City Assault

The purpose of the map was to work for/with Rad15 and to create him an environment that would allow his Advanced AI to utilise the environment for tactical onslaughts and cover.
Therefore, the map was released alongside his Advanced AI to show best how the AI can work in such suitable environments.

The map features a city environment, which is a change from the usual jungles and beaches of Crysis. The map includes custom buildings, custom city props and cars, custom weapons, a freeroaming city and a simple yet bottlenecking mission, and Advanced AI that force the player to think more tactically about attacking or they will be overwhelmed by assault and flanker AI.

Video:
Created by Marco

Production process:
I was the lead on this project, firstly concept designing the layout and ideas for the gameplay.
Then I was joined by my mappers and we began to map out the city, with me at the forefront modelling all the buildings and additional city props that the engine didnt already have, in a very short amount of time, and directing the others' mapping to my concept ideas.

The original plan was to have a full map with custom models completed in 10 days. The level mapping was completed before this time, but as this was my first full level project, I underestimated how long it would take/how long workers would take to complete the AI navigation, FG, mission setup, debugging and testing, and we therefore did not get the level fully completed within the 10 days. This was unfortunate, but did help in marketing, which will be discussed below.

The layout of the map was done within 7 days of production.
The map was then AI navigated and missions were set up over a couple of weeks. The last week involved play testing and further marketing.

Post-Production:
The mod was released on the 17th September 08, though unfortunately with wip cutscenes. However, the mod still did well, with ~6000 downloads and 1 magazine publication(that we know of).
Work on the mod stopped after this, until 3.5 months later, when we spent a week improving the cutscenes, fixing minor bugs and creating new content as a prefix to the mission. This was released as version 1.2 on 11th January 08, by which time our previous release had already 15000 downloads, and we have been asked to do another magazine feature.

The game received a number of criticism from forum members, that the buildings were too basic and/or too clean/generic in textures. This was my fault, although it was because I was the only one working on building and texturing 12 buildings, and the fact that I managed to do this in 4 days, and working late nights, I do not regret my decision to speed model them, in order to give me more time for modelling props, mapping and managing others.
It was explained in the map that the city was once a utopia that was free of graffiti and crime, hence the clean streets, and overall, since all models were relatively clean, the overall art direction was consistent, and I personally like the overall visual appearance as a whole.
Screenshots of the models I made can be found Here, which show the cleanness of the textures.

Overall, this was the only criticism, and therefore I would happily conclude that the mod was a success in creating a fun, enjoyable, working and unique Crysis mod, especially under the circumstances of the short development time and the lack of branding. As my first full completed project, I learnt much and gained experience in the development process, timing and scheduling, the capabilities of individual team members as well as members working together, problem solving and marketing.

Marketing:
As an online mod, 99% of marketing for new projects is done through posts to forums. For this project, I used Crymod.com and Moddb.com, although screenshots and descriptions of the project did appear on other websites without my agreement.

With the original idea to release the map within 10 days of its start, the idea for the marketing was to constantly be updating a thread on Crymod and Moddb, so that forum members could be updated with the progress everyday, but more importantly be reminded that the mod exists, as the theory was that when mods don’t release any news for some time, people forget about the mod and the mod will eventually lose excitement.
So over the 10 days of daily/bi-daily updates, we did attract a good number of forum members, and members that commented once would comment again the next day. When we went over the 10 days, I thought that people might lose faith in our abilities, but in the long run, I believe that this helped, as it allowed more time for the mod to be advertised on other websites and views from forum members that did not see it within the first 10 days.
As a small mod, I believe that the one month was a good amount of time for advertising and recognition. Had we stretched the development period any longer than that, the updates would have been less frequent, and so there would have been longer periods of time where the page views were non existent. This is evident in the fact that, after a few weeks of our first release, we had no updates or news to post about and so page views dropped considerably. Now that the mod is completed, we will have no more updates, and so it will be inevitable that the mod will eventually fade out.

One marketing ploy that I tried to implement was in-game advertising. The bus stops and other props provided us with space in which to place posters. I wanted other mods to send us their posters, which would inheritably increase their interest in the mod, since they were being advertised in the mod. Whilst we could a sufficient amount of posters from other mod teams, it was sometimes through chasing them up, and it never seemed like other mod teams thought it was a really good idea or got excited by the fact that their posters were being advertised in another game. Therefore, I have deemed this scheme unsuccessful, though it may work better if the game was an AAA game and the mod teams would know that they poster would get seen a lot more if it was in a fully published title.

Lastly, as City Assault did not feature any brand names, the mod did not have the same attention and instant likeability that other branded mods have, including our Lost Dimensions mod that was originally under the name of Lara Croft; which received over 100,000 video views when a very basic video announced the name of the Lara Croft Crysis mod.

In conclusion of the marketing, whilst we stuck to originality and didn’t use a brand name to pull in the fans of that brand, and one scheme of marketing wasn’t as successful as hoped, simply posting updates and ensuring that the screenshots we posted were as visually appealing and striking as possible was sufficient to get a good number of page views and downloads.

Credits:

• Jlim - Mod leader, Marketing, modeller, level designer, FG, voiceovers
• Marco - Lead mapper, Cutscenes, voiceovers
• Badas - Mapper
• Crow - Mapper
• Zygurt - Mapper
• Stevendossett - prop
• Triptucker - Car prop
• Richard_[uk] - dirt textures
• Ror-Shak - SigP226 and H&K UMP

• Rad15 - Advanced AI
• DICY - AI (smart) Navigation and FG
• Nerv3 - FG and Mission setup
• Watbe - FG and AI nav

• 3Ds Max textures
• CGtextures.com
• Turbosquid horse

Related Links:
Chain Mods web: Chain Mods
Version 1 Forum Thread: WIP Levels
Version 1.2 Forum Thread: Finished Levels Page
Crymod download:login for fast download
Moddb page:Moddb City Assault
Moddb download:moddb download + mirrors