Colossal Order’s approach to Cities: Skylines was to support the game’s modding community as much as possible, and fans have responded to that creative freedom by coming up with some amazing creations over on the Steam Workshop.
The game’s brand manager Jakob Munthe has a post up over on MakingGames.biz, where he explains why mod support was so important to its success.
”When we started working on Cities: Skylines,” he explains, ”we knew from the start that modding would have to be an integral part of the product. Cities: Skylines was the first game from Paradox Interactive where we went up against an established AAA-title in a non-niche genre, and we simply lacked the resources to compete in terms of assets and production value.”
With a relatively small development at Colossal Order, the hope was that modders wouldtake on the creation of new assets and other relatively simple additions, while the team were free to concentrate on larger, more wide-ranging new features, like the day/night cycle that’s on the way in first expansion After Dark.
”That smaller teams, especially Indies, should focus on systems ahead of content is of course nothing new, but it is maybe not commonly understood how much a file sharing platform such as Steam Workshop can help a game to overcome limitations in content,” Munthe continues. ”Games such as city builders are based on the people’s love to create, and if you give them good tools and good possibilities to share even a fairly small user base will quickly start creating assets. For a game with a large active community, the sky is the limit, often generating full new game experiences.”
The full post is well worth a read, covers some interesting topics - Munthe believes that the much-maligned concept of paid mods is something that will eventually become the norm: ”When hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people use your content it is only fair that some sort revenue flows to you, the modder – the creator,” he writes.
If you haven’t been dipping in to Steam Workshop to enhance Cities: Skylines, you really should check it out. Alternatively, you could wait for expansion pack After Dark to be released on September 24.
