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I love this idea, and I'd love to help out where I can. Might be worth laying out some Milestones the team wants to reach to give the team discrete goals to hit that are a bit more bite size. I know at a few companies I've worked with have had a process that looks like:
Addendum) Document Everything. 20th Anniversaries are great for media and for historical archives, and having a visual story to go along with it makes things great when you revisit this in 10 years. "Man, I was just looking at our work in 2018... we did such cool stuff back then, we should do it again!"
Preproduction:
1) Assign a timeframe, allotting for "Microwave Explosion Time". Expect up to a 50% Time Delay on unpaid mod projects, so if you have 6 Months until you need this to be released, plan to only have 4 months of work-time. Poll for team members and get a listing of their primary skillsets and time availability. Collect your team members into divisions (Art, Sound, Design, Technical, Producers, and Media are pretty common). Setup a discord or some sort of live chat. Forums are not great for real-time teams.
1A) Reach out to former developers, and see if they have some insights into what went into their original level production process. Who knows, some of them might be floating around the forum, or have a killer idea they always wished they could work on. It's been a long time since Dreamworks Interactive was a thing, but reaching out to EA DICE (Who I think is the closest branch to the remnants) and asking if they know who currently is managing the IP, and if the managing agency would want to be part of a community effort as part of the anniversary. Be prepared for a legalese response, but you'd be surprised how often you'll get positive or encouraging emails, especially if they can get good PR out of the deal. A well executed level could land folks jobs, so keep that in mind. Tweet at Minnie Driver and ask if she's record a few lines, who knows?
2) Beat to Beat Sheet. Basically laying out a timeline of what design concepts we want to teach the player, and how we expect them to execute on it. Also, any important narrative bits, what pieces of story we want to communicate. Like any good GDD Node, the sheet is a guide, and it's obsolete the moment it's made, but it lays out to the whole group the base premises.
3) Since this is effectively a mod, If you have access to a Modeler, Sound Tech, Musician, or Texture Artist, maybe write an additional sheet of new models, sounds, texture swaps, or music you need to for certain beats.
4) Run these additions and plans past someone who knows the engine (Technical), and someone who knows project management (Producer), if both sides agree what you've proposed is reasonable in the project timeframe, move on to production.
Production:
1) Whiteboxing. Lay out the general terrain, whitebox everything. Test your puzzles and refine the concepts. Make sure you've properly tutorialized the lessons you want to teach the player.
2) Environmental Population. Start replacing the whitebox zones with environmental art. Start testing these zones to see how they react in-engine to you as you move around, and tweak to keep the framerate somewhat reasonable.
3) Entity Population. Dinosaurs. Make sure to test the challenge you present against the resources available to the player. Anything that seems "Hard" to you after your 100th playtest, will be nearly impossible for new players. Doubly so for the TresCom folks, who have been playing for 2 decades.
4) Start hooking up the narrative systems if any.
Polish:
0) Make sure once you enter this phase, if you have time, you keep a "Weekly Build" of the level. This level needs to be capable of being released at a moment's notice. If people drop off the face of the earth, make sure the file is accessible to anyone so it can get released on-time.
1) Assign Zones to people, and have folks write up "Gripe Sheets" on every part of their zone. These gripes are /intended/ to be highly granular and nit-picky. I once griped on a platformer project "Why is there a random broken clump of dirt in the middle of the tile?", and we discovered a major bug with our render draw order because of it, so do it! Anything annoying, scribble that thing down.
2) Have your producer or team lead go thru the gripe sheets and use 4 color code highlighting to determine what needs fixing.
[Green]: Cosmetic Gripe. Environmental Art Team.
[Blue]: Design Gripe. Design Team.
[Red]: This is not worth our time to fix, or cannot be fixed.
[Black]: Engine Issue or Out of Scope.
3) Let folks work on these issues, and continuously refine your gripe sheets. Cross things out as they are resolved.
4) Update the weekly build every week. (I use Friday in my professional life because it's end of the week, but it might be worth using Sunday Night since this is a mod project).
5) Do it again.
6) Leave a "Credits" Object somewhere in the scene. Something that has everyone's names or usernames on it. "Kiljoy was here" for modders, especially if you want to use it as credit in the future.
Release:
0) Release it. This is hard when you're in the thick of it, you're partway thru a polish cycle but the deadline is here. Just put it down for now, and release it. It's okay to update the file later... just make sure to get it up. Don't let the "We can delay a week" temptation happen. It's evil and kills projects.
1) Post it to the community. Post it to twitter. Post it to your friends, family. Show that sucker off. Put it in your resume. See what kind of traction it gets.
2) Send it to some Let's Players who have an interest, especially if they covered Trespasser in the past.
3) If it's possible to have someone documenting the entire exchange in real-time, and post a screenshot cache, video, or something else to help celebrate the 20th alongside the mod, that is always something really neat to do.
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