[MUD-Dev] Emminent Wisdom

[shannona at skotos.net]

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Original message: http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/2002Q1/msg00706.php

On Mon, 25 Mar 2002 23:21:21 -0800 (PST)
Mike Povoski <ixion at guardianwall.com> wrote:

> Well, a "handful" would constitute a team in this case, wouldn't
> it?  and Skotos did have someone building "the tools to pull this
> off", right?  It is no wonder then that Castle Marrach launched
> successfully.  I would guess that the development of Castle
> Marrach followed the four bullet points above quite well.
 
> I'm curious as to what made Skotos think Joe Admin could build a
> game _without_ a team, a coder, a community, and a time
> commitment.

Well, we always knew there was a time commitment, we clearly just
didn't communicate the extent of it well enough to our first set of
developers, some of whom came from tabletop design and fiction
writing backgrounds.

As for the rest: we expected people to make smaller games than they
wanted to, and we expected them to make simpler (more social-based)
games than they planned to. Our development system allows for good,
simple entry of text to describe rooms and objects. A single
developer could easily create several dozen rooms and start planning
out plots with several months of work. But, that wasn't what the
initial developers *wanted* to do, hence the problems.

> On a related note, if I may be so bold as to offer some advice of
> my own to anyone running a business: if you want your employees
> (or consultants, or "external developers", or whatever you want to
> call them) to be productive, pay them.

We're not looking for employees. We're looking to give people the
ability to create games because they *want* to create games. The
only reason that we're selective in our process of finding "external
developers" is because we can only support a limited number at a
time--so we pick the people most likely to develop games that the
community will enjoy.

We also offer royalties once the game actually goes live.

Shannon Appelcline
Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities
http://www.skotos.net/articles/TTnT.shtml

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