is modding worth it?

[FeMaiden]

There aren't any points in Artifact of Might (or Lost Halls of the Drinn, for that matter) where you're required to get hit. It does lock you in rooms fairly often to make gameplay faster (so that you can't kite every monster back to a safer place) but the party is always given room to move around. Of course, if they sit in one place or make bad moves, they can get cornered, but that's intentional; otherwise they'd never be able to die!
The Mold Colony, Ratling Raiders, and Nine Rangers fights favour high damage output and constant movement, whereas the Fallen Champion and Guardians of Fir fights are more about precise dodging and attacks. Ossuary of the Northerners and Chamber of the Inquisitor are a mixture of both (these two are extremely similar actually...).

I beat the the nine rangers without too much trouble...i did die once because i was tired and not paying attentions, I did have the foresight to save just before the room.

the mold colony...the instrant i entered the room there was no room tomove at all, there was a wall in front of me and 2 adult herders right there in a pincer attack and every time i killed one another one moved into it's place.
I noticed that you did put a warning that i might not be strong enough yet, so i decided not to try again and figured i would come back to it later.
I'm gonna try to beat this mod, but i started another, smaller project of my own.

I was so overhwlemed by my epic 32 dungeon, I decided to chalk it up as a learning experience, i have a lot of scripts I wrote in there i can use as reference.
I'm making a smaller mod with only a handful of overworld maps linking the player to a more classic multilevel dungeon.

I also have another small mod thats based more around survival horror and atmospgeric storytelling.

I think if I can just pick a project and finish it, I'll feel a lot better about myself.

[Komag]

I worked pretty much "full time" for about 6 months making Master Quest, well over 1000 hours. If hardly anyone played it I would have been sorely disappointed. Fortunately it proved very popular with players and reviewers, so that was gratifying for me personally.

I do also enjoy the programming part, finding a creative solution to some problem and feeling smart in the process. But I wouldn't go through all the work just for that.

[FeMaiden]

I worked pretty much "full time" for about 6 months making Master Quest, well over 1000 hours. If hardly anyone played it I would have been sorely disappointed. Fortunately it proved very popular with players and reviewers, so that was gratifying for me personally.

I do also enjoy the programming part, finding a creative solution to some problem and feeling smart in the process. But I wouldn't go through all the work just for that.

lol, I do feel like the programming part is kind of a puzzle in and of itself. trying to make your script do what you want it to do...that can sometimes be just as challenging as any puzzle in the dungeon.

[Halluinoid]

you can go mad on modding

sometimes a modder has to pause and check out what other modders are doing

Download a random dungeon that someone else published, it could be terrible - it could be fair, who knows, but give it a go! that's what I did this morning

after continuous modding of LOG dungeons since 2013 finally I thought "yeah I'll try someon else's!"

[AndakRainor]

it's inspired by the horror movie "The Cube" and it *will* feature 1 dungeon level with 125 rooms stacked in a 5x5x5 pattern, full of traps and assorted nasties.
there are references to the cube movie and other horror films such as cabin in the woods and friday the 13th
but i took a break from it as it required me to stack bridge panels on EVERY square, 6 times (once for each elevation). and then I am stacking castle gratings on the squares in between to create the "walls" of the rooms. there are literally thousands of objects packed into this 1 map level

that's not gonna create performance issues will it? do I have too much going on?

the player will need to find a way to escape the cube and then will be asked one final question...

if this idea has already been done, then let me know and i won't steal someone else's idea.

placing all the squares only took a few hours but it was incredibly tedious.

I got annoyed and went back to my original mod because with the height differences, the doors were not opening correctly. I think I figured out the problem.
you can not have a door above another door at a different hieght. because opening one "moves" it up, which in turn moves the doors above and below it. maybe the problem is
because i'm using castle portcullises for the doors. perhaps I should try a door that opens sideways. or I could move the portcullises on each height of the cube to be in a different section of wall, there's just enough space to do that, but...it will take more time lol


p.s.

if someone else likes my cube dungeon idea described above and wants to steal it...go right ahead. if you want to do this, then have at it lol.

