Anniversary; 5 Classic SWBF2 Mods Just Like The Simulations, HUMANKIND Receives Mod Support Powered by Mod.io, Do Feed The Polls - October 2021, and Call of Duty Vanguard Released; Five Outstanding CoD Mods From Across the Franchise.

AvP2 doesn't have a huge presence on ModDB, but it does have a much larger footprint than I thought (or could possibly know given I've never actually played AvP2). Its modding community is very dedicated and they were the ones who got in touched to suggest an editorial. I'm always up for a good excuse to write one of these mini countdowns as they're solid engagement, and it'd be a good way to respect an older and still somewhat active modding community on the site - win-win.

Another anniversary was for SWBF2 (2005), whose modding community I am quite familiar with, especially as I've covered mods for this game in previous videos and major countdown articles. It was a great chance to pick out some solid contenders and SWBF2's history on the site is quite well-known at this stage, so it's no wonder this article went down quite well, too. I've discovered by now that pretty much every editorial I've written will do somewhat well, but it alternates between "exceptional" and "acceptable", and everywhere inbetween. It's good to know even the smaller, more niche content is finding its footing for the site's audience.

Here's an interesting one - due to some factors out of my control, I actually had this editorial for HUMANKIND sorted out weeks and weeks ago. HUMANKIND's mod.io implementation was a little delayed and as a result so too was the big announcement article about it. Thankfully, though, everything turned out alright, with mod.io now powering HUMANKIND's UGC and providing a lot of opportunity to that side of things to grow thanks to the extra publicity. As ever, I'm not directly involved with mod.io's activities, but I am on hand to support their PR efforts and the HUMANKIND article was the latest bit of that to go on. It didn't do quite as well as the other editorials tend to do but this one was about delivering on a promise of mutual support, and as long as the fans of the game on ModDB got it, the editorial did its job.

Do Feed The Polls for October went down about as well as usual. It never "blows up" to a serious extent but it's another one of those niche pieces some people really really enjoy. The polls are on hold till MOTY and IOTY are done now but it was a good month to round off for the polls.

The last editorial was regarding the new CoD - Vanguard. I'll be honest and say I'm not loving it so far, but I appreciate that reporting on gaming news is more than just what you're interested in, and there are probably some people who are excited for it regardless. In either case, I knew for the people who weren't enthralled by a new CoD that a set of mods to celebrate would go down well alongside it, so the editorial ended up serving a number of purposes and hopefully will have something for everyone.

Wrapping Rapping

That's all for now. These blogs aren't hitting huge viewerships which is why I was able to justify prioritising other things in the mean time, but I do want to keep them up from time to time. They might change from weekly to biweekly or when there's just a sufficient volume of things to describe - we'll see. For now, here's a chunky one to keep you busy.

Blog number eight is up and at 'em, though it's a pretty quiet week with a lot of background stuff again.

Steadying On

Last week, no real solid editorial topics reared their head. We had the news about the GTA Trilogy but if you've been keeping track of the news lately regarding GTA modding, I think it's clear why it wasn't wise for us to cover that particular topic. There's no winning with an editorial like that. In the end, then, only one editorial (and video) made it out - the Top 5 Horror Mods To Scare Your Socks Off On ModDB on Halloween 2021.

Spookums

The Halloween video was an easy win and choice, naturally. Horror mods are one of the most historically relevant and popular mod topics ever, and some of the biggest mods of all time were spooky ones. I'd only played a lot of one of the mods on this list and had the pleasure of finding a few new favourites by putting together this list. It's doing pretty well compared to the last few vids though I also identified strategies to make underperforming videos cross the distance in the long run, so all in all, the YouTube is chugging along, same as ever.

Running Soon

Going into this week, I had Monday off to spend with my girlfriend, but scheduled an editorial for the Monday with some DOOM news, and already had another idea for an editorial for today. The two so far, then, are DOOM Eternal Receiving 6.66 Update; 5 DOOM Mods Where The Only Thing They Fear Is You, and Aliens vs Predator 2's 20th Anniversary; 5 AvP2 Mods That Revive The Classic.

