Typing this in my phone in the car, so apologies for anything that ends up autocorrected which I don't catch.
Tl;dr- I make a lot of random lists, had plans, started wanting a CW mod and chose it over something else when I had 10 months free and was gonna do it alone, but rest of the team jumped on board. Even they didn't know I was serious, but some of them who've known me longer probably guessed.
There's a lot that went towards this. When we killed the mod as a whole (ICW and FotR) off in 2010 and brought it back, we'd only intended to work for the summer, get something out for ICW since that's the release we'd actually been working on and call it done. Most of us, myself included, were about to start university and thought we'd be too busy to continue after that.
When we released 1.0, we all hated it. After that, we decided to stick around and fix it up, since, for me at least, University didn't end up being as busy as I thought it would be. However, since our goal was to fix it up and there was an abundance of Clone Wars mods, we never saw a point to reviving FotR. We also didn't have the resources to work on both at once. When people asked about it, we always just said we hate the Clone Wars, when the reality was closer to us hating a lot of the Clone Wars fanboys.
Fast forward to 2.2, where we've felt actually good about the state of ICW, and we've got a solid base to work off of. As the team knows, I have a thing for lists. We have a bunch of different progress tracking lists on a Google Sheets thing where we organize everything. In about October-ish, I was reading EGW which covers basically everything, seeing what was in there that we needed to take into consideration for ICW. I didn't have access to my main work computer, just my laptop. So, that day I just made a ton of hypothetical unit lists for different eras and factions, FotR-related ones included, not intending to do anything with them- in my mind, there was still RaW and The Clone Wars and a bunch of other mods around if people really wanted that.
When I did that, I was one or two episodes into my RaW playthrough on Corey Loses, so I didn't have much of an opinion on it yet. I'd never played it before, but z3r0x had always told me their goal was more of a reskin of EaW, and that didn't appeal to me as much, the more I played through it. I'm not saying.its not a good mod, but I started thinking of what we'd have done differently. A couple months later, I started playing the other major Clone Wars mod for my channel as well, and honestly, while there's some good stuff in there, I found it to be kind of a mixed bag and we'll leave it at that. By this point, I knew I wanted to play a CW mod, but nothing out there was quite to my taste, and I had all these hypothetical plans for FotR, which I kept thinking about.
As some of you may know, my mom was going through chemo last year, and this year she was told it was terminal, so I left my apartment to stay with my parents for a bit. My lease is until October, so I still have it (I'm actually on the way back from.it while writing). Since I didn't need a car where I lived and my parents live pretty far from anything, I decided to live off my savings plus my income from Corey Loses until October, then I'd make a decision on what to do from there. That basically meant YouTube became a full time job, and the more modding I did, the better off that would be, too. Plus there's nothing better for me to do most of the day here and it's a good distraction. So, if i ended up in a position where I could continue doing YouTube full time for at least a few years and grow it into something, then great- even just the time I save on travelling to and from a separate workplace, that's almost two hours a day I can devote to modding, let alone the extra exposure for the mods which can attract more talent for the team. If not, I'd scale back the plans a bit.
So, with this extra time to devote to modding, I started making more concrete plans. I hadn't made a full decision yet, but I decided it would be funny to make a fake, half-assed trailer for FotR for April Fools. I hadn't made a final decision yet, but I had decided I'd just do it alone and not impose it on the rest of the team unless they volunteered later which many of them did, since while I had that extra time.to devote, I couldn't speak for them, and I doubted that would be interested. We were going to post the trailer, have fun watching the reaction, and leave it at that, whichever way it went. We'd either have an announcement people wanted later, or we'd leave it be and no harm, no foul. I'd started collecting assets by them, but was still on the fence. I then decided I'd go ahead with it if I did it in a modular way, so we could do a basic release, and then expand it if I were still YouTube/modding full time.
This idea that we had all the assets and therefore may as well just do it isn't quite as big a factor as people think. Yes, it helped make the decision and we may not have decided this without that factor, but a lot more needs to be done than anyone seems to be taking into account even for a simple first release. There was another thing I'd thought about doing instead where that wasn't a factor at all.
Topic: Why Bring the Mod Back? (Read 6848 times)