Who'd be interested in creating a sci-fi mod for Attila?
Let me first preface this thread by saying it's just a general inquiry. There's no concrete plans yet, but it never hurts to ask. If people see potential here, step two is to start conceptualising.
Alright, so let me quickly tell you who I am. In October last year, I made my writer's debut with a sci-fi novel called Synthesis, to which I intend to release the sequel this year. Around november I started distributing the book to all my friends who were interested, and have since then been experiencing a slow and steady trickle of sales of Amazon. Hardly anything that could be called an income, but that's alright. I was more interested in my novel not being a total flop, and it wasn't. If anything, I couldn't have asked for a better reception in terms of reviews.
The Synthesis IP revolves around two core pillars, the first being a strong philosophical narrative experienced in the small scale through a group of interconnecting POV characters, the second being large scale, all out war. As a result of this, I've had people who finished reading the book tell me that it should be turned into either a Deus Ex-like RPG, or a Total War style RTS. I usually just laugh that off and say that turning the IP into a game is something for the far, far future, should a company be interested in picking it up once I've reached greater audiences. The idea of creating a mod had never at all occurred to me, until now.
So going off feedback from my readers, I'd like to explore the avenue of creating a Total War mod. I think it'd be interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that Total War does not lack for historical mods and has nothing in the science fiction department. The type of combat I depict in my novel would lend itself exceptionally well to the type of gameplay we've come to know and love in the TW series, making me think that if just we'd create the factions, give the game a bit more of a shiny polished future tech look, and adapt the grand campaign map to suit the planet Earth depicted in Synthesis, we'd have something that would actually start to look like a proper adaptation already.
The problem?
I've never before created a mod for anything.
What I'd like to do is assemble a team. People skilled and versed in all the elements of mod creation. I would oversee the project as a lead writer, and would contribute with my own photoshop skills in terms of promo imagery, the creation of unit cards for the mod, and other areas I could assist in. And unlike most mods, there's even a potential element of pay involved. I have a product to sell, after all, and it would be in all our best interests to market it and receive a cut. How much that cut would end up being in absolute numbers, I have no idea. It might be little, it might be a lot. But if anything this mod would raise exposure for the setting, and we'd all stand to profit at least a little bit.
For those interested in seeing what Synthesis is all about, here's the cover: http://imgur.com/OR9haWE
You can read the first 40 pages for free here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...ynthesis-alpha
And here's the Amazon link to read the reviews for yourself: http://www.amazon.com/Synthesis-Alph...ynthesis+alpha
I've been playing TW for a long time and have been a member of this forum since 2008. I've seen firsthand what kind of creativity this community is capable of, so I hope I've sparked your imagination in some way. That said, if this is going to happen then the team is going to be a five star team. I want to work with people who know what they're doing, and who can commit. It took me three years of my life to learn to write in order to deliver a book capable of getting the kind of reception it did, and will want to apply the same thoroughness to this project. However long it takes is how long it takes, so long as we all keep being convinced the project's potential.
Thanks for reading,
Tim.
Absolutely. I'll add this reply to the OP.Originally Posted by Tiberius Crackus
Synthesis is a tale of global war. It takes the traditional trope of a synthetic rebellion and reworks it into something new, because in Synthesis the 'machines', a race known here as ferrans, are not such mindless automatons, and there's a great deal of internal division about whether mankind deserves extinction or a chance at coexistence. Likewise, the humans too are divided over whether the creation of ferrankind is the greatest mistake ever made, or whether they could be worked with for the betterment of all. But, there's a third faction, an extraterrestrial element known only as the Usurpers, that turns out to be the true underlying reason for ferrankind's violent uprising, even if the ferrans themselves do not know it. If the war cannot be decisively concluded in ferrankind's favour before this force makes planetfall, existence itself is put in jeopardy.
If you regard the story through the lens of Total War, you can see how the different factions play out. Whether humans, ferrans, or Usurpers, there'd be a lot of room for the players to choose.
Humanity's divided between:
- The Survival Fleet, an Australian military remnant of the old world.
- The Holdouts of Man, individual factions that work together like old tribes.
- The Alexandrian Empire, a rising nation under the lead of one Howard Alexander, carving out a future for itself in the ruins of Europe and exploiting the power vacuum.
Ferrankind's divided between:
- Elysium, the city built by the Maker, ferrankind's alpha unit, in the Siberian Altai. It is home to the second and third generation of ferrans with an alternate view of the war.
- The Legion, the first generation army under the command of Glass, a global scourge and a nearly unstoppable force of destruction.
- Invidual first-gen warbands, smaller armies left to their own devices until the Legion swoops in and assimilates them.
The Usurpers are divided between:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
As you can see there's a lot of material to populate a world map with, though I would envision something a bit more akin to the Imperator Augustus campaign and less like R2s traditional grand campaign. Lots of room for alliances, agreements, client states, and everything you traditionally know. The technological scarcity of this world also makes for a particularly medieval form of battle. Humans use old, scavenged tech, and depending on the faction fight more or less like a traditional 21st century military. The ferrans see themselves as technology, and thus hardly make use of external tools at all. They fight in melee and wash over their enemies like a metal storm. The Usurpers are a very elemental force, with a lot of strong, heavy units designed to go toe to toe with even the greatest ferran warriors, and smaller more agile creatures that take the fight to the holdouts of humanity.
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