I've loved DOOM Eternal since it came out and been replaying it from time to time, though I've not yet started TAG Part 2. The 6.66 update was pretty well received and I'm excited for it. More info on how this article did next week, after some time.

The other editorial, AvP2, wasn't quite as close to my heart, but I recognised it was important to another long-standing mod community and figured it was a good excuse to get some coverage out there. More editorials is more site activity and viewership, and that's never a bad thing.

More details on both next week. I don't have any other editorial ideas for now but I will keep my ear to the ground in the interests of continuing site coverage.

The Next Number

With the easy Halloween topic out of the way, I'm back to whipping up ideas for videos. Luckily I have a few suggestions from the community to look through, so I might well consider pursuing one of those to save myself some thinking time. I'll keep my eyes peeled for more editorials, but there's more background stuff going on. Tabletop Playground had its community items reviewed and accepted, which means those'll come in the next big update, and meanwhile it's newsletter time again. In addition, the annual competitions are looming as per usual, meaning I've got to begin making preparations to get that under control. We've made some good forwards momentum, but we need to make sure that's still moving forwards to get it done in time.

Next blog'll probably be discussing Halloween casually, hopefully the video reaching 1k+ views, and also discussing the editorials. We'll see how everything pans out.

Blog number seven, here we go.

An Unexpected Write-Up

Though I started the week without any specific editorials in mind, two nice excuses cropped up during the week: Fallout 3 Compatibility Update Released; 5 Fallout 3 Mods Where Modding Never Changes, and Back 4 Blood Releases; 5 Left 4 Dead Mods That Woke The Horde.

The Fallout 3 editorial was a quick one. The news was semi-interesting but the main appeal is just snapping up an opportunity to put mod communities not traditionally associated with ModDB front-and-centre. I explained my reasoning last week for doing this, and it holds true here - it won't always make the difference, but some people seeing the coverage might be tempted to at least cross-post their mods, and that's a win, no matter how small.

The Back for Blood editorial was a little more substantial as a news item goes. Considering it's more or less a spiritual sequel to Left 4 Dead, it's got a lot of headlines going, and it's nice to see that L4D2 campaigns kept shipping updates on ModDB all these years even after transitioning actual file hosting to Steam Workshop. It's the ideal middle-ground, because I acknowledge there's no way to convince people it's better to upload files via a comparatively inefficient medium than through Steam Workshop, but ModDB's blogging potential and use as a development archive gives it plenty of weight even despite Workshop's existence. Getting more Workshop-heavy communities to recognise this benefit is one of my long-term goals.

Spooky Scary Videos

The next video, as I said last week, will be Halloween focused. All things are on track for that to ship this Friday, which'll give it the week's run-up to Halloween to remain relevant before dropping off. I've got the five mods in mind and they're all at least very good, with a few of them being really stellar. I ought not to spoil the selection, but here's a great screenshot from one of 'em:

Zipping Up

A short blog this week, but no major roadblocks cropped up and editorial focus, whilst not non-existent, was reasonably small. We're still gearing up for MOTY/IOTY and hoping to sort out the majority of that content soon, so stay tuned for how that comes along.

Alright, here we go again - another week, another round-up. More articles happened, I got involved with some of the other stuff in DBolical, and I got a nice email too.

Noob Tube?

So, first things first, we shipped a new video last week - the Top 5 Mods That Make You Think on ModDB.

I think the video turned out pretty fine and I was happy with the variety in mods selected here, too. I've been steadily moving away from familiar territory for these lists and picking mods I either haven't heard of or at least haven't played so that I can be more objective and also get a wider appreciation for the creativity of the mod community. It means a bit more research but it also means, I think, more interesting content.

At least, that was the hope, but unfortunately this video seems to have bombed rather badly. I was expecting it, for two main reasons: 1, whilst I think the theme is unique, it was a gamble since puzzling mods aren't the most popular genre of mods. I still felt it was important to try and do something new, though, regardless of the outcome. 2, I deliberately chose mods with smaller or non-existent social media presences because I wanted to test the collective power of DBolical's socials. How many views can I dictate just by socials alone? How many people will watch videos we put out on YouTube from the Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube itself, without relying on shares from the mod creators involved? The answer is not a lot, and that could be for a few reasons, really. I won't go into great detail here, but I think the audience is still a lot larger than the video suggests. It's about engaging that audience now and figuring out how to pull them in more. This video, evidently, did not.

