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!
