Busy Busy Busy
by Donald "Yadot" Harris · 12/22/2008 (11:57 am) · 2 comments
Well I have been pretty quiet on the forums lately. My last few plans where surrounding my teams larger project. Well I am very proud to announce that with the very hard and dedicated work from Dan McCollom we have finally reached the first milestone in design on all 3 areas of the franchise. This is no small achieve as Dan lives in California and Tom and I live in Texas. And our art team lives somewhere in Lithuania. Which leads me to my first tangent (this blog will be filled with plan points of ADD)
Tangent 1: Making sure you have the best team possible will make the likelihood of the MMO you are planning to build as your first project does not fail. If you have a group of people who are as dedicated as you are then your chances are higher to finish a project. One of the problems I had early on when I was trying to get small projects done is that I had the wrong team. They were at different stages in their lives or they had other things set as a life goal they wanted to achieve. No fault on their part... actually the blame is on me for not seeing it sooner. The team I run with today is much more dedicated to gaming and the industry as a whole. This helps me big time because as it stands about 95% of the team communication goes through me and I have to manage all projects and assign task. It is a huge relief when a designer ask me to take something off of my plate because he thinks he could run faster and allow me to move on to other parts of the business. What's even better than that is that I know if I pitch it off to him I will not have to worry about a thing. This is the confidence you need to have in your team to really get something done.... okay now back to the blog....
...And we are now starting to shop our main project around to different publishers. With game design docs in hand I am confidently knock on all the doors in Texas asking for a publishing deal. While I am working on this Tom has been very hard at work on porting one of his smaller titles over to XBL. And I maybe stealing some thunder here but he actually got it to run on his Xbox tonight.... which of course brings me to another tangent...
Tangent 2: In the early attack of my attention span, I made a comment on how you would be building your MMO.... This was an obvious joke at scale and scope.. and general know-how. If you are new to this forum or industry just understand its good to dream but trying to attempt such dreams early on will be disastrous for you and all who are involved. I am lucky enough that my team mate was working on something smaller in scope while we were developing our big IP. Now that I am off shopping this around and dealing with publishers, I can come home and work on something we have a chance at shipping. If you don't understand why people are saying that your scope is to large here is how you fix it. Put the game idea that you have going on hold. Then take your favorite game from the 80's and remove 1 or 2 features from it. That is your new game idea. Even though those games seem simple once you open Torsion and try laying down some Torque script you will get challenged.
... and now back to the blog in progress....
So now the Starlit Sky team is sitting pretty nicely with 2 XBOX Community live arcade projects both using TXB, one big home grown project in the pitching phase, and we are looking at purchasing the exclusive rights to another IP to manage and finish the project. I hope I made it clear that only 3 people are making up the core of this team. We three are extremely busy. If you are on facebook then you probably saw my post about making TXB bend to my will in a 12 hour development shut in with Tom. We didn't finish either of the two games but we did make some great strides and more importantly I learned a vast amount of knowledge (always team up with someone smarter than you in subject, that way you are bound to learn).
Well my system just finish doing some software updates so I think I will end this bit of random thoughts and get back to working on games. I will say one thing however.
Thanks to all the GG staff.
I have never been apart of a company that often reaches outside its 4 walls to work with its customers/fans. I don't know how you guys deal with the people you can't satisfy. As a customer of GG and someone who is trying to get ahead in the industry I have to refrain from jumping in on some good FLAME threads.. my hat is off to the entire staff on the way you guys handle business. I hope that you all have a wonderful holiday and I look forward to spending more of my money with you next year!
Donald Harris
Starlit Sky Games, LLC
www.starlitskygames.com
Tangent 1: Making sure you have the best team possible will make the likelihood of the MMO you are planning to build as your first project does not fail. If you have a group of people who are as dedicated as you are then your chances are higher to finish a project. One of the problems I had early on when I was trying to get small projects done is that I had the wrong team. They were at different stages in their lives or they had other things set as a life goal they wanted to achieve. No fault on their part... actually the blame is on me for not seeing it sooner. The team I run with today is much more dedicated to gaming and the industry as a whole. This helps me big time because as it stands about 95% of the team communication goes through me and I have to manage all projects and assign task. It is a huge relief when a designer ask me to take something off of my plate because he thinks he could run faster and allow me to move on to other parts of the business. What's even better than that is that I know if I pitch it off to him I will not have to worry about a thing. This is the confidence you need to have in your team to really get something done.... okay now back to the blog....
...And we are now starting to shop our main project around to different publishers. With game design docs in hand I am confidently knock on all the doors in Texas asking for a publishing deal. While I am working on this Tom has been very hard at work on porting one of his smaller titles over to XBL. And I maybe stealing some thunder here but he actually got it to run on his Xbox tonight.... which of course brings me to another tangent...
Tangent 2: In the early attack of my attention span, I made a comment on how you would be building your MMO.... This was an obvious joke at scale and scope.. and general know-how. If you are new to this forum or industry just understand its good to dream but trying to attempt such dreams early on will be disastrous for you and all who are involved. I am lucky enough that my team mate was working on something smaller in scope while we were developing our big IP. Now that I am off shopping this around and dealing with publishers, I can come home and work on something we have a chance at shipping. If you don't understand why people are saying that your scope is to large here is how you fix it. Put the game idea that you have going on hold. Then take your favorite game from the 80's and remove 1 or 2 features from it. That is your new game idea. Even though those games seem simple once you open Torsion and try laying down some Torque script you will get challenged.
... and now back to the blog in progress....
So now the Starlit Sky team is sitting pretty nicely with 2 XBOX Community live arcade projects both using TXB, one big home grown project in the pitching phase, and we are looking at purchasing the exclusive rights to another IP to manage and finish the project. I hope I made it clear that only 3 people are making up the core of this team. We three are extremely busy. If you are on facebook then you probably saw my post about making TXB bend to my will in a 12 hour development shut in with Tom. We didn't finish either of the two games but we did make some great strides and more importantly I learned a vast amount of knowledge (always team up with someone smarter than you in subject, that way you are bound to learn).
Well my system just finish doing some software updates so I think I will end this bit of random thoughts and get back to working on games. I will say one thing however.
Thanks to all the GG staff.
I have never been apart of a company that often reaches outside its 4 walls to work with its customers/fans. I don't know how you guys deal with the people you can't satisfy. As a customer of GG and someone who is trying to get ahead in the industry I have to refrain from jumping in on some good FLAME threads.. my hat is off to the entire staff on the way you guys handle business. I hope that you all have a wonderful holiday and I look forward to spending more of my money with you next year!
Donald Harris
Starlit Sky Games, LLC
www.starlitskygames.com
Associate Steve Acaster
[YorkshireRifles.com]