FreeGameDev

I played red eclipse back when it was still blood frontier and have come back to the scene off and on. Over the years (has it really been that long jeez) I've noticed the player base has
always been very low compared to some other indi shooters available such as urban terror, nexuiz, the original saurbraten, warsow, xonotic etc.

So with the 1.3 release on the horizon I thought I'd mention a few things about RE I think could be driving new players away from the game.

1. Some of the weapon models and textures are vastly superior to others in quality and there is a huge noticeable contrast there. I mean no disrespect to any of the developers of these weapons or maps in any way.
I am a 3D artist myself, and I know all to well how much work goes into making a high quality weapon or map.

2. The same as above except for the stock maps.

3. Nearly every server has nothing but insta-gib being played.

4. Not enough variety to the core gameplay (not game modes) to maintain player interest. The parkour system does help a lot with this though. How about implementing something like simple vehicles? Xonotic has already done this
And there is already the mek expansion made by cdxbow (not sure if that's still actively under development if it's ceased).

5. Not frequent enough updates to the game. Very small weekly to monthly updates let the players know the game is still being developed and having content added which provides more incentive to play the game.
Your average casual gamer isn't going to go to source forge to see the development of SVN let alone know what that even means. The biggest problem is that if someone creates a high quality weapon model the creator
has to wait months to a year to see it added to game. Theirs a lot of professional contract 3D artists out there that would probably donate content just to list it on their portfolio (red eclipse is a stand alone shooter after all).

6. No progression system. A good progression system is what keeps the new players playing the game. Team Fortress 2 nailed it the random item finding system. Basically slight variations of weapons or armor you keep in an inventory.
They can be equipped and are only available if you get them from playing the actual game or of course the steam shop. They aren't overly powerful but provide alternate functionality at a some cost, so it's and equivalent exchange.
Perhaps you could offer these items to people who make donations hehe. What's wrong with a little compensation for all your work. Maybe random items or game currency could be awarded for certain achievements made in the game such as
a triple kill.

Red Eclipse is truly a great and innovate shooter but I think it could be so much more with a little extra work. Well anyway, that's just my 2 cents.

I'm currently working on a large scale game which uses the upgrade cube2 engine (Tesseract) and some code from the saur\re community that I'm keeping under wraps for now, but I'll be glad to share my work with the RE team if their interested.

MysteriousKieran {l Wrote}:I played red eclipse back when it was still blood frontier and have come back to the scene off and on. Over the years (has it really been that long jeez) I've noticed the player base has always been very low compared to some other indi shooters available such as urban terror, nexuiz, the original saurbraten, warsow, xonotic etc.

It's still early days for Red Eclipse as a project, we already have ten times the regular players when compared to v1.1. Note: Most developers and community members will take offense if you compare their game to other games.

MysteriousKieran {l Wrote}:1. Some of the weapon models and textures are vastly superior to others in quality and there is a huge noticeable contrast there. I mean no disrespect to any of the developers of these weapons or maps in any way.

Unfortunately, you take what you can get; it sucks, but there are also strict licensing requirements in Red Eclipse so that is remains a fully open source game which leaves a bad taste in the mouths of most artists. There are two sides to this, artists come and go, so we never get much consistency when there are so many contributors, and we need to be able to continue evolving the project when they leave, this is obviously impossible if you can no longer reach the original creator to ask permission.

MysteriousKieran {l Wrote}:2. The same as above except for the stock maps.

I've recently logged a bug that certain maps need to be retextured before I will put them back into the main rotation.

MysteriousKieran {l Wrote}:3. Nearly every server has nothing but insta-gib being played.

I think you'll find this endemic of many first person shooters, if people can play a game mode without the hassle of having to find items and get instant gratification, they will. The "arena" mutator is a partial solution to this, and we've found if you vote for it, you will likely get a split vote when going against "instagib" votes. I've found most people don't want to play regular deathmatch at all, but Red Eclipse is all about giving the player the option, no matter how much that can be annoying sometimes. We've studied this problem at great length for some time, and there is no be-all-end-all solution to it, if we simply remove "instagib" then you will make half the player base rage.

MysteriousKieran {l Wrote}:4. Not enough variety to the core gameplay (not game modes) to maintain player interest. The parkour system does help a lot with this though. How about implementing something like simple vehicles? Xonotic has already done this and there is already the mek expansion made by cdxbow (not sure if that's still actively under development if it's ceased).

Everyone always thinks vehicles are the solution to everything, and after years of developing, I am honestly getting quite tired of it. I really don't care what game X has done, we are not that game. Red Eclipse is about trying out new ideas and not just reusing the same old boring mechanics over and over again, so please try to come up with some original idea, if it really is in the name of "maintaining player interest". If people want vehicles, they can go and play those games that already provide it in a gameplay framework that is already designed to accomodate it. All this does is create extra workload (both in programming, and content/map creation) that we don't have the resources to follow through with. For the record, I am the programmer for MekArcade, so I am well aware of it, and I don't want to create two products that compete with each other.

