A final Window into my world.
I am sharing this to show people a part of the effort I have put into creating World Difficulty. I have worked tirelessly for 2 years. This photo is showing roughly 30% of assets I have created to build what we're up to now. The most astute of you, will notice the file sizes on some of the archives. Every single file for Dragon's Dogma (as you more savvy mod users will already know) has to be edited by hand.
I decided to show these specific ones because these are a large portion of the build/testing archives. Fully compiled versions of enemies, stages, entire versions of the mod with experimental assets or alterations that were never released. Most of this was for my use only, so I could compile and build the absolute best final product for you I possibly could. Each of these archives and the 10's of thousands of files in them each had to be compiled into a mod that was then installed, tested, bug tested, changed (so on, and so forth). It's not quite like Skyrim or other games, each test required me to build a mod that would be equal to a full release version so it could be tested.
If I had to wager a guess, I would have to say over 2,000 work hours or a bit more (Just my own work not play testers) I have worked individually on 200,000 files. Each single file, is an archive of it's own. Inside that archive, you have as little as 20 files, or as many as several hundred. Which means, I have opened 200,000 archives over 2 years, with 20 to several hundred files inside those. Since the launch, I have provided nearly 24 hour technical support all the while continuing to work on this non stop. Still to this day, 2 years later I still provide tech support for all things modding related. It's not the 24 hours it used to be 100% of the time, but almost all times of day there will be someone there to provide tech support, along with me creating custom patches or on the spot bug fixes or file repairs. Even for mods I didn't create.
You might be wondering now, what has caused me to explain all this. I've never gone into any detail on what I've gone through to build this for everyone. Sure, I've proudly exclaimed how many thousands of hours I have put in, but I never shared the true horror that was creating this. I say horror, but I suppose tedium is more appropriate. The first, 7 months I worked on this, I was also working 15+ hours per day. Getting off work at 3 in the morning, and working on this to get it to a point it was releasable. I would only get an hour here or there, and 2 or 3 times per week I would put in 13 work hours, then another 10 hours into this, then work the next day. After those binges I would sleep for 7 hours and do it all again.
One reason I did this was this is one of my favourite games in 2012 when it came out. However they sold it so short, with the lack of a proper hard mode, the pointless NG+ feature, coupled with pretty much the best combat of it's time. Which just made the lack of the former 2 things an absolute travesty. Some of you might not have played it back then, but this game had one of the best communities in gaming for it's time. Through the GameFaqs forums. For years we would talk about all number of things. Chief amongst them? You're playing it. More challenge, more longevity, better AI, stronger enemies, different enemy spawns, hidden bosses, conditional spawns, a real NG+ (when using 2.0) we all wanted things like this so much. I didn't make it for myself obviously. I wanted to make sure this generation of DDDA players got the absolute most they could for the money they paid for the game. Some people think I succeeded, some people find me to be quite the pariah. I'm still not sure why that happens.
The second reason I created this, was my best friend. Originally I started working on World Difficulty when I had time. I was an author and developer anyway, and it's what I enjoyed doing. I was working as much overtime as my body would allow, so I would take care of my closest friend, whom anyone seeing this will know already from the main page. It didn't afford me a lot of time to work on it. However, I still had enough. Those first few hundred hours were actually me testing what I could do, or couldn't do.
Needless to say, it took every ounce of fortitude and software experience I had to actually break through and make anything work. Those first 150 hours? Absolutely fruitless. However, little by little over the months I would make little gains. I was well into the hundreds by the time I finally had a breakthrough. One might think this was a joyous occasion? It wasn't. When I managed that breakthrough and finally understood how the game was engineered (reverse engineered it) I sank into my seat. I learned I could do it, but I also realized I was looking at literally thousands of hours.
With taking care of her, there was no way I could take on something like that. Believe it or not, I was pretty heartbroken over it. Not because I wanted it. It was because I wanted you all to have it. Sincerely, it really made me upset I finally learned how to re-develop the game to be hit with the fact I wouldn't be able to invest the time required. I also knew I couldn't share the project, it's not Skyrim. Working with this is not an easy thing to do. I wouldn't have been able to teach someone. It was leave it, or do something with it.
Yes, I know the front Patreon page is full of piss and vinegar about "impossible" and "challenge accepted" memes. Technically all true. It's omitting much of the middle. Yes, there were forums posts on Reddit and GameFaqs and Steam about the exact work I did being "impossible" when I looked into seeing if anyone had created a "hard mode" or something to that effect. All true.
Fast forward an amount of time I can't recall, and I learned about Patreon for the first time. I'd heard the word, but I didn't know what it was. Speeding through the agonizing decision to create this account after I researched it, I had an epiphany of sorts. I knew if I intended to go into thousands of hours of tedious work on what became WD, I would need to offset the loss of my overtime. I was trying to support two households during this period. That's when I realized, I could put her as the physical financial beneficiary on this account. All money raised, would go directly to her, since I was sending her money anyway: Anything I could earn from this would just be that much less I had to send to her.