New Year's Resolution: One Last Multiplayer

Truth is, I've been really turned off from developing anything multiplayer again.

When I first starting modding/dabbling with games - there really wasn't an internet to go publish things on, so I knew I was more or less doing it for my own amusement. Then came DooM and I started making maps for friends in college. This more or less kept up through Half-Life and Unreal Tournament when I made a couple of maps of our workplace for my co-workers then. It was also around that time that a friend and I started to design a mod.

Not making a multiplayer mod didn't really seem an option. Everything we were playing was multiplayer then. Mods were different then too, because just about any decent mod would get at least a few servers of people trying it out. In fact, when I finally made a workable mod for Unreal Tournament, it was pretty easy to get some notice and when I finally evolved that code into Freehold, I had made a few online friends with that we could playtest/play for a couple nights/afternoons a week.

That all seemed to change recently. Gamer curiosity seems to have peaked, and now they really want a well saturated mod before they dip. Plus, and I hate to sound like an old curmedgeon here, but the online crowd has really changed. Way more l33tSP3K trash talkers than there are decent players it seems.

Because of this, my desire to play online with people I don't know has been pretty much quenched. I'm sure there will be games to lure me back from time to time, but I doubt it will ever become the norm again. Hence, a lot of my focus these days is on how single-player games work.

But, my resolution is to try and make at least one last multiplayer mod. I really think the concepts of how gametypes evolve has stagnated and I'd like to try some things with dynamic team and goal creation. So it might not always be one team against another team to get a flag, but perhaps on the same map three guys are trying to get a flag while a fourth has a mission to stop them and fifth is out to frag any of them.

So I'm taking notes and will just have to see if this goes the way most resolutions do...