What is an Editorial? A smouldering pile of words...

Three editorials went live last week - Halo Infinite's Phase 2 Flight Part 2; 5 More Halo Mods To Play After Finishing This Flight, Do Feed The Polls - September 2021, and Top 5 Mods That Make You Think On ModDB. Firstly, I already miss Halo Infinite. The multiplayer was brilliant, and I enjoyed reporting on it. Neither of the two Infinite editorials broke records for viewership, but they didn't really need to, as there's one main reasons behind doing them - to show people we do have Halo mod content and are taking notice of it. Halo is one of those communities that doesn't make much of a home on ModDB, and thus, one of the communities I'm looking to tap into more. Providing this paper trail of editorials where Halo mods are featured is going to come in handy later for enticing people onto the site and ensuring they feel their work will get recognition.

All my images came out stretched though!

The second editorial, the poll analysis for September, is straight-forward enough. The polls were a little less groundbreaking but I love data and I think it's always handy to give thoughts on it. Ultimately I'm aware they appeal to a very small sub-section of ModDB and IndieDB's communities, but an editorial that drives engagement is worth writing, even if it doesn't do as well as a 40k editorial (which, speaking of, is still doing very well. The power of the Emperor of Mankind, ladies and gents.)

The third and final editorial from last week, then, was on the mods that make you think. As per usual, a video doing poorly usually doesn't affect the editorial, and this one comfortably surpassed 1000 views rather quickly and is already going up beyond that. I've been tracking analytics lately and engagement on the site is up by quite a bit. It could be an anomaly, but apparently there's roughly 500,000 more site visits going on each month than in 2020 and 2019 (at least when taking July, August, and September into account). This could be because of the improved engagement, or it could be simply the wind changing in a particular direction. In as vague terms as possible, another modding site was also in some hot water recently that saw some users of that site jumping ship over here, but many of them returned and simply started using both sites instead of one or the other, so really, it could be many different factors, and I think I'll be able to have a more confident theory as we approach the end of 2021.

This mod really did make me think

Playtop Tableground

You may or may not know this, but DBolical actually has a moddable indie game publishing label associated with the business called Modularity, which so far has two games published - Meeple Station, and Tabletop Playground. I've been getting more involved in Modularity in recent weeks and last week formalised my support role by setting up some revived socials for Tabletop Playground. I've never really been involved in publishing so far but I am familiar with marketing work (had to be done for my own mods, after all, on an independent basis with little help), and as a result I think I'll be able to apply many of the same lessons here. Tabletop Playground is a javascript-based boardgames simulator with native VR support, mod.io integration, and a very active developer. We've got a good bit planned for the socials going forwards and you can check out the game here:

Next on the Chopping Block

I'm starting out this week in a peculiar position as I don't have any immediate ideas for editorials. We've not got a lot of gaming news worth covering so we'll have to see how things go. As for the future, I'm beginning now to gear up to Indie of the Year and Mod of the Year, including beginning to work through logo concepts, setup some transitions, other work and planning how videos will work this year. We'll see how everything goes but, suffice to say, it's gonna be a lot of work given it's my first time running these events instead of just taking part with my own mods. I've also got a spooky video planned for the week before Halloween, so that'll hopefully be a good opportunity.

Closing Thoughts

As always, any thoughts, let me know; Any suggestions, let me know-er; and I'll be in touch next week for another review!

Hey everyone - this week's blog is a bit late since I had yesterday booked off for my girlfriend's birthday. It was a nice weekend and we saw the new James Bond film, so all in all, a good time. Today was back to business as usual, though, so here's a round-up of what happened and what's happening this week.

