Competition in the Community

We understand how hard it can be to stay motivated on a large project for an extended period of time, we feel it a lot too. Everyone here just wants to make great things but it can still take a lot out of you to achieve your goals.

To add to that, there appears to be a somewhat prevalent fear of being overshadowed in the community. Now, we want to say that we think this is something mod creators should try to be less concerned about.

Our reasoning is simple: we think there’s more than enough room here for every mod to be appreciated and there are several reasons we believe this to be the case:

• Infrequent mod releases.
• Mods are short.
• Creative potential.

Infrequent Mod Releases

While there are quite a few campaign mods being made within this community, they are not released every day or even every week. As stated above, these projects are hard work and take a lot of time to make properly so as a result, they are released fairly infrequently. This makes it easy for even a new community member to catch up on all of the community’s content releases.

Mods are Short

Hit & Run is a short game even when you complete all of its missions and get all of its collectibles. Couple this with the fact that most campaign mods released to date only span 1-2 levels and you come up with the simple fact that basically all mods released here, including ours, are short experiences.

This is not meant to downplay the experiences within any mods we or the community have made, since they can still be fantastic. It’s just that mods are generally short-lived regardless of the effort put in. Of course they can incorporate elements such as randomization and difficulty to allow them to last longer for players who choose to replay them; but, this can only go so far.

Creative Potential

Lastly, no two mods are exactly the same. There are many different directions that creators can choose to take their projects, like telling stories with characters that don’t usually get the spotlight or getting creative with the existing mechanics (like the tornado “cars” in SOS). Even if you gave two mod creators the same concept to work with, we imagine they would present fairly different results.

Just a reminder to all community members: Please don't reach out to the developers if they do not seem to want to talk about these things. Some of them do not want to discuss a game they made over 18 years ago.

Our Professionalism

While tools may be usable without as much polish, we’re not really fans of this ideology in regards to releases.

When we are making something for public release, we believe it is in the best interest of everyone who uses our tools that they look nice and feel nice to use. We wouldn’t release a tool that looks like it was made 10 years ago because we don’t consider that acceptable.

Other modding scenes may have tool developers that place less care into usability but we consider it very important and have this in mind from the outset of all of our proper releases.

Our Release Methodology

To start, we’d like to address the air of secrecy that often surrounds the things we’re working on, explain where that comes from and explain why our release methodology is the way it is.

Throughout a good portion of our history, we have had a tendency to announce projects much sooner than is appropriate. While this often came from a place of excitement and wanting to show off our new and exciting ideas, it often meant we announced things before they were planned out very well (or at all).

A couple examples of this behaviour include player character announcements for future Donut Mod updates and concepts for our own original games. This is something we’ve been actively working on getting better at and is a good part of the reason why we’re not so quick to announce things we’re working on and why we prefer to wait until we feel it is an appropriate time to do so.

That said, this does not apply to everything we put out. Many of our releases simply come into existence and then get released within such a short time frame that we couldn’t really build up to their release even if we wanted to.

All that said, I’d like to explain the various types of projects we have to give a better understanding of how we operate. Projects include mods, tools and updates and they fit into into three categories: Short-term Projects, Long-term Projects and Active Projects.

Short-term Projects

Short-term projects generally come together quickly and then release shortly after. This category encompasses most of what we release. A couple of examples would be the recently released Font Creator and RCF Builder tools which went from not existing to released in the span of about two weeks.

With the exception of the initial release of Additional Script Functionality, many of the Mod Launcher’s features are the same way. We currently release major updates every 3 months or so and many of the features in these updates were not considered or developed prior to the major version they were added in (such as the new Lens Flare hack or the vehicle character functions of 1.19).

Long-term Projects

Long-term projects can get announced early on but not see a release for a significant amount of time. This includes things like Donut Mod 4 and the Model Builder. These projects are generally daunting and exceedingly complicated and time consuming to develop.

Considering there is a lot of overlap between the members of our team that create these projects, it’s extremely hard to keep them all moving forward together and generally one takes focus over the others. Right now, our focus is on Donut Mod 4; though, this project also serves as a test bench for the Model Builder as developing the map helps us to learn what features should be prioritized and polished in that project.

Active Projects

Active projects are ones that are developed alongside other projects. This includes things like the Documentation site and the Donut Team website. These projects don’t really interfere or take the spotlight away from the long-term projects and more just chug along beside them.

No Mod Launcher Betas

We had previously mentioned that we were discussing doing beta releases of the Mod Launcher. After several internal discussions, we have decided against doing so.

Our reason for this is quite simple: this entire mod scene centers around a single build of the Mod Launcher that is designed to be fully backwards compatible with the features of every version that came before it. Excluding one case that was unintentional, Lucas has never faltered on his self-described militant stance on backwards compatibility. We agree that this goal is a good thing for mod creators and players alike and fear that beta builds may interfere with it and complicate the modding scene without providing a substantial benefit to the project.

As is, our internal testing build is available to most of our staff members (including some but not yet all community managers and currently excluding our contributors) and we feel this group of people provides sufficient enough pre-release testing while limiting the amount of people we have to keep up-to-date on bleeding edge developments to a manageable amount.

As is the case with any software, issues can still make it past testing; but, when this happens we try our best to be on top of it and get it fixed promptly. Also, due to the modular nature of the Mod Launcher and its hacks, issues often only extend to new features that can be safely ignored until the issues are resolved.

In Development Now

Outside of our long-term projects, there’s not a lot in the pipeline right now.

Of course we’re working on finishing up Donut Mod 4 and plan to have the Model Builder out not long after. We expect both of these to be released by the end of January if things continue going well.

There will also most likely be a minor update for the Mod Launcher prior to Donut Mod’s release and another update to coincide with it (if necessary).

As always, these windows are estimates and may change if we feel we need more time to properly achieve the goals of the projects. While we want to seem more reliable with dates going forward, we still hold quality and the end user experience above all else with our releases.