Submission Philosophy

Note from Xxshmeli8xX

This is a more opinionated and disorganized section of the submission kit that talks about some ideas people should be aware of when planning on submitting something.

Making content for In Plain Sight 2 is difficult. It is a unique game and the people working on it are always trying to improve the game for the better. Standards are always rising, and this makes it difficult for newcomers to catch up with said standards. Fear not, however, as you're not alone in your endeavor.

The best way to ensure that your submitted content gets in the game is to get help from anyone willing to help. Talking about its concept early on will help greatly in many ways. Whether it's just a model, just an idea, or a vague sense of how it'll play, other people can help you create these ideas.

When submitting a character... The most important part to get right is how they'll play in-game. If the character isn't fun, people will be less inclined to play them. Fun is a very subjective term, people find different things fun, so getting feedback on what seems fun will be difficult. Not everyone will find your character fun.

For example... As creator of this submission kit, I made Greenhorn. Greenhorn can summon or remove cubic rocks in front of them, up to 10 can be summoned, and they can be pushed around by thieves and cameras. Not a lot of people find Greenhorn fun or useful, but they're still in the game because they're fun for the people who enjoy their playstyle. Greenhorn offers something unique to the game that no other character currently fills. They can build staircases for all thieves to use and build walls to protect thieves. They can fill Bank's vault with rocks and grief people by trapping them in rooms. They can build structures. The idea of a character that can build structures is not a unique idea on its own. Lots of folks have submitted characters that can build. Lets take the basic concept of "Activate your ability to build a wall in front of you" as a thief and point out its flaws so we can make it more fun.

Firstly, it's not fun to activate. You activate it and spawn a wall in front of you with a 30 second cooldown. If there is a system in place to prevent the wall from spawning in walls, if the wall is big enough, it's going to be really difficult to spawn a wall in no matter where you are. If there ISN'T a system in place, then you can trap yourself or other thieves in rooms, which isn't fun.

Secondly, neither thieves nor cameras can do anything about it, which isn't fun for anyone. Thieves can't walk through it and cameras can't zap through it.

Finally, the primary purpose of this ability is going to be instantly placing walls as you're being zapped by a camera. The ability isn't flexible enough to be used for anything else.

There are many ways to solve these issues, and heavily depends on what you want out of the character. I wanted a building thief that was more permanent and less of a "Press E to instantly live" ability, to separate themselves from Cyb0rg, their competitor in this niche. I also wanted a thief that's versatile, capable of building many different kinds of useful structures. My mind instantly turned to Minecraft, and a fighting game character named Kragg. A smaller wall, but you get a lot of them, solves many of the issues with the previous iteration. Smaller parts allows easier placement, and having a lot of them means you can arrange them in any way you want. Smaller parts also means that you can't place one instantly to save yourself, you have to plan ahead to shield yourself (and teammates!) This is why they're 4x4x4 cubes, as a thief is 5 studs tall and cannot perfectly hide behind 1 rock. Having them be physical objects that you can push around also contributes to the sandboxy theme of the character, and mostly prevents rocks from trapping other thieves, which was a big problem.

This is the original version of Greenhorn released, with a 20 second cooldown for rocks. Originally, the rocks couldn't be pushed by cameras, but could be pushed by thieves. This wasn't terribly fun, as thieves could knock over your useful structures rendering them useless for the rest of the round. This wasn't fun for cameras either, as they couldn't do a thing about it. Cameras without explosive shot were most affected by this. And lastly, it wasn't fun for the Greenhorn, as the 20 second cooldown didn't allow you to build cool structures quickly. The cooldown of 20 seconds was intentional to balance out the fact that there was no counterplay for cameras.

All of these issues had to be solved simultaneously. You can't make rocks be pushed by cameras without lowering the cooldown of Mold Earth, otherwise they're useless. You can't lower the cooldown of Mold Earth without having a limit to rocks, otherwise you can fill the map with rocks. If you have a limit to your rocks, you need a way to pick them back up so that you're not without rocks the rest of the round.

With some quality of life improvements, this is the current version of Greenhorn. Are they fun? To some people, yes. Are they perfect with no flaws? Absolutely not. Summoning rocks in front of you is a janky way to summon rocks and makes it difficult to build advanced structures. Needing to run over to your rocks to pick them back up after they're knocked over takes a LOT of time that could be spent doing more fun things, like building or stealing, and becomes a worse problem as the maps get bigger.