YourTube

So the last video - Top 5 Mods To Play With Friends - isn't doing superbly well. It hasn't breached a thousand views yet, though the article did about as well as the other editorials, so ultimately, that's the important thing. The next video is at risk of not doing well either - it's an experiment so I can see what's going on with our YouTube community. Given it sat around for six years, I'm not surprised initial uptake is low, and I want to figure out exactly how much uptake we're looking at. The next video, then, is five still great mods, but ones without dedicated Discords (that I know of) or conventional communities like that to share them around in. That tends to get extra eyes on videos, and what I want to know is how much promotional power all of the socials have for just one video, on their own, without other groups contributing. It'll be the Top 5 Mods That Make You Think, whether physically or metaphysically, and we'll see how it goes.

Editing Schmediting

Two editorials went live last week - Space Marine 10th Anniversary Out; 5 Warhammer 40k Mods Where There's Only War, and Halo Infinite's Phase 2 Flight 1st Weekend; 5 Halo Mods To Play Before You Finish The Flight.

40k is a remarkably popular franchise on the site. Dawn of War mods are pretty much hosted here or not hosted at all, and other 40k games like Space Marines and DOW2 enjoy some healthy modding support, too. It's sometimes difficult to gauge how well editorials are going to do, but I knew the 40k one was going to be a hit. Five great mods made the cut and people really enjoyed the editorial. Lots of discussion happened, mostly about some other great mods worth checking out, and all in all, I had a good time writing the editorial too.

The second editorial that went live last week was about Halo Infinite, and my flight I was involved in. It was a fun flight and I'm really excited about Infinite's multiplayer, even if the campaign is still a wary point for me given Halo 5's blunder here. The second flight period happened the weekend just gone, and though it was a busy weekend for me, I did manage to fit in a little bit of flighting even so.

The Infinite editorial didn't do anywhere near as well as the 40k editorial. Matter of fact, it did worse than I was expecting, but I was expecting it to be a less sure-fire win. The Halo modding community on ModDB is not very large, with most Custom Edition mods being on HaloMaps, and most modern-day Halo mods being on Nexus. I'm trying to turn this around as with many other modding communities, but it's a difficult road to travel. Editorials that put mods in the spotlight are an essential part of that journey as modders won't consider hosting their content on ModDB too unless there's strong incentives to do so.

I also went live with my own mod article for September, a major update to my project Raising the Bar: Redux, the Half Life 2: Raising the Bar REDUX: September 2021 Update. It featured some pretty big things and whilst personal modding news isn't directly relevant to site administration, engagement on the site is engagement on the site. Lots of comments and a big splash with both viewership and on the social medias for that mod mean it's one of my best performing articles in a while.

Letting News

I also did the newsletters last week, and that's why the video's delayed again - newsletters take a long time to put together. We stopped doing them for a few months due to the scheduling of the previous editor, and we didn't do any between January and June. Now I'm in the role it's something I've been committed to getting back on track for monthly submission, and it's going fine enough, so far. A few hundred thousand people are subscribed to the newsletters so it's another part of the social outreach we should be making use of.

The Week to Come

This week, I've got three editorials planned. The first is already live - the second part of my Halo Infinite editorial, Halo Infinite's Phase 2 Flight Part 2; 5 More Halo Mods To Play After Finishing This Flight, where unfortunately my in-game shots didn't come out exactly as I wanted them to (but I still think they're usable). The other two will be a poll analysis editorial for the month of September tomorrow, and then an editorial on Friday for the new video. That leaves Thursday as the wildcard for anything especially unique to come up, but we'll see.

The video's mods are locked down now - Portal: Reloaded, The Nameless Mod, Watching Paint Dry, The Forgotten City, and The Mansion 1408. All are really solid mods that either tax your brain, tax your emotional compass, or both, and I think that's an interesting premise for a video. It goes without saying we'll do something spooky this October too, and meanwhile, we're beginning to gear up for MOTY and IOTY, so something to keep an eye on.

Closing Thoughts

Last week was busy, this week'll be busy, and thanks to MOTY and spooky month, it's likely every week for the next few weeks'll be busy too. Keep an eye out in the mean time and you'll see lots of content. If you have strong opinions about it, comment down below, and we'll touch base during next week's blog.

Here we go again - another week, another set of roundups. Let's get this ball rollin'.

