Player submitted POIs (competition)

[Taddious]

Would it be possible to implement a monthly competition in which the playerbase can submit their designs for POIs to the FunPimps?

Then a regular monthly update could add the winner(s)' POIs to the database. That way we could get potentially get hundreds upon hundreds of variety and no two towns will ever be the same and it would free-up a lot of time for the team (I assume they would just need to play test them and make tweaks to the loot balance/zombie placement)

 

I posted this suggestion on the Steam forums and was told to place it here. It's my first time posting here, so please be gentle and I hope I'm not breaking any etiquette or necroing any repetitive topics.

[H01101001]

That would rock!  I discovered this game a few weeks ago, and I am really into the design aspects of it.  I would love the chance to share it with others.

[Laz Man]

I asked Rick in one of the A19 dev streams and he seemed open to the idea.  The question is when is the best time for something like that.

[unholyjoe]

no this is not an official word...

 

but seems to me that the best time for such contest would be after we go gold (that way we are done with any changes that could break prefabs ... naming and ids and textures).

 

gonna be nice to see what designs the community can come up with.

[AtomicUs5000]

Sounds like fun to me.  I would hope that sleeper placement and the how well the POI plays out are all a part of the decision making process.

[mr.devolver]

9 hours ago, unholyjoe said:

no this is not an official word...

 

but seems to me that the best time for such contest would be after we go gold (that way we are done with any changes that could break prefabs ... naming and ids and textures).

 

gonna be nice to see what designs the community can come up with.

Yeah, this is what I was about to add as well. It's a nice idea, but it would be pointless to do something like that now since nothing is really set in stone. Things may change over time and old POIs may not be compatible anymore. I can't imagine that the developers of say 50 people would have time to fix hundreds of player made POIs just because they won the competition and were added to the game. This would be best done once the game is really finished in the way that nothing that could break any POI would change in the future.

[Tehnomaag]

There already is compopack. Which people can use if they so desire. It is already kinda moderated to some degree by few people in the community, although there still is some "troll" POI's in there. For example, floor full of metal spikes under the floor that falls in when you step on it which is painted to look like normal breaking floor (not the usual, this will break, looking floor some vanilla POI's have). 

Problem, to some degree, with this proposal is that it takes time to go over submitted POI's, test them, clean up problematic bits, etc etc - at which point the devs might as well do the POI themselves and get it just right for their vision of the game balance. Some custom POI's are very liberal with the loot boxes, some are very stingy but rig up the "loot room" to be outright death trap. Some custom POI designers have trollish attitudes using nasty traps and auto-agro sleeper volumes that cover entire floor of the buildings, etc. 

[geengaween]

We won't need the devs to officially implement player made prefabs once the steam workshop is integrated. You'll just be able to browse through the most highly praised prefabs and download a couple hundred to add to your random gen list.

[Liesel Weppen]

3 hours ago, geengaween said:

We won't need the devs to officially implement player made prefabs once the steam workshop is integrated. You'll just be able to browse through the most highly praised prefabs and download a couple hundred to add to your random gen list.

That is a point i hate about the steam workshop. It completely lacks the capability of mod packs. Picking mods like in steam workshop is fine for mods like darkness falls, but especially for POIs i don't want to pick each single one, i don't want to choose them, i don't know what there might be in the forehand.

Sure someone can put a "compopack" there also, but then it's still the same as it is now.

 

And imho the vanilla game should still have lots variations of POIs. Moddable games are nice, but i don't like these "build your own game out of thousands of mods before you can play" games.

[geengaween]

1 hour ago, Liesel Weppen said:

That is a point i hate about the steam workshop. It completely lacks the capability of mod packs.

No it has packs, anyone can create a mod pack

[Tehnomaag]

There absolutely are "mod packs" in steam workshop - I remember I have used some collections for RimWorld, for example, which contain a number of separate mods that are moderated to work well enough together. 

 

I'd imagine that once the steam workshop integration is there there would be a steam version of Compopack distributed there soon thereafter containing some community moderated list of unofficial POI designs. 

[Liesel Weppen]

8 minutes ago, Tehnomaag said:

There absolutely are "mod packs" in steam workshop - I remember I have used some collections for RimWorld

I've used modpacks for rimworld alot from its forums, before it started using steam workshop. However, if there are mod packs on the workshop i haven't found them.

[Tehnomaag]

1 hour ago, Liesel Weppen said:

I've used modpacks for rimworld alot from its forums, before it started using steam workshop. However, if there are mod packs on the workshop i haven't found them.

Been a while since I have been playing RimWorld. But as far as I remember, the steam workshop modpacks are not formatted as a collection of many smaller separate mods, like they usually are but tend to be all-in-one solutions. So if you download, for example, expanded prosthetics and organs or hospitality you get the whole package, not the modlets adding individual bits and pieces. And then there is, supposedly, a possibility of a curated list of these larger mods which are known to play along well  from which one can pick and choose. 

 

Returning to the 7d2d, this could mean, for example, that  Compopack comes as all-in-one collection of new prefabs, not as a collection of 300+ individual POI adding small mods which it really is. While it is not impossible that some creators might share their POI's as standalone addons as well. 

Obviously not everything in workshop is compatible with each other, similarly like it is not wise to install, say, Ravenhearst and Darkeness Falls simultaneously.

[Liesel Weppen]

21 minutes ago, Tehnomaag said:

Returning to the 7d2d, this could mean, for example, that  Compopack comes as all-in-one collection of new prefabs, not as a collection of 300+ individual POI adding small mods which it really is. While it is not impossible that some creators might share their POI's as standalone addons as well. 

Yep, and that is the problem.
Then it is not a mod pack, but a new stand-alone mod, even tough it is just compiled out of other mods.

And then i might get a problem, if i combine two different compo"packs" that may contain the same POIs or even different development states of same POIs and and and. Or if a bug in one single POI becomes fixed, i won't get the update as long as the pack-provider does not update his whole package...

A Modpack, if you use a system like steam workshop anyway, should just a be a linked list to every small mod included, not a "copy" of that mod.

 

So once i saw people can share a list of mods they use. Since this in theory are "modpacks", there was no option to say to steam workshop "use exactly this" or "install all of them (additionally)".

 

Of course in many cases steam workshop is fine, but there is still a lot more optimization potential