My experience with Amnesia

[DanielRand47]

Greetings fellow modders, testers, and those of you who are here because Amnesia is awesome! I have had a lot on my mind lately regarding my experience with Amnesia and the community and thought I would share with you all my thoughts/experience. (Major text wall below.)

When I First Joined.
I first joined the Amnesia modding community back in March of 2012. I was ambitious and eager to get into playing the actual game and then creating my very own content. The game was quite an enjoyable experience. Lights off, sound up, and constantly looking around each corner. After completion, I then began working on my very first mod called "Castle of the Living Dead". It was going to be one of three parts, but I never started the other two.

First Custom Story
Before beginning development I created a poll asking the community what the title should be. The choices where either "Brute Force" or "Castle of the Living Dead". After a week of voting the title was set. I then began development. The mod consisted of four maps. All of which where very small and had minimal events. The community proved very helpful when I needed advice or technical support. After two weeks it was finished. I was quite proud of my accomplishment, that I went on and created my second mod. "Escape From Razgul Prison".

Second Custom Story
This mod had a demo that had two maps in it. During development I became even more familiar with scripting and creating intros and a more compelling story. (No idea what the story was now.) Events became more complex and so did the level design. However, I grew tired of creating a solo project and wanted to work in a team. Let's just say that I was very eager to manage a team and create a really ambitious project.

Third Custom Story (First Potential Full Conversion)
On a nice cool evening during the late month of September, I was sitting in my dorm room (I attended a boarding school during my High School years.) and suddenly conceived the idea for my next mod. It would be called "Mansion of Doom". Planning began right away. My inspiration was from Shadow Hearts. There is a section where you go to London and visit an orphanage that is managed by a man named Jack. An orphanage was going to be the primary area for the player.

When planning started, I brainstormed names for a development studio. I had several, but settled on "Gearsoft Studios". I created a basic Facebook page and Moddb page as well. I then started to send out applications for level designers, scripters, testers, voice actors, and composers. While waiting for replies, I crafted a draft of the story and characters, and some starting lines for them.

Once the hiring process was finished, I had a roughly 13-14 members (myself included) who would embark on creating the next best mod for Amnesia. It would rival Tenebris Lake. Production started out well, though coordinating meetings and delegating work evenly was harder than expected given that my team was a multinational team, and time zones are a pain. After about six months of development, things started to get tense with some members. In house competition was starting to be a thing and some of my voice actors and level designers were getting tired of working on a project that was not yet complete. (It was planned to be a three chapter mod. Chapter two was already in progress at the time.) In the end about half of the team left and I ended up having to shut it down. I had made a major promise to the community by promising all these new things, and failed to deliver on them.

Redemption
Shutting down "Mansion of Doom" or "The Sixth Gateway" was hard and painful, but for the best. I took some time off and eventually got back into modding. I set out to create a new mod called "Pandemonium: Portrait of Despair". It also had a good story, but was never released. I even tried to revive it later, but never released it.

After that failure, I decided to remake my very first cs. I did a complete overhaul on the maps and some of the events as well. The overall premise was the same. This mod was released. Upon release I felt accomplished again and I had delivered on a promise. So, I went ahead and started a new mod. "Triad".

Triad
For those of you who have been around awhile are probably familiar with this mod and what happened to it. Anyways, I wanted to create a mod that would make up for the failure that "Mansion of Doom" was, and wanted it to be more puzzle based. So as before I announced on the forums that I was looking for developers to help out with my next ambitious project. I recruited the help of: Karba, Spelos, PythonBlue, PeterP, and others. It was going to be amazing!! However, it was short lived. There was conflict and a lot of disagreement about design choices. Ultimately it was shutdown as well. Then revived and cancelled again. The community was given a promise and I failed yet again to deliver. So I left the community.

Conclusion
(If you've made it this far.) Basically my point is this. (Newbies especially) It's one thing to have grand ambitious ideas, but if you do, be sure to deliver on them. Do not come here thinking that you will create the next Tenebris Lake or White Nights and do so with a large team and have minimal to zero experience. Not saying you can't create the next best thing, but be reasonable and don't make promises you can not keep. It took me a very long time to realize that. Also don't try to recruit a team by simply saying you have an idea, because everyone has an idea. Show images that you actually have something in the works and a story to go along with it. Have a small team of no more than three or four. Be patient and know that it may take longer than a year to develop. Be reasonable and realize that your team members are doing this as a hobby and not as a job. Do not over work them or hold them to high expectations. Meaning do not run it as a corporation, because it isn't. This will cause your team to break very quickly. I speak from experience.

Finally I would like to apologize to the community for all the empty promises that I made and never delivered on. I realize some people were probably hurt by it and it did affect my reputation whether I knew it or not. A lot of trust was probably broken as well. So again, I apologize to everyone here.

If you all have something you would like to share, feel free.