Plan for Rhonda Smith

Holy freakolis batman! This is a HUGE project!

When I first got into this, game design I mean, it was because I was tired of the politics on the game server I play on and I wanted one of my own. I had held a position of considerable power where I used to play, and I was certain (because I'm a cocky lil thing) that if I'd had just a bit more I could run that thing like nobodys business. So I started looking into lisencing that game to run on my own server....and looked into the financial details. They were not pretty. The market for that game was shrinking, not growing...I would just be one more pole in a rapidly shrinking pool, and the game had alot of things that really could have been done better, so I, in my infinite arrogance thought. So why not take the money that was going to go into buying that lisence and create my own game? Sure, I was creative enough for that right? I mean, how many games of D&D had I DMed? How many worlds and campaigns had I created out of my own imagination and brought to life for my players? Hell, for years I had run the Abbadon (an RP community and chat room) and done that successfully...my business was turning a good profit now, so I could invest some of that into this game. Hell yeah, I could make the best online RGP known to man!

Or not.

I started reading up on this stuff, game development. The jargon alone was over my head, all my expirience online didn't mean ANYTHING when it came to this. I couldn't program in C++, I could do graphics, sure, but only in 2 dimensions...I was screwed.

Then someone told me 'I told you you couldn't do this' and that got my hackles up. Thanks to a couple of great guys I met here (thank you thank you Shane and Ted!) I -am- doing this...and man is it alot of work.

Someone at GG said 'find a skill, build a skill, turn out something so that the other people on your team can see that you are working too, not just them'. Well, I've looked for a skill, and I'm failing. I still can't program, and I still can't create 3D graphics, but now, because of the right people, I don't have to. My job is to create the world, to create the game and their job is to bring it to life, and we are.

We are still very much building foundations, fleshing out development plans and the like, but it's starting to take shape now. The website is up, and slowly becoming more then a few blank pages with purdy pictures on it, and I feel good about this project.

It is a massive undertaking, bigger even then I thought it would be when I first started, and I thought it would be big, make no mistake. But it is doable.

Over the next while I am going to continue to flesh out the world and the game, the storyline can wait for right now, first we need to get the mechanics sorted out and finalized. Ted is already working on one of our models which makes me immensely happy, and once the basic writeups for the game is done, Shane and I can work out milestones and deadlines. It's coming together, slowly, but it is coming, and more importantly, I'm learning.