There's a lot to be said for being involved with a mod project. Forget unrealistic goals like having your project go commercial or being hired by a company; I'm talking pure creative satisfaction. Working as a team and watching a unique and playable project slowly take shape is very satisfying, not to mention getting a lot of great feedback from happy gamers.
Sounds fun, right? But what if you don't actually know how to make levels, models, skins, or code? Are you therefore screwed as far as participating in cool mods or conversions?
No way.
Below I'm going to talk about several job descriptions people with no development ability can fill and still be an active and useful contributor to a mod team. Take a look and see if any of them are a fit for you, and if they are... then get involved!
HUMAN RESOURCES
The number one MOST CRITICAL part of running a mod is maintaining a staff of talented developers. Not only do people come and go due to real life commitments or loss of interest, some people just suck in the first place. It's a reality that most projects are always looking for people to help work on it, and once again spending time on manpower issues means NOT spending time mapping or writing code.
A dedicated human resources person can REALLY be an asset. You can be the one to 'fire' the guy who hasn't submitted any levels except that one untextured square box four months ago. You can be the guy who posts to every Unreal-engine-related forum on the internet when it's time to find a new coder for your Deus Ex project. If people send in requests to join you can evaluate them by playing their old levels, looking in their old mod forums to see if they were dicks to everyone, and generally checking them out. Hell, you can even have some fun and try to poach talent from competing mods!
WEBMASTER
This is actually a two-parter. The first option is if you're skilled at building websites. Believe it or not, a lot of people who can code/map/push pixels couldn't design a non-ass looking site to save their lives. This is where you come in to put together something that will capture gamer's attentions and help show off the project's elements in the best light. Helping like this is especially important for mod groups just starting out. A great looking website will pull in the number 1 most important thing to any mod, established or just starting out... PEOPLE.
And don't just stop with one! Get your first mod group off and running with a great new site and you can then jump over to the next bunch of guys and help them out too. Don't be afraid to look for groups that already have sites up and running... a complete redesign can often times be a fun way for them to bring new attention to their project.
If you're not all that good at web art or design, don't despair. You've got another option; being a site maintainer. Almost anyone, with a small amount of instruction, can learn the very basics to maintaining a website. Some text here, a few html codes there, and voila' you've just unloaded a ton of work and responsibility from the people who should be concentrating on the actual development. You can do news, add screenshots, post new game information sections, and update existing parts of the site as the project goes through the inevitable design evolutions. An added bonus is that many times gamers quit visiting sites for mods in progress, since the team is too busy actually working to update their site. A dedicated webmaster can keep the site activity and community interest high, which helps team morale and membership efforts.
PUBLIC RELATIONS
The entire point of this article is to show that people with no development experience can still help, which frees up the people doing the actual work. And who doesn't know how to use email? Right, everyone, and 'using email' is more important than you might immediately think. You see, simply by being the designated PR monkey for a project you can email news sites with project updates, be the go-between to keep communication between team members open, or contact other projects to discuss collaborations or to get questions answered.
A PR person can do even more than this, too. Some examples could be:
Patrolling a mod's forums to answer questions and weed out flamers
Setting up and administering a chat channel
Answering interview questions
Writing press releases
HARDWARE PROVIDER
Got a rich momma who set you up with a T1 to your Snoopy desk and all the latest in Sears' best Packard Bell hardware? Well, put that silicon to use by doing stuff for mods. Maybe you can be the guy who compiles maps for people on your P4-1.7, which otherwise would take an entire night on your lead mappers old computer, thus freeing him up to actually map. Or maybe a multiplayer project needs test servers so they can all bang on the code to see if it breaks, and would benefit from your cablemodem. Heck, you could even be the one who moves the thirty megs worth of music files from your sound guy up to the project's main FTP site rather than your webmaster having to do it on his 56k modem.
BUGMASTER
Let's be honest... mods take a lot of time, are usually done by non-professionals (even though they may be packing a lot of talent), and are worked on in between real life responsibilities. The result? Bugs, baby! Yes, I'd say that anyone who's played community releases knows that stability is not always the exception. As a result, bugs tend to be a big topic of discussion once the game is actually released. Feedback emails, comments on other websites, and forums are typically where you'll see these little monsters get discovered.
This is where you come in. As bugmaster, your job is to be the one who compiles all the community complaints into one database (don't be scared by the word, it could just be a big text file), and feed them to the appropriate people on the team to get 'em fixed. Coders and mappers can get a lot more done if all they have to do is open their section of the bug database and work down the list. Kinda hard to squash bugs when you have to spend a bunch of time searching forums and looking through two hundred emails all talking about the same thing, just in case there's one new item brought up.
I'm pretty sure the above is just the tip of the iceberg. People actively working on mods should drop me a line if they've got any other suggestions for how non-developers can help. For the rest of you, consider taking part of the time you might be spending to game, and donate it to actually help MAKE a game. Get your ass over to one of PlanetDeusEx's hosted mods and dig in. It'll be l22t, I promise.
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