MysteriousKieran {l Wrote}:5. Not frequent enough updates to the game. Very small weekly to monthly updates let the players know the game is still being developed and having content added which provides more incentive to play the game. Your average casual gamer isn't going to go to source forge to see the development of SVN let alone know what that even means. The biggest problem is that if someone creates a high quality weapon model the creator has to wait months to a year to see it added to game. Theirs a lot of professional contract 3D artists out there that would probably donate content just to list it on their portfolio (red eclipse is a stand alone shooter after all).

You don't seem to realise that the bulk of development on Red Eclipse is driven by one person, that one person being me. I do have a life, which includes a wife and kids, and amazingly I still manage to dedicate 60 odd hours a week to the project. While it may seem like development has "stalled" at certain points, it is just because I have issues that come up in my life that need dealing with. We simply don't have the resources to deploy on a monthly or weekly basis, and there simply wouldn't be enough included with such updates to warrant all the effort involved in doing so. I currently keep a schedule of around six months between releases, this allows the community to find and/or suggest enough things that need doing, and get a solid feel for where things are currently at. Considering that most people don't want to be downloading the entire game on a regular basis, more frequent releases would just result in community fragmentation between versions.

MysteriousKieran {l Wrote}:6. No progression system. A good progression system is what keeps the new players playing the game. Team Fortress 2 nailed it the random item finding system. Basically slight variations of weapons or armor you keep in an inventory. They can be equipped and are only available if you get them from playing the actual game or of course the steam shop. They aren't overly powerful but provide alternate functionality at a some cost, so it's and equivalent exchange. Perhaps you could offer these items to people who make donations hehe. What's wrong with a little compensation for all your work. Maybe random items or game currency could be awarded for certain achievements made in the game such as a triple kill.

This is yet another suggestion which hinges entirely on having people create content, which is nearly impossible to fulfil. Sure, I have these grandiose ideas too, and if I could do them, I would. You might notice some TF2 inspirations already in Red Eclipse, and yes, that is because I am a fan of that particular game myself. When we have tons of money or heaps of people contributing, I might be able to start doing things like this, but for the moment, we're still struggling to accomplish the small tasks we already have under our belt.

qreeves {l Wrote}:It's still early days for Red Eclipse as a project, we already have ten times the regular players when compared to v1.1. Note: Most developers and community members will take offense if you compare their game to other games.

I definitely didn't mean to compare in that way but just reference to the number players other games had. I'm sorry if I gave the wrong message there.

qreeves {l Wrote}:Unfortunately, you take what you can get; it sucks, but there are also strict licensing requirements in Red Eclipse so that is remains a fully open source game which leaves a bad taste in the mouths of most artists. There are two sides to this, artists come and go, so we never get much consistency when there are so many contributors, and we need to be able to continue evolving the project when they leave, this is obviously impossible if you can no longer reach the original creator to ask permission.

I see your point here. Perhaps a stricter content acceptance guideline that outlines the style red eclipse is supposed to have for core game content inclusion would be appropriate? For example, what would you say to having all the future
weapon replacements being consistent with the Pistol and Shotgun models that luckystrikerx did such a great job on?

qreeves {l Wrote}:Everyone always thinks vehicles are the solution to everything, and after years of developing, I am honestly getting quite tired of it. I really don't care what game X has done, we are not that game. Red Eclipse is about trying out new ideas and not just reusing the same old boring mechanics over and over again, so please try to come up with some original idea, if it really is in the name of "maintaining player interest". If people want vehicles, they can go and play those games that already provide it in a gameplay framework that is already designed to accomodate it. All this does is create extra workload (both in programming, and content/map creation) that we don't have the resources to follow through with. For the record, I am the programmer for MekArcade, so I am well aware of it, and I don't want to create two products that compete with each other.

You're right. I didn't think that through well enough and was just thinking of a way to get the game more popular without regard for what the Red Eclipse project stands for. Maybe expanding on the parkour and movement system would be a better approach.

qreeves {l Wrote}:You don't seem to realise that the bulk of development on Red Eclipse is driven by one person, that one person being me. I do have a life, which includes a wife and kids, and amazingly I still manage to dedicate 60 odd hours a week to the project. While it may seem like development has "stalled" at certain points, it is just because I have issues that come up in my life that need dealing with. We simply don't have the resources to deploy on a monthly or weekly basis, and there simply wouldn't be enough included with such updates to warrant all the effort involved in doing so. I currently keep a schedule of around six months between releases, this allows the community to find and/or suggest enough things that need doing, and get a solid feel for where things are currently at. Considering that most people don't want to be downloading the entire game on a regular basis, more frequent releases would just result in community fragmentation between versions.

Wouldn't some form of automatic patching system that updates the game to 'stable svn' be a reasonable way to allow users to have their approved content go into the game quicker (like steamworkshop for example.)

This thread shows indirectly very well which kind of development this project is. Qreeves points out what the community can expect and what not. Naturally he is the most reliable developer in this project and we would need more of these people when we expect more (work continuousely, reliability, experience, know how...).
Here is no big company with money and manpower, ...
I enjoyed to read this .

