This is some thoughts about how to design a campaign.

First of all you need to decide if its a storyline driven or mission content driven. What it means is that if you have really good storyline, you can manage with slim mission content (however it is at the end first person shooter which you cant forget) or if you lack storyline elements you need to beef up the mission content to the maximum.

Storyline Driven

You have intensive characters which player familiarizes and attaches himself, there is alot of cutscenes which make movie kind of atmosphere and tells the story. This sort of campaign can be small like 5-10 missions or so.

Mission Content Driven

If the storyline is slim, there is maybe no characters to recognize, cutscenes are just something random or similar non interesting, then you concentrate on the mission content gameplay for example 50 missions so the player really feels like doing hard work to complete the campaign. The PMC campaigns (except few) are content driven, like in PMC Fury we have over 200 (yes, twohundred) missions where you painstakingly go through the BIS islands with a precision to cover all the landmass available, the cutscenes in this campaign were poor if not totally worthless but the missions then balanced the whole thing. At the same time the mission content can include tight team saving (saveStatus) and/or weapon saving (weaponPool) which also brings the content level up a notch.

Of course who's to say that you cant have storyline driven campaign of 200 missions with team and weapon save, I just havent seen one yet ;)

Campaign description.ext

When you have decided what sort of campaign you want to have, you must make absolute sure that the campaign description.ext (not the mission!) works perfectly, this can be easily tested with the endmission cheat. Just start your campaign and after the briefing when you are ingame, hit endmission cheat and you get to see next mission, or you end up with error that your description.ext is broken. It is essential that this campaign backbone is working before you release your campaign.

Triggers

Make sure your mission triggers work, since you do a campaign which is many missions (no, I'm not talking about 2 mission campaign) you should create one set of triggers which you confirm carefully that they work and only then you start to use them in the campaign on all of its missions. Sure some missions require different type of triggers, but same applies here, you must check the triggers in easier conditions than just dropping them into real missions with hundreds of enemies and whatnot.

Music

Put all music files into the campaign root under its description.ext so they are available on all missions, this way you can have many tracks on all missions with only one sound file download per track. It is stupid to duplicate same music track for two or more missions on their individual mission\music\ dirs.

• Do not put mission.sqm into the campaign root dir, it does not belong there
• Clean out unused files from all dirs
• Make use of root\Scripts\ directory for all your scripts

This text is work in progress, more to come, stay tuned…