I forgot one thing I wanted to mention in the Tier Three post I made a few days ago. Here's one principle to add:
We want to help make your game better. Let us.
That's not just true for text sims. Half Life was a terrific game, but Counterstrike had a huge influence on its longevity. So did Team Fortress. And Unreal Tournament is an outstanding series, but the mod tools really give the game staying power.
Games by independent developers in particular, though, need to take advantage of this free labor and creativity to the greatest degree they can. In essense, it's expanding the development team for free.
Again, Shaun Sullivan did a masterful job of doing this with Pure Sim. He exposed so much of the game's engine via the .xml file that what we could do with the game was basically unlimited. That played a huge role in the growth of Pure Sim as a franchise.
And not to pick on EA (although I'm about to), but they just don't understand this. Look at MVP baseball, for example. A giant modding community sprang up around the game, none of which was supported by EA in any way. Everything in the game had to be unpacked with independently developed tools, and much of what had to be done to mod the game was extremely time consuming. How many people would have gotten involved if EA had actually supported modders? Because make no mistake--the most creative people aren't necessarily the most persistent. If the tools are too difficult to use, there are some brilliant people who just won't get involved.
I worked on player progression in MVP--which sucked ass out of the box--for over a month. I had a test team of over half a dozen people and we simmed over a thousand seasons. We were doing high quality work. There were still some improvements I wanted to make, but I decided to take a break for a few days and actually play the game for once.
Hated the fielding camera angles, though.
So, since EA didn't have a custom fielding camera, I decided to modify one of the existing camera angles, which involved unpacking one of the very complex parameter files and manually modifying about twenty different values in a fifty parameter (at least) camera specification. The only way to do it was to change one value, repack the file, put it back in the game directory, start the game, look at how the camera angle had changed, and go back to step one. Over and over and over again.
All they had to do was add a custom camera feature. Which a ten-year old would be smart enough to include in a design document for a sports game. I should be able to take the position of the custom camera, drag it anywhere I want with the mouse, and that becomes the new custom camera angle. That's an important feature, but EA's design teams are so inbred at this point that entirely logical features don't get included because there just aren't any fresh perspectives on the game.
Six hours later, I still didn't like the camera, and I was done. Period. EA didn't want to make this game easy to enjoy, so why did I care? Well, the answer was--I didn't. EA beat it out of me. And I haven't played the game once since then.
And that was the end of my free labor on player progression--or anything else.
So we want to help you. We do. Don't treat us like the opposition. Please.