Vidi Vedi Video

Last week's video is doing alright, but as per usual, the article consistently does better. I know, of course, that the majority of DBolical's audience rests on the sites and might not be familiar with the other socials - it will take time to build up the YouTube as a viable other medium for site news, though the emphasis should always be on the site itself. Going forwards, I have another video planned with a more unique premise and an experimental nature to the mods selected. It'll either do about as well as usual or exceptionally poorly as a result, so we'll see how that goes.

Wedded Torials

Three editorials got their chance in the limelight last week:

5 Battlefield Mods to Scratch Your 2042 Itch

Most of the editorials I've written so far have been focused on big bits of gaming news and then using the mods as an extra to kick things off. Last week, I tried something a bit different, and pushed a few much smaller bits of news out that were more reliant on the actual mods being featured to carry engagement. For the most part, it worked, in my opinion - both articles still did quite well, and the Battlefield 2042 one was fun to research a few less well-known but still high-quality mods for.

5 Total War Mods To Build Your Warhammer 3 Hype

Whilst I don't have a huge attachment to Total War, my dad definitely does, having been playing them since Rome, and he told me about the delays. I figured this would be another great opportunity to get a "mods are the most important feature of this article" editorial out, and it also did reasonably well. Turns out Total War fans are a little more talkative and opinionated than Battlefield fans as the comments on this post, whilst still only a handful, were generally a bit more controversial with one another. Still, as long as there's no flaming, a good bit of healthy debate is good engagement all the same.

CSGO Releases Operation Riptide; 5 Counter-Strike Mods To Feed Your Nostalgia

I've played about an hour of competitive CSGO in my life and I don't plan to play more, but I've played hours of the casual gamemodes and especially deathmatch modes in CSGO, and so I still stay on top of news and new maps for the game. Riptide was a big bit of news, but the more difficult part of this article was finding five solid CS mods. We have a lot of smaller addons, single maps, reskins, that sort of thing, but finding five bits of content big enough to justify an article mention meant digging a bit into the past. Still, it was interesting to unearth some older CS mods that were real products of the time, and I'm even tempted to try one or two of them.

Cheerbright Tomorrow

The first editorial of the week, Space Marine 10th Anniversary Out; 5 Warhammer 40k Mods Where There's Only War, is already out. Space Marine's a game I really enjoyed and the Augmented mod, in particular, is brilliant. It's a great excuse to return to the classic game, years after its release, and maybe it'll encourage GW to finally make a damn sequel!

The other editorial coming is tomorrow, regarding the recent Halo Infinite flight. It'll be a two-parter as I gained access to this flight, and thus I'll be reporting on both the weekend just gone and the next weekend's features. The first will be mostly discussing the general arena-based combat; the second, I'll be focusing on the Big Team Battles. Hopefully we have ten solid Halo mods to mention (I'm still trying to encourage Halo modders onto ModDB as they tend to upload elsewhere right now). If not, you might see 4 and 4 or even 3 and 3 if necessary, but both editorials will carry mods alongside 'em.

Closing Thoughts

And that's a wrap for this week. Lots of editorials! Also got the newsletters to do this week and a major update for one of my mod projects, so that'll keep me busy too. As usual, any thoughts on this week's contributions or next week's? Let me know down below!

Hey there again. I know now at least one person reads these blogs and finds them interesting, so on we go with another look at what's under the hood at DBolical...

Video Names

Coming up with headings is half of the time that goes into these blog posts. Now imagine how much time gets spent thinking what a video or editorial is gonna get called! Whipping these bad boys up takes a lot of effort, and especially when I'm contacting the mod creators involved to share the video but also give their thoughts on how it's all coming together (script, footage, so on). Last week didn't see a lot of editorials, save for the one big one - The Top 5 Mods To Play With Friends on ModDB.

This was a "fun" video to make. First off, I wanted to try and get footage with at least one other person for all of the mods on this list - otherwise it was a bit of a moot point trying to report on the five mods here. I had a friend who had ACM luckily (the overhaul mod looked really exciting and I wanted to give it a go), and meanwhile I managed to get a friend to be cannon fodder on the Clone Wars Revised section of footage. Finding people besides that was, unfortunately, difficult as my working hours didn't coincide in that particular week with when most of my friends were free. Not to worry, though, because Sven Co-op, QCDE, and Full Invasion 2 all had competent community server support that meant I still got some multiplayer footage together.

