Insane Difficulty: Scope Creep in Video Game Mods and Hacks - Insane Difficulty

Scope Creep, for those not familiar with the concept, is a project management term that refers to out of control changes or goals within the scope of a work plan.

You might ask yourself; what does a term from the project management world have to do with the mods we create here purely as a hobby?

Good question. The answer is simple: projects that people carry out on their spare time, such as game mods, are usually not restrained by deadlines, project managers, budgets, or similar constraints that lower the risk factor for professional business endeavors. Because of this, scope creep is a huge risk for modding projects.

From the Wikipedia article: Scope creep can be a result of:

• Poor change control
  
• Lack of proper initial identification of what is required to bring about the project objectives
  
• Weak project manager or executive sponsor
  
• Poor communication between parties

Insane Difficulty's modding projects have the advantage of already having a pre-defined goal in place for most games: Increasing the level of challenge for the player and making the gameplay experience more interesting overall. However, even on this site we face the problem of scope creep frequently.

Keep this in mind whenever you are working on a project that seems to have new goals added on a weekly basis, where no matter the amount of work you put in, the deadline never seems to get closer. Scope creep and lack of proper planning could be the thing keeping your project from being enjoyed by a lot of anxious players.

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I agree. This is something that's plagued me in a lot of my projects; thankfully Dragon Trial is, for the moment, not one of them.

Scope Creep, for me personally, usually results in a loss of motivation and spells death for my project.

Talking to Synchysi about it, I'd say we had a pretty good handle on the scope of Brave New World. It was more or less defined when I started rewriting every enemy script in the game and he realized he could hack the special effects bank, and everything we've done since has just been filling in the pieces. We didn't really change maps, graphics, or music, and both of us turned down ideas several times throughout development because we felt them to be beyond the project's scope.

I think when I approached Dancing Mad I wanted to make things simple because I felt like I wanted to keep things as close to vanilla as possible while making the difficulty greater. If I would have stuck to this and just mainly focused on editing stats of monsters, items, and a few chests then this project would have already been done. As I started to learn more about what the scope of what I could do actually was I felt like I wanted to do more for multiple reasons. The first one is that I didn't feel like a project where i just used an editor and pumped up some stats would really feel that original or seem like I was doing alot of work. There is a sense in the modding community for FF6 at least in my opinion that some of the more experienced modders are annoyed with projects that don't make what they feel is a contribution to the community. To elaborate, you seem to get little to no respect unless you either contribute something to the community through a tool or new knowledge or you already have extensive knowledge and use that to make a really extensive hack. That sort of elitist attitude is something I tend to stay away from which I why I post here mostly however I guess part of me wants to be respected in that way for doing something that feels really extensive, complete, and polished.

In the end the project has quite a huge scope but it is not something that is or will ever be abandoned. Put quite simply when I work on this I put hours on end into it and I get burned out pretty quickly. Alot of the time I spend is on self testing because although I want others to test I don't want to release something with errors that prevent people from playing. I am such a perfectionist that it just takes me a really long time to get something where I feel like I want it.

After realizing that I was getting out of hand with the scope of the project I have really tried to reign in what I want to do. My goal is to make a mod that feels like the original but is different from the standpoint of map layouts, treasure locations, NPCs, special events, new locations, etc. If I really focus on it it won't take a terribly long time but nowadays its just hard for me to put alot of focus on it. I have to playthough the entire game to really bugtest because I had to remake everything again due to some compatibility errors. Long story short I have made things now where there is really no chance of future compatibility problems. I have to iron out any little things that I may have forgotten to edit along the way.

The main thing about this post is to say that I agree that scope creep is a real thing but it has not changed the fact that I will get the project done. I have resolved from now on to focus on a project and get it finished before moving on to the next. I have some unfinished LPs that I need to get done as well. Right now I focus on my Dark Souls playthrough and then I will either move on to DM or continue my FF7 HardType playthough.