Tekk, people aren't being mean. It's just that over the last five years we've probably seen a five hundred people announce they are going to make a TC, and, aside from Nova (originally planned as a TC for EVO), I've never seen one of the pre-announced TCs actually be released.
There was a good crop of what would now be called TCs released for original EV. By a good crop, I'm thinking about five or six. There's always a market for TCs based on TV series or films. The Star Wars and Babylon 5 ones were quite popular as downloads. However, as far as I am aware, there was only one TC based on an entirely new universe released for EVO.
Making a TC in the grand sense involves you in all of the following:
A new galaxy
All new planets with descriptions
All new planet graphics and landing graphics
A tweaked interface
Splash screens
All new weapon graphics and some totally different weapons
All new ship graphics and some totally different ships
All new outfit graphics and some totally different outfits
All new governments
All new dudes, pers and fleets
All new set of minor missions (eg, flight training missions)
Enough of a main mission thread to take at least 24 hours to play through
New pilot challenges that haven't been seen before
New twists on the EV game engine to help recover the 'wow' factor
New ranks, legal status, pilot skills, ship names and other hidden strings
New music
New sounds
However, all of that only qualifies you for the words 'Total Conversion'. It doesn't actually mean that your TC will be playable or interesting.
Most people who have tried to produce a TC have failed. However, many people who have had a really strong idea for a plugin have succeeded in making an excellent game - eg, Angels of Vengeance, Eye of Orion, TOPS Mods, Clavius and Beyond, Oreste.
Ultimately the scenario is far more than filling in all the blanks and changing everything that can be changed. It's an entire ethos, with a history of how your universe came to be and a set of tensions and rivalries between planets and governments, and between trading concerns, and with a criminal fringe of some kind. What makes a TC live is when it all comes together so that even the most jaded plugin developer who plays it feels like the outfits and ships really were invented because of the situation in that universe, and the missions really could not have happened any other way and couldn't have happened in any other universe.
This is when the game becomes magic and you forget that there are only xx types of outfits and all outfits have to be variations on them, and that there are only yy types of weapons and zz variables for designing ships.
Even then it might not make a very good game. To make it work you have to play through your entire plot five or six times and carefully balance every mission so that it's achievable within what they player will have at that stage but not so easy that it becomes facile nor so difficult that they either give up or write a cheat.
Then the missions have to have that human quality which makes the player keep on wanting to know what happens next. There has to be a balanced progression, and there have to be payoffs so that the player knows they've really had an adventure to be proud of.
If all that sounds easy, remember that all EV editors ever made are intrinsically buggy - and that includes ResEdit. You'll need to save rows and rows of backups and you may well crash your machine so often that it causes your hard disk to fail. A lot of TCs or big projects have failed because of computer failure.
Then on top of that you need to remember that the graphics you produce for ship #73 are likely to be much more mature and sophisticated than the graphics you did for ship #1. So you'll then want to go back and at least re-render but probably redesign the first ships. The same goes for weapons, landing pics and outfit pics.
Then there's the whole question of beta-testing, debugging and (heaven help us) proof reading. There's nothing to spoil the hypnotic quality of a great plugin like bad spelling or grammar, but tonnes of stuff has been released without a proper proof read. Releasing a plugin which hasn't been thoroughly beta-tested is liable to make you a laughing stock. Someone released a very promising EVO plugin called the Universe Next Door, which was universally ridiculed because it was buggy.
So, don't be discouraged - just be aware that the comments people are making are on the back of a lot of collective experience. If you can achieve your TC in just a single year, then I take my hat off to you - as far as I know, that would be a speed record.
Regards
Martin
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M A R T I N • T U R N E R
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