So, speaking just for me and not for anyone else on the team. This gets a bit more general than just Stellaris, though.
When I say I'm not very into the game, I mean something fairly specific- planning a significant project like that would require knowing a lot more about not just how to play, but, more importantly, what modding actually lets you do in order to actually plan and structure it in the first place. It's not that I'd be unwilling to do that, I've edited some of the files and even exported a model or two, but in terms of a large scale project, right now it's just more than I can commit to. As Revanchist pointed out, we've been pretty consistently saying every release since 1.0 would be the last release of ICW, except for 2.2 where we've said we have plans for at least one more. The key thing about our currently projects, even FotR, is that if it were to become impossible to continue, they're fairly finished projects as far as what's there, we could stop after 1.1 for Ascendancy, 2.2 for ICW, or 1.0 for FotR and there's not these gaping holes, though the "Coming Soon" on the faction select screen for Ascendancy would likely have to be removed... Point being, we've learned to structure our releases a lot better, and work on more self-contained systems. With Ascendancy, we do one version with a new faction, then one version of other features, then repeat. If we had to stop, it wouldn't be obvious that we were in the middle of anything beyond some curiosities in some files that you have to actively seek out. For ICW, we decided to focus ICW largely on the Warlords, which may have had significant popularity among the forum community, but was also about polishing what was there without allowing a scope-creep to make it more unpolished. We have other stuff we plan to do, but it's basically a choice between doing x or y themed release, as opposed to tackling it all at once and trying to incrementally work on everything at once, which could potentially work if it were based on longer term stuff. FotR may never have been released at all yet, but it's being planned from the start around this same principle, and we also have the ICW base to work off of, which simplifies things a lot, even if it's not as much as some people seem to think. As we explained in the announcement post, the first release covers the Clone Wars directly, and then we have plans to expand on that and introduce more, but again, in the event we can't continue, there's still something that can reasonably be called a finished product there. Ultimately, one of the things I've been trying to focus on with Thrawn's Revenge as a whole is shorter, more focused dev cycles for potential future releases.
This is where the problem with another big project comes in, even if we weren't doing three other projects as it is. We're simply not at that point with another game, obviously, since we don't have anything in the first place. We'd have to have at least one or two beta/workup dev cycles (even FotR will sort of have one), and I wouldn't be comfortable having to leave a project like that, which is a significant part of why 1.0
wasn't the end of ICW, another being us having more free time when we started university than we thought we would.
I'm not saying this because I want or intend to stop anytime soon, but it's impossible to know what's going to happen at this point. It's been almost 3 and a half years since the last major ICW release, and it's really not because we've spent the whole time working on it. My last two jobs pretty much took up all of my time, so I didn't have many opportunities to work on the mod, hence our increased focus on the release strategy outlined above. We love doing it, but it doesn't support us. Through a series of stuff I won't go into in the last year and a half culminating this January in me deciding to go stay with my family using the money I'd been saving to go back to school (I'm still paying for my apartment, but I've basically turned it into a free Air BnB for family and friends who wanna stay in that city) until at least October, I have basically that long to work on pretty much just the mods, which is why I felt comfortable even announcing FotR. Luckily, my youtube channel does well enough to supplement my savings so I can sorta make this work without
entirely screwing myself in the long term, it's just not enough to live off of on its own. Once October hits, I'll likely have to head back to Ottawa and find a real job (I had to turn one down while down here with the agency I used to work for, and it's not an easy call to get), which would likely mean work on the mods winds down and we're unable to do more than a few smaller patches for the existing mods. If, on the other hand, the work with the channel along with some other freelance stuff I can do is at a point where it's sustainable, even just to the point where it's still below the equivalent of a 40 hour minimum wage job, I'll likely end my lease, give up my apartment, find a new place down here and do that full time. The benefit there is that, even leaving aside the synergy between making video content and working on mods (it gives us a great platform to advertise the mods especially as I make contact with other youtubers allowing us more room to attract new team members, gives everyone a look into what we do, and the channel gets a good source of content), compared to either of my last two jobs, I'd be saving 1.5-2 hours per day just on transit, let alone all the extra shifts I used to pull because I can't say 'no,' which alone is great for modding time. That's my preferred option, obviously, considering I love doing this and would like to extend that as long as possible, and I'm doing everything I can to make it possible but it's likely unrealistic. It would, however, mean I'd be more than open to committing to another longer-term project.
have you considered asking corey to put together another team to do this? there has to be more modders in this group. put people together and just have Corey "supervise" as in give you broad instructions, and let you make. i would propose to lead this, but i'm hopeless right now, and am to leave in a month for 2 months
Honestly, that would be little more than a random Star Wars mod with the name "Thrawn's Revenge" plastered on it, which isn't what we'd want that to become. It takes a lot more than you'd think to assemble a team large enough to tackle what would need to go into this, and asking a bunch of people to listen to our direction when we're not really putting anything into it doesn't really do much for them, they'd be perfectly capable of implementing their own vision without me breathing down their neck while having basically no idea what I was talking about, which at best culminates 6 months later with an announcement post on why Thrawn's Revenge IV: The Calrissian Chronicles broke away from us and became Star Wars Tales: The Return of Moff Jerjerrod or something. Mod leaders who don't do anything are the worst. Some of us on TR used to also be involved with an EaW project called Ages of Star Wars: Jedi Civil War when EaW first came out. It was started by a guy who then refused to learn how to contribute in any meaningful way other than to tell us what to do, which was often way more than was reasonable. We all just stopped working, and some of the team revived the mod later with pretty much everyone but him.
