Speaking as someone who isn't a modder, but who sees some parallels between this and the software world: start small, release quickly, and iterate. Planning everything from the get-go and attempting to have things perfect and complete before anyone can get their hands on it is a recipe to burn yourself out and/or never release anything at all.
There are a lot of projects - not just mods, though some specific examples like that do come to mind - that promise the world and never see the light of day. As the work of an unpaid volunteer, that's not the worst thing in the world; half (or more) of the fun is the creative process itself, and the actual release might be secondary in the end.
If you really want players to try your stuff out, though, getting a quick release into their hands (like a single, barebones NPC, with just a handful of banters but no special items or complex relationships) is a good way to get immediate feedback... and, more importantly, to give yourself a big "I can do this!" confidence boost. And while that first step from work-in-progress to usable mod can be enormously intimidating, as you can already tell, it's an understanding bunch here; there are a lot of warts that mod users are willing to overlook if the first release isn't as fine-tuned as you would like.
Yeah I get the gist, don't worry. I did have a downloable Noa file that I was really close to uploading to this post, was just finishing up some problems with initial recruitment.
My idea was to get things out slowly but I was having a lot of initial trouble with some stuff (vague because I don't wanna bad mouth anyone). So with that in mind, things took a slower start (which did help a lot anyway).
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Thank you so much ;w;
There are a lot of projects - not just mods, though some specific examples like that do come to mind - that promise the world and never see the light of day. As the work of an unpaid volunteer, that's not the worst thing in the world; half (or more) of the fun is the creative process itself, and the actual release might be secondary in the end.
If you really want players to try your stuff out, though, getting a quick release into their hands (like a single, barebones NPC, with just a handful of banters but no special items or complex relationships) is a good way to get immediate feedback... and, more importantly, to give yourself a big "I can do this!" confidence boost. And while that first step from work-in-progress to usable mod can be enormously intimidating, as you can already tell, it's an understanding bunch here; there are a lot of warts that mod users are willing to overlook if the first release isn't as fine-tuned as you would like.
Good luck!
My idea was to get things out slowly but I was having a lot of initial trouble with some stuff (vague because I don't wanna bad mouth anyone). So with that in mind, things took a slower start (which did help a lot anyway).