I recently released what is supposed to be the final patch to Night's Edge: Wet Works, our mod for Unreal Tournament. I admit, my attention to the mod over the past several months was sparse and sporadic at best. This definitely prolonged the release of version 1.2 and I can't deny it. But I also believe that most people don't know what it's like to have a project like this last for 3 years and reach the point where it's gone on for so long and absorbed so much of your life that you begin to harbor a deep down resentment for it and cringe at the thought of continuing. I can't remember the last time I played Night's Edge when it wasn't for testing purposes. It was probably at the last outLAN, which was quite a while ago. I designed Night's Edge as the game that didn't exist but I wanted to play... and then I never really played it.

Creating a mod is a pain. I mean, it's a seriously arduous task to design and actualize something on the scale that we did. Inexperience managing a group (especially a volunteer group) only makes it worse. I made a number of mistakes in the way I recruited, ran the team, and planned out goals. Being the only programmer and team lead meant that the time I took out to aid a team member, bring new people up to speed, or investigate a particular tool was time I didn't devote to working on the code. Lack of solid information at times severely crippled our progress. Official documentation for much of UT's feature-set is simply non-existent, and so there was a considerable amount of trial-and-error going on behind the scenes.

Then there's the reality of volunteer internet help. Faceless strangers doing work for someone else's project are notoriously unreliable. This is not to say that all of my volunteers were flaky, because this simply not true. Night's Edge benefited from some great volunteer contributions. But I wasted a lot of time handling people who either had no real skills to offer or who -- for some reason or another -- decided that they couldn't (or didn't want to) continue to help out. I suspect that I could have done a lot more to keep people (and keep them productive). In the end, though, dealing with team turn-over is tough and demoralizing for everyone involved (probably more so for the team lead).

Three years is a long time to work on an amateur product like this and so I've made it, I think, perfectly clear that Night's Edge: Wet Works has come a final and decisive end. What little interest there was in the mod can only further dwindle with the release of Unreal Tournament 2003. But the experience has taught me some valuable lessons, and though I still may cringe for a while whenever someone mentions it to me, it was an important project for me to work on. First off, I'm not a manager. I've known it since high school when I was the "head" of various teams and clubs. Organizing people is not my strong suit. I'm also a notorious procrastinator when it comes to things that aren't fun, and let's face it, a lot of making a mod is just plain work. I don't know what to say to motivate people, especially volunteers. And I definitely played too nice with both the non-contributing team members and the complainers on the message board. Yeah, even with my numerous acerbic comments, the forums still got out of hand because we tolerated too much crap.

Which, of course, brings up one of the biggest reasons I've come to resent Night's Edge: some of the players themselves. I just haven't yet gotten accustomed to the fact that no matter how hard you try, you will be deluged with bitching and whining about every little thing. It's a staple of the gaming community, whether you do it for fun or for profit. Just because people don't pay a cent to play our mod doesn't mean they won't complain just as loud as they do for the games they paid $55 for at Best Buy. Well, maybe not quite as loud. Still, I don't think anything was quite as demoralizing as the constant negative comments we received from people who claimed to like the game. And it wasn't just about bugs (though there were plenty from time to time), it was the stream of complaints about the style, or the lack of a particular feature, or how This Game didn't compare to That Game, or how they always wanted So-And-So in a game and we were idiots for not including it. We had several great fans who posted helpful and constructive criticism, but eventually they moved on because the barrage of inane comments.

After the mod conference, I drew up plans for a third-person space-style mod for UT2003 (similar in vein to what Bellicose Void is supposed to be) that I discarded when Mojo pointed out to me how much work it would be and I'd said I wasn't interested in doing another large project. Too true. So I abandoned it and devised a basic type of rune-style mutator to replace the adrenaline. After putting that all together... I realized the last thing I wanted right now was to head up another mod, even if I was the only one working on it. I have too little free time to have another sink hole like that eating it all up. So maybe one of these days I'll join up with an existing mod team and offer up my volunteer services. But probably not any time soon, and I don't know that I'll ever start up my own mod project again.