October 7th, 2002 Hello everyone, For those of you who know me from Manifest Destiny, hey gang! If you don't know who I am yet, hopefully you will get to know me well in the coming days. I am not shy about expressing my opinions and thoughts on a great variety of subjects, most especially the projects I work on. I hope the collective readers will give me a great deal of debate over the course of this project. It is very often not too late to change my mind on some aspect of the game. One thing that is very different about my style of creation than in most other design houses, you will find, is that I like to let players actively participate in the design process. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you will always have full access (as much as possible) to the latest build, and I will often disclose, in great detail, the current thinking process and trials of whatever aspect is currently being worked on (just ask anyone who follows MD!). This allows players a good deal of freedom to see where the project is going and suggest a multitude of ways it can be improved or changed while it is still in development. On the other hand, this approach is even more susceptible than usual to feature creep, the number one cause of games not being completed. For this reason, I will give you every opportunity to suggest changes to systems in design or in coding, but once they are done, they are done, and generally won't be redesigned (at least not any time soon). This allows progress to continue while maintaining an atmosphere of flexibility. It's a fine line to walk sometimes, and I don't necessarily always get it right, but hopefully, in the end, it all works itself out properly. So far, at least, it seems to have worked pretty well. I want to very briefly go over the sections available on the web site for this project, because it is not particularly obvious what they all are at first glance. The "About" section is going to cover interesting features and aspects of the game. You can think of it as the advertisement section for the game. "State of the Code" is not particularly relevant at this point, but in the future will cover some of the technical points of the code that may affect your play. For instance, if there is a bug that prevents you from completing a particular quest, it may be detailed there. This section, "Letters to the Players", will be more of an article with a slant toward a general overview of the game. Less technical than the previous section, it will cover things like why we are going to make some change and how it will affect play, game-play issues that we, as the developers, are concerned about, or maybe provide a bit of insight into how a particular subsystem works. The section called "Developer's Notes" is simply a rundown of the last publicly released build, and what changed relative to the prior build. These notes are straight off of the list on my desk, only slightly edited (they don't, for instance, include items that you don't care about, like interface changes to the Server code (which you never see) or content spoilers. Just be aware that the list of changes usually is longer than what is reported, but we have published the stuff that will be of interest to you, as the player). The last section "Report a Bug" takes you to our super fancy custom bug filing system. It's too much to go over here, but I think it's pretty self-explanatory once you get there. So that's it, for now. Explore. Check out our forum. Take a look at our other ongoing project (Manifest Destiny). Have fun. We are soon coming to a point where I will be giving out some of the broader details of the game. I haven't done so yet, as we hadn't reached a point where it was a good idea. You might think it's counterproductive to my method of design (player participation), but you have to have a certain level of coding done before starting to get input from the players, and for us that involved having a working Server/Client system in place, which we now do. The nature of the game will soon become obvious from the released code, and at that point I will talk more about my vision of what the game is going to be all about. Your job is to incorporate your vision via public discussion, and between all of us adding a refining the collective ideas, hopefully we can come up with something unique, exciting, and utterly amazing to play. -Ron Back to Top