Polling Tooth

(Now these are just low-quality puns!)

The polls are going well, though I notice people want more promotion, overwhelmingly. This puzzles me a little, but I recognise it could be a holdover from before I started this job. Since I was hired at DBolical I've doubled headlines, brought back the YouTube, made use of YouTube community posts, turned editorial/mod feature content up to eleven, and even ran more features from community sources like new games added to mod.io and that sort of thing. I've got more in the works - more editorials, more videos, new trailers as and when people offer them up, and so on - but it looks like people want even more promotion. At a certain point, promotion turns into advertising, and people generally have to pay for the latter - so I have to keep in mind it's not my job to sell other people's games for them. What I can do is promote projects that are worth a look, and that's where covering mods for editorials and covering indies for editorials gets a bit muddy.

People aren't (generally) selling mods for money. When I promote mods and visibly come down on one side of the fence as really liking (maybe even endorsing?) a mod project, it's not a monetary thing. I enjoy the mods involved, they're free for everyone, and anyone who likes my recommendation can go and get the mod right then and there, whether they've got much disposable income or not. Indie games are different because an indie developer stands to gain sales and cash off the back of an endorsement - and people may use their limited available funds on an indie game that caught my eye and went in an editorial. Whilst this isn't a hard and fast rule, it's why I've generally stayed away from IndieDB editorial content like this. It helps that ModDB gets around ten times the traffic that IndieDB does and so there's not many people missing out, but I'm concerned, in the long term, about indie developers feeling left out in the cold a little.

That's why the rebranded DBolical YouTube now also allows indie trailers, which I think manages to be "news" and "promotion" as opposed to straight-up advertisement. I've got to consider, too, other ways to talk about indie games in a way that doesn't straight-up advertise them monetarily. Lists for indie games might be a way to go if I'm careful how I word it but, again, ModDB's audience is ten times larger. I'm not sure if IndieDB articles would do especially well, but that doesn't mean I won't give it a go. By the end of this year, expect to have seen a few experiments on the IndieDB side of things to try and give it a resemblance of parity with ModDB's editorial and promotional efforts.

Forward Unto Morn

This week, I have a bunch more editorials planned. One went live today - 5 Battlefield Mods to Scratch Your 2042 Itch - and is a mild innovation on the previous few editorials by focusing almost entirely on the mod content with not much actual news content. "Battlefield 2042 has been delayed" is one sentence, but I still wanted to a. report on it and b. report on the very productive BF modding community on the site. As a result I figured I would also use it as an excuse to talk about the Battlefield Portal, which sounds exciting for UGC and is a bit of good news going forwards for DICE games.

The other two editorials are one about Total War: Warhammer 3's delay (which will feature either 5 great total war mods, or 5 great Warhammer-related mods. I haven't quite decided yet, but I will tomorrow), and also one about THQ Nordic's 10th anniversary. Only problem is, THQ Nordic's latest games aren't exactly renowned for moddability, which ties my hands a little. Hopefully there's at least five decent mods for Nordic's games, or else I won't be able to have an editorial stand on its own two legs about it without just sounding like a congratulatory thing. This is a modding website, after all.

Closing Thonks

As ever, there could be more editorials if there's more news. The next video I'm thinking of is mods that make you think. Stanley Parable is a good example of one - I'd like to touch upon more out-there subjects for the mod count-downs than just genre. I might do genre on occasion as they're easy to research for, but ultimately, I think the more unique themes grab people's attention more, and they're the ones I want to get out there.

As ever, any thoughts, suggestions, so on, let me know down below!

Hey again and welcome to another week in review, where I talk about site activities over the last week, plans for the next week, and offer you the opportunity to give direct feedback on running the site!