Oh I just discover this thread tonight
I had the same idea for the mod I am working on currently!!! I have a dungeon with a hyper-cube of 4x4x4x4 rooms. It was a lot of work I must admit, and to get it done I scripted a LOT! all my rooms, doors and connections in between are spawned by custom "script" objects. Even the light color of each room is calculated with the coordinates of the room
Only the specific traps or items in each room are manually placed in the editor. So each room is resumed to just 1 object in the editor, I just add to copy/paste this object on 4 columns, 4 lines, at 4 elevations in 4 different levels (4 levels to simulate the fourth dimension).

I made custom assets so the floor, walls and ceiling all look the same as in the movies, and even sliding panels to replace doors (with no gate node in the model, this uses obstacles instead). I thought it would be a great easter egg for a tile-based game

I didn't realized it would be so much work! Now it is done, and I can say that it is not especially heavy on performance. It has lots of occlusion as in a "normal" dungeon map, so it is still lighter than outdoor maps! But it takes a lot more memory than a one floor only map, of course. In my case it uses about 4 times the memory of a classic dungeon map, as it spawns things from elevation -7 to +7. By the way, I was wondering how you managed to stack 5 rooms with only 15 different elevations? My cube rooms are 3x3x3 rooms and are separated by 1 tile "passages" so 3x4 + 3 = 15. Did you just stick 3x3x3 rooms next to each other, with thin platforms and walls?

[Azel]

Some of the best modding experiences come from games like Neverwinter Nights 2 and Elder Scrolls. That one famous modder, Alexander Velicky, spent 2000 hours making one of the best mods for Skyrim, and then he got a job offer at Bungie (the dudes who make the Halo Franchise). As for NWN 2, the game itself turned out a bit terrible but thanks to the work of Modders it became a top-rated RPG experience.

Modding is worth it if you go in with the right intentions, which transaltes to: providing the best experience possible for other people to enjoy.

I think that the Grimrock Mod Kit is a great way to get a beginners introduction in to Modding. If you can create something that people can enjoy with this simple tool, then you might be ready to move on to bigger and better things. But if you're just going to use Modding as a way to extend your ego, chastise others, show-off, portray a superiority complex, etc, then you will likely have a short-lived reward that will make very little positive impact in the overall gaming community. Some people like that though lol

I recently acquired an Oculus Rift and I plan to start making my very first virtual reality Dungeon-Crawler for Crystal Rift ( http://www.crystalrift.com ) which has it's own Editor. Thanks to the fun I had modding Grimrock 2, I feel confident going one step further with VR.

[Halluinoid]

yeah one step further is VR alright, I quite agree, LOG3 should be VR I think

but one thing back here in non-VR land I am still disappointed with is "EXTRAS"

I still have the same LOG2 I had when it came out, I see the MOD forum with two ASSETT PACK threads as stickies ?? but when I download them ? what? to me there is a big lack of help to get the Assetts into the original LOG2 editor, it doesn't "happen automatically" but having said that - the original LOG2 editor comes with a lot of cool stuff anyway - plenty to make many many mods

yes modding is worth it, if you get just one Endorsement (Nexus) somebody somewhere has played your mod and thought it good enough to make the effort to come back and give you credit

[zimberzimber]

If you're referring to the stickies asset packs, they're the assets you see in game. The files you download there are there just to show people how things work, like examples.

If you're talking about other asset packs - Yeah they don't merge automatically. Usually all you have to do is add a line to your custom dungeons init.lua file. Instructions are usually written on the asset packs page.

[Isaac]

yeah one step further is VR alright, I quite agree, LOG3 should be VR I think

A Grimrock 3 VR title, could easily share [visually] an appearance like Myst III :Exile's style exploration; a 360° mouse-look affair, from within every cell. The big difference being the transitions would be smoothly animated instead of instant, as in Myst3.