One suggestion of mine would be to bring Red Eclipse into Steam. The playerbase would explode, i think.

Sniper-Goth {l Wrote}:One suggestion of mine would be to bring Red Eclipse into Steam. The playerbase would explode, i think.

I don't think VALVe is willing to give games which have absolutely no way of making any money away for free, as they only cost bandwidth.

There is some games there that are 100% free and don't generate money for Valve (ex: Super Crate box, Insurgency, Zombie panic source etc.). Thats why i think it should work with Red Eclipse too.

One 'business model' for deployment on Valve would be the game being free, but the Red Eclipse Pro pack (new maps, characters etc) could be sold, without in anyway affecting the open licensing of the game. This is one way we have thought we could keep MekArcade true to open source, but still buy me a Porsche. Its also a good model to encourage mappers and artists, as essentially its their work thats being sold.

cdxbow {l Wrote}:One 'business model' for deployment on Valve would be the game being free, but the Red Eclipse Pro pack (new maps, characters etc) could be sold, without in anyway affecting the open licensing of the game. This is one way we have thought we could keep MekArcade true to open source, but still buy me a Porsche. Its also a good model to encourage mappers and artists, as essentially its their work thats being sold.

I don't see how you can sell something that is open source, it doesn't work that way.
It is mostly Non-commercial use, besides we DO NOT need that kind of business model ruining this game too, they do that to the mainstream games enough as it is, thanks.

It is easier to just go where the eyes are and post about red eclipse there, I tend to post in random very popular forums about red eclipse. Try going to Rock Paper Shotgun and post about RE in their forums, that is bound to get some people.

Only extra content is purchased. Seperate. eg The Red Eclipse Tournament Pack. The game remains open source and free. I can't see any problem with that. If anyone can point out a problem, please do, especially if you have a good understanding of licensing.

To me this is a great way an open source game could expand its reach while at the same time the devs & the artists could make a little money.

The gaming market is so competitive that unless your game is growing, it is basically dying. I don't want to see RE stuck only in the small Cube community forever, it deserves more, Quin deserves more. Getting distribution via any of the commercial or platform related 'app stores' can only be a good thing, including the opportunity to sell some extra content. As many of this community are 'content providers' it should be looked on as an opportunity rather than a threat.

cdxbow {l Wrote}:Only extra content is purchased. Seperate. eg The Red Eclipse Tournament Pack. The game remains open source and free. I can't see any problem with that. If anyone can point out a problem, please do.

To me this is a great way an open source game could expand its reach while at the same time the devs & the artists could make a little money.

The gaming market is so competitive that unless your game is growing, it is basically dying. I don't want to see RE stuck only in the small Cube community forever, it deserves more, Quin deserves more. Getting distribution via any of the commercial or platform related 'app stores' can only be a good thing, including the opportunity to sell some extra content. As many of this community are 'content providers' it should be looked on as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Well the problem I see is that the game is open source and free, so what defines "extra content" and to what extent? Can people sell the maps they make for the game? Why would you want to introduce money into a community project, money always corrupts.

Extra content is anything that is not delivered with the original game. It could be free or paid. It would be very hard for individuals to release maps though 'official distribution',

Community projects can benefit from money, to think otherwise is silly. Without $400 there would be no player model in RE, thus no game. It is almost impossible to get good animators to produce player models without money. Artists are a precoius lot, coders are a bit freer with their favours. I couldn't find a modeller who would do meks for me for free. After about 12 months of looking I decided to pay, even then it took about 4 months, and 400 euros to find someone decent. (then he disappeared and left me in the lurch...)

I can't argue about the corrupting influence of money, but it does, as they say, make the world go round.

I will reiterate the point, if your games is not growing, it's dying. We have to do everything we can to increase the player base, including, I believe, looking at channels like valve or similar.

My plan with RE has always been to build a game that can provide me the assets I require to build another (commercial) game at some point in the future. This is one of many reasons why RE does not accept content with a "non-commercial" license clause. The RE First Person Shooter will always be free to play, there may, at some point, be an online marketplace designed to sell other content (maps, player model customisations, etc), and we may even sell premium memberships so that you can own your nickname, and the like.

The point is, "open source" doesn't mean "zero money". I live on disability benefits, and make almost absolutely no money from RE (aside from donations); as you can imagine, this means I live on very little. Yes, I would like to have a better life some day, and not rely on a pittance from the government to survive. Don't fret though, I'll always do it in a way where you still have everything you already have now, for free, it will just be nice little "extras" which we will charge for. I am waiting to see the end result of Steam coming to Linux, after which I may make a custom version of the game for that distribution platform.

I have again, advertised on the Battlelog for Battlefield 3 to try and migrate some players over to this game, perhaps I catch some eyes and they realize the awesomeness that is this game.

Don't know if you can read this, you probably have to login, but here is the link:
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/fo ... 946985263/