Busier Week

Last week I was on duty all five days and ended up being quite busy at work. Pretty much every day had something noteworthy to report on, gaming news wise or related to activities around the site or other socials. I'm going to break down my thoughts on these editorials as I did last week, as well as describe what I'm keeping my eye on at the moment and what happened in regards to my own modding efforts last week.

New News

The sudden slew of editorials that has been happening lately in regards to general gaming news which is then tied into mods is part of a new initiative to get site content going a bit more. Of course, we have original content to whip up relevant to the site - the new poll editorials will be fun, for example, more on that later - but we've been trying to get more relevant, up-to-date news on the front page, too. In order, then, regarding the editorials I wrote last week:

Do Feed The Polls - August 2021

This is part of a new, ongoing series of editorials we'll be doing every month (probably) in regards to poll results that month. Every Wednesday, I posit a question to the IndieDB and ModDB communities on Twitter in regards to gaming, site usage, and development. The idea is to generate interesting engagement as well as useful data for the users of both sites to know who they're engaging with and how to engage with the community.

There were some interesting results in the last editorial, and I discussed them at length. Coming up with poll questions is tougher than it sounds but I probably will keep to doing four a month, so if we happen to have a fifth Wednesday in a month, we'll skip the poll for that one. Four is a nice round number to analyse at a time.

Modderview: A Peek Inside the Minds of Modders

The other original content editorial (sort of) that I wrote last week was one on Stefan Köhler's Modderview series. I was asked to take part a few weeks back and I did, writing about my experiences in game modding. I had to go back and amend some of my answers as I think they initially came out pretty negative, but I'm a reasonably blunt person so that's probably why the "dark side of modding communities" came out a bit more in the interview.

I do enjoy modding and generally enjoy community engagement more than I haven't, but there's bad apples everywhere as in any online community. The trick, really, is to find a group of people who aren't gits, and stick with them. Make your thing, be happy with it, move on to the next passion project, or stick around and support that one. Better not to get bogged down with the people who are out to get you as, ultimately, they're never going to change. You can, though.

Classic Star Trek Games Return to GOG; 5 Adventurous Star Trek Mods to Boldly Try

The first of the two "gaming news" editorials had use looking at five classic Star Trek mods (in particular, I really loved Ultimate Universe when I was younger. Was as good as Star Trek space combat got until Star Trek Online). It's always great to see old games getting a second lease of life through re-releases, and I'm pleased Armada I and II haven't been forgotten and are coming soon.

KOTOR Remake Announced; 5 Incredible KOTOR I and II Mods to Play

The other gaming news that drew my eye last week was a KOTOR remake in the works. I'm especially thrilled about this concept as KOTOR is a game that was a huge part of my childhood. Some of my closest friends and I only got as close as we did because of our mutual interest in the game initially, and all things considered, this remake is probably my most anticipated game, now. I hope they do it justice; it'd be a real damn shame if this went the way of some of the other remakes in recent years.

Futurethinkin'

As for the next round of editorials - this Friday, I should be finished with the new YouTube video, as well as the list editorial for it. We'll have to see what other news happens this week - if we have lots of gaming news, editorials will come out in short order, and if not, it'll be Friday's video editorial and not much else for this week. The start of the month - with poll editorials and such - will begin getting pretty busy. We did also upload another trailer over on the DBolical YouTube for a WW1 tactics game - trailer applications are still open, so keep that in mind if you're up for it.

Modding Away Pt 2

This week I did two big things on the site with my own mods - I shipped my Warblade mod, Warblade: Tribute, and also open-sourced the initial code repo for my main mod project, Raising the Bar: Redux.

As before, this mod is a personal tribute to the creator of the game, thanks to the effect it had on my childhood. I wasn't working on it for very long - about a week or two - but I was working pretty constantly on it in that time and it was a personal thing more than anything. Once I'd made all the changes I intended to make, I was more or less done. My dad and girlfriend both gave it a go and enjoyed it too, though neither have as much context for the game as me so that could just be the fact the game is still that good!

