Schlock on 2/1/2019 at 22:35
Quote Posted by Murderer's thumb
Schlock, how did you plan out your submission, what problems did you encounter and how did you solve them?
Unfortunately I don't have much advice because my own mission was not very meticulously planned out. I mostly just tried to mimic what worked in missions like Lord Bafford's Manor, and the only other guidelines I kept in mind were that I wanted to create a more or less asymmetrical manor layout, and that I wanted to avoid long hallways lined with doors (a pattern that I find repetitive and boring in other missions). As far as actually designing the mission layout, I started by building the mansion interior room-by-room without thinking far ahead about what the complete layout would look like, which worked but made for slow progress.
Most of the problems I encountered were small technical ones which I won't get into the details of. I did originally plan for a more involved storyline, featuring a scripted sequence and a much larger city area surrounding the manor. I quickly realized that I wouldn't be able to produce these by the contest deadline (or before I burnt out). So rather than solving that problem, I sidestepped it entirely by simply cutting those parts out from my plans and focused on the meat of the mission (the manor).
john9818a on 5/1/2019 at 21:22
Those pictures look to have pretty simple architecture so why copy them? I know some people have made decent missions in a short amount of time, but good missions take months if not a year or so to really produce and polish. Personally with my missions I could never come up with most of any one of them in a few weeks, but rather over time my building sometimes purposely and sometimes incidental spawns new ideas, and I would be too stressed to try to dish out a competition worth mission at the last minute while knowing that most of the other contestants probably used the entire build time to their advantage. I just downloaded this mission and I have yet to see what it is like. :)
Haplo on 6/1/2019 at 00:48
On the subject of planning, while it is good, it is not essential. My own contest submission "Darkness Walk With Us!" was 100% improvised on the spot. No planning beforehand whatsoever. I just opened DromEd and built what I felt like at that moment.
If you do plan before starting to build, make sure you don't fall victim to "analysis paralysis".
Murderer’s thumb on 7/1/2019 at 07:21
Schlock, thanks anyway for your response.
Haplo, what do you mean with 'analysis paralysis'?
Haplo on 7/1/2019 at 09:47
Quote Posted by Murderer's thumb
Haplo, what do you mean with 'analysis paralysis'?
From Wikipedia: Analysis paralysis describes a moment where over-analyzing or over-thinking a situation can cause it to become 'paralyzed', meaning that no action was taken therefore a solution is not reached.
<Username> on 19/12/2020 at 06:56
For what it's worth, I think this is one of the most memorable Thief fan missions. It went down in infamy. Murderer's thumb's apology is a fascinating lesson in how overambition can set you up for disaster. Creating missons is hard. There is no example that illustrates this better than the story behind Station of Station.
DarkMax recognizing where the multibrushes were lifted from was pretty epic by the way. This is one of my favorite threads on these forums.
Finished the mission today on Normal in 22 minutes with no hints.