Hey HyperSonic,
This is going to turn out as a giant wall of text, so apologies in advanced for this. I do have a lot to say. I know I'm going to be downright demotivating but I feel that you do not understand the situation that is mod making, but also to understand the Marble Blast engine and its possibilities and limitations.
Before all these, however, I'd like to ask you to format your posts better. Others did tell you about double/triple/quadruple posting, but I want to tell you about using more commas, better sentence structure and so on. Even though this is the internet and everyone can do whatever, it's still very good to see proper English, especially since this is a forum.
Onto the mod. Congratulations on wanting to do a mod for Marble Blast! This is a really hard task to do in today's standards, and as many have learned it is an achievement to complete one let alone having it done per the original intentions.
To create a successful mod you need a team of people that are knowledgeable in the field they are put in, are capable of having a lot of spare time and of course have plenty of time for this mod. Reasons are that level designers are best for levels but not music; people are also mainly at school, which eats up a lot of their time. Their spare time would then usually be directed at homework, friends, TV and games, which means they aren't going to work on the mod as much as you'd like them to. This means if you're looking on having a mod done under a year, you can already forget that.
This leads to another problem: dedication. Many people will not bother working on a mod for at least a year without good progress, them enjoying working on it and community backup. It's a lot of tasks and items to do and again time management is key. Likewise direction of the mod, as without a proper layout of it right at the beginning will not help.
I'll draw PlatinumQuest as an example. Plans of it started in later 2008 as Marble Blast Campaign, but I gave up quickly due to the sheer amount of work I'd have to do myself. However it rose again later in 2009 during chats to Aayrl. Having discussed these further it seemed like it might be a good idea; after talking to most of the Platinum Team we thought that perhaps we should implement it as an extension to MBP (calling it MBP 1.50).
When I then posted about it, I didn't write about it in a few sentences or 1-2 paragraphs, I actually laid it out fully in a post that is three and a half (3.5) times the size of this post at this very point (of 3 paragraphs).
So what did I lay out? Everything. From GUI design, to game modes, actual level design, how the mod will play out, number of levels and expected difficulty and so on. After the staff replied, I posted again with even more info and what we need to do. That post was as big as the first one if not larger. At this point, everyone who was on staff knew exactly what was going to be in PlatinumQuest, what we want and our direction.
Did we know exactly how levels will play out? nah. We didn't know we're going to have water 2 years later. We didn't know about Moving Objects, Cannons or anything at this point. We did know about the game modes because this was our original design. The reason cannons, moving objects and others came up was through discussions later on in development when we were wanting some new features and tested them. Not everything made the cut.
For example, AI is not very possible (and still isn't fathomable) because of the incredible difficulty creating one (and you can't tell someone just to make it, that's brutal), let alone proper implementation. As such anything to do with it was axed.
Once we had our new features, we found ways to implement them in current levels or create new levels revolving around them and/or containing them to some degree.
Mind you, our original intentions were to release by the end of 2010. We're at 2013 and without any knowledge of when will we finish
. Marble Blast Fubar began even earlier than PlatinumQuest and is still in progress, though in a more advanced state, but is made largely by a single person. Perhaps this will give you an idea of how long a mod can take when people do not have much time and dedicate themselves for quality over quantity.
Onto the Marble Blast engine itself. I know you've seen things on YouTube. Scratch them out of your mind right now.
- Multiplayer takes an extremely long time to create, playtest and work out properly. HiGuy and Jeff are doing an amazing job on pulling through with it despite the numerous re-writes and problems they went through during its creation.
- Like I said, AI is next to impossible (or really is impossible) to work through.
- A Campaign type story is one that needs to be created and written about in lots of detail in a document months in advanced. Only then you can heavily edit it on the go.
- The Marble Blast engine poses many difficulties. It's no surprise that many hacks were done script-wise to do things otherwise not possible, or they crash and break a lot. We can't just throw an idea into the air and fully anticipate it to be possible. We have to know whether the engine is capable of doing so to begin with, and also what is hardcoded into the engine. For example, we long wanted to change the end of a level where the camera rotates around the marble on a specific height and speed. That's hardcoded. Can't change. Want to improve camera? Can't either.
Now I can go ahead and tell you that ideas like "learn the basics" is pretty much useless. We've played those in Marble Blast Gold, Platinum and the custom level Camp. Doing those all over again is annoying and a waste of time and effort that can otherwise be put into other levels. Not saying you cannot have any, but if you teach players these while also putting in the new features in the spotlight will actually help, not diminish.
I'm not going into level naming scheme as I'm pretty bad at those, but I do want to let you know to be very careful on level names. "noob hell" sounds rather childish and much like a custom level's name over a mod's level name. Noob also stands for newbie, so such level name already makes me think of a level that is very hard for a new player at Marble Blast (but not advanced+), but you then mention it's an easy mission in a dark/helly area. Again, you can make up a better level name than that based more on the level's contents than the scenery.
Another thing is... don't ask the community for ideas, especially not levels. They don't know what you know in your head. Your staff are the ones that create the levels based on the knowledge of what you wrote to them and the direction you are giving them. If you do not know how to use Torque, you're in for years of learning.
Lastly I can come up with many level ideas in a few minutes and outright tell you they all take too much effort/time to be worth it, are not possible to do at all, and I do not have the motivation to follow through with any of them. For me a level takes an extremely long time to make. Look at buzzmusic's levels for example; they take a long time too but he goes through all the thought processes properly as well as testing things out. He also looks at the big pictures and can see whether levels will work out at the end.
But you don't have to be Buzzmusic to make good levels. Look at Jkk39's latest level
(CLICK HERE). It's very simple, can be created easily and will be played for a few minutes. But it's also fun and quick and that's what we like as well.
Now I'm going to say here what no one else is going to say bluntly:
Drop this mod. It's not going to work out.
It's the horrible and sad truth. At your age you should be busy with school and friends. If you want to create a mod for Marble Blast it's awesome, but you don't know anything. You're better off learning Constructor and making levels for the community (then get feedback, create better levels). You can make your mods levels yourself and using requested skyboxes and textures. So you release them one at a time every few weeks, so what? No one said it's the end of the world. If anything it gives you time to plan things out, grasp level design and above all: learn that things aren't easy. You'll be surprised you'll end up much better doing so instead of trying to throw a mod together.
During this time you could also learn programming, and afterward TorqueScript, and this will give you an idea of what monster you are up against. Will it demotivate you to the point of you not wanting to do the mod? Very likely. But Jeff and HiGuy pulled through and they're working on Multiplayer, which is a beast. So it's not impossible.
Before you reply to this post, I'd recommend you to think about it. Reply to it tomorrow. Think about it when you go to sleep, think whether you can really do this in a few months time, and whether you will achieve it.
And remember this: no one will dislike you you for not following through with this mod. We will be more happy with custom levels, videos of Marble Blast and you being active around the forums. Posting in shoutbox, playing in Hangman, playing people's levels and posting good times and comments on those, laugh and chat. You don't have to do a mod to be a recognizable member of this community. Just be active and we will appreciate this far more than you can imagine
. How do you plan to make the voice not only speak in the start of the level, when it should be saying its Ready, Set, Go sequence, but also speak the player's name. Will there be a login screen? How will you even be able to make it recognize the player's name? No offense meant, just some questions.