The other bit of modding I got up to was open sourcing the code for my main project. I'm a staunch believer in open sourcing code - assets are iffy because they're very personally suited for a given project and maps are too, but code, I think, is generally always worth open sourcing. I don't feel it informs on personality quite as much as anything else, and has the potential to be of a real help to other modders. It'll be a good way to insure the code base in case there's bugs we haven't discovered yet, too, and the retroactive addition of later releases' codebases will keep it from spoiling people.

Ending Thoughts

That's that for this week. As before, if anyone reads this whole thing and wants to comment on an idea for the site/community engagement - polls, editorials, whatever else - feel free to leave a comment down below. Thanks!

Hey all - David from DBolical here. I'm going to start doing these sort of weekly blog posts regarding a few highlights and important bits of work from my last week of working on the site. These aren't going to be too long or too refined, but they'll be an opportunity for you to see what I'm up to, what's coming next, and give feedback on the previous week's work.

Busy Week

First off, I wasn't on duty all five days last week - Monday was a bank holiday and Thursday I was graduating (would you believe they got my degree wrong in the yearbook? I didn't until I saw it). I did a little bit of catching up on the weekend, but for the most part I scheduled many many headlines throughout the week to make sure I wasn't behind. The new The Old Realms (formerly The Old World) update was really nice to see, and I also wanted to congratulate HedonDev on a new release, Bloodrite, for their mod-turned-standalone-game, Hedon. Both were notable standouts last week, though as ever, if something gets headlined, it's because it stood out to me in some way! I did five for IndieDB and five for ModDB in one day last week - 10 in total for Tuesday to account for the rest of the week's absences.

Editorials, Editorials, Editorials?

Part of what I'm trying to get going in the new role is regular editorials - covering industry news relevant to ModDB or IndieDB, whilst taking the opportunity to plug a few nice bits of community content on the sites. Last week, I whipped up an editorial about CDPR's modder recruitment.

I've played a fair bit of Witcher 3, though I like the idea of the game more than the game itself, funnily enough. Something about a game being that large makes it hard to pick up and play, given how little time I have for playing games these days. I like short, snappy experiences generally - but every so often I progress just a little bit further in Witcher 3, when I feel like losing an hour or two to its vast open world. I haven't played Cyberpunk 2077 and will reserve my thoughts on that, but it's always a good move for companies to pick up modders. They're reliable sources of workers already familiar with an engine's workflow, and it's oftentimes pretty good for the modders, too.

YouTube - Then and Next

Last week, we rebranded the YouTube to take into account the wider DBolical brand. It wouldn't surprise me if people didn't know DBolical was the overarching company in charge of both ModDB and IndieDB, and the rebranding is a bit of an effort to turn that around. In addition, it gives us a good excuse to post IndieDB content like trailers, too - speaking of, don't forget you can submit your own trailers, though it's not just the ModDB YouTube after all. Special thanks goes to Thibault Testart over at Mod.io, who helped advise me on banners and then whipped up this fun little call-back to the mascots of DBolical's past:

Next on my plate is another video, though the last few weeks have been hectic enough that it's not likely to come out this Friday on schedule. Expect it the following Friday instead - it'll be focused around mods that are good fun with friends (so mostly multiplayer mods, with an emphasis on co-op play, too). One of the mods I'm featuring is The Clone Wars: Revised, which I'm looking really forward to covering.

The mod's got a lovely style overhaul and considering how important The Clone Wars was to my childhood, it's really satisfying to see all these assets in-game.

Modding, Always Modding

Of course, I'm a modder too - and worked on all my various projects over the last week and the weekend, too. Whilst I spent a lot of time working on content for my Half-Life mods (content I'd prefer to keep under wraps for the time being), I did also pursue a little tangent in learning how to mod Warblade.

I'll go into full depth when I ship the mod, but in short, it'll be using content intended for the sequel that was never finished due to the unfortunate death of the creator, Edgar Vigdal. I've obtained the blessing of Edgar's colleague at the time of his death, Simon Quincey, to create the mod, and it is almost complete. It might well feature in the next blog post as a result.

Wrapping Up

That about sums up the important stuff over the last week. As per usual, every day was also full of dealing with support tickets, sorting out the headlines, and the usual suspects. Next week, expect some news about editorials, progress on the video, and how this Warblade mode shaped up after all.