woo! chat time! so, looks like we've got another rather small turnout today * imbri blaims the weather the same disclaimers as always... respect each other, no opinions better/worse than the others, if you have anecdotal something that want to share (or questions you want raised) but don't feel comfortable sharing for whatever reason, /msg me and I'll put it out there the topic today is a fairly 'boring' one: "keeping it all balanced" :) but it's pretty important to the success of the game, the stamina of the team and the players, and the general enjoyment of everyone involved and hard in practice from the description on UF: At the end of every game, PMs can be heard muttering in a corner about just how consuming the live game was. There’s a reason for this… it is! But, with just a little work, you can get your game and your players to help you find a bit of time for yourself outside of the game world. This comes from creating a solid balance in your game and attracting and developing a well balanced player base. obviously, much of what we've talked about in previous chats (not going at it alone, proper preparation for going live, etc) plays into this so, in some respects, this chat is really a repeat of other things that we've discussed but i think that just solidifies their importance :) and, as steff points out, they're hard in practice but, are they really? is what hard? so, before we go much further, how many of us are live in this chat and how many are just lurking? * Dante is hiding * Matalanifesto waves * imbri waves * imbri looks behind the couch * imbri looks in the closet * Magesteff rubs the sleep out of her eyes * imbri peaks behind the bar * imbri finds no Dante * catherwood returns I just want to say, the Apple Fiji salad from panera bread is really good * Dante hops out of beer cooler and runs away the beer cooler! of course! batdard, thats why the cooler is always empty s/batdard/bastard/ We don't have a magic fridge * imbri grabs a beer from the supersecret stash in the little minifridge and tosses KungeRutta a bass ale * Dante squezes himself into the three foot square yeagertap danke * Matalanifesto needs one of those tardis fridges ok, so are questions/thoughts around here more about what to expect when live or how to better manage things when live? basically, i guess, i'm trying to figure out the various backgrounds and experiences? How about the value of a stable update time? well one first point and second would be good for me. the stable update time is a very solid trick for maintaining work load, definitely can I give an example? sure Orbital Colony didn't really have one we had a plan of what would come out on what days but the "update" time was not really planned - it just happened I would come home from work, catch up on uF, and on the PM forums then answer the e-mails. as such the players saw an "update" time of late evening Eastern, but not because we planned it that way a time schedule of when to release stuff would be good, but you also have to have a plan for what to do if, say, your players immediately solve a puzzle and then are left twiddling their thumbs for a week, because you thought they would never get it for days and because I answered e-mail every day, we had a daily update.... which really got hard to maintain In my games, i deal with 3 different update philosophies the random whenever/whereever the strict regular (say tuesdays and fridays) and the staggered (certain sites/characters/plotlines update on monday, others on tuesdays, others on wednesdays, etc) i find for grassroots teams, getting as specific as a certain time (noon est, for example) is near impossible as a player, a regular update time is nice, but it also eats into the TINAG feel because of the volunteer nature of the games - you also have your regular lives geting in the way *nod* it can, but if you think about it, people are rather structured in their lives depnds on the ingame nature of the update -- for example, the players could "intercept" a regularly scheduled company status report. and you can write that into a game true, but another part of real life is that stuff happens when you least expect it ;) but a human updating their personal blog is hard to justify on a "same day, same time" weekly schedule. well I only have one game to pull from, Wildfire, but in that game, Colin Brennan was updating every day that it may, but that can be written into the update ;) in any event, even if you have "random" updates to the game, they need to be planned ahead of time he actually had a bot that he would "control" since it had some form of AI that they do imo and he'd interact with the players for at least an hour a day people and teams generally work better with a deadline.. if you don't have one, you're likely to justify putting things off LCP's update schedule was not written into the story. It just was. agreed addie! agreed! Addlepated : yea, depends on how disciplined they are I guess another benefit of the regular update schedules, such as 42 uses, is that it creates an "event atmosphere" when players know that something will happen and so they come together and form community There's a quote from a Stephen King book that goes something like - "If you told a housewife that she had to walk 5 miles before she could sit down and have dinner, what do you think she'd do?" "I think she'd be exhausted." "No, I think she would get all of her walking done first thing to get it out of the way." One of the problems we ran into was underestimating how long we were going to leave certain places open... It was very easy, even with a schedule, to get behind with updates i find that it really strengthens the community bonds yeah, it's disheartening to release a major plot point or puzzle and it doesn't get talked about for 24 hours because people aren't around to talk about it steff, on metacortechs, i'd post every week (and again right before every update day) with a list of things that had to be done for that week what exact points needed to be hit and how they were going to be hit Varin did that for us. :) so we knew what had to be done it helped and there just wasn't really the option to not do it ;) *nod* but we had a set end schedule and we knew that if the things didn't get done, we wouldn't be able to end before the holidays (our goal from early on) I might have mentioned this before in the PM Chats, but I also think that teams work much better with _specific_ tasks assigned, not "This needs to be done; will someone look at it?" Addlepated: yes. We ended up with areas we each took on can some updates be written ahead of time, and released by another team member on a later schedule? Cath, sire sure Flynn was our proof reader, and we all made certain that we tested each puzzle/technical thing at least once to make certain it worked cath: with metacortechs, almost all of our updates were written ahead of time (even if that time was only 30 minutes) because we didn't all have control over every site if you have a PM team member out of town or out of commission for some reason, you kinda have to do it that way Catherwood, we had somethings set to go out at specific times - Corporate web site updates for example, much of the stuff done on the research journal was written by clay and andy, they'd send it to me to put on the site that we had done and ready for anyone to upload you can also have a PM forum where you post assignments and work or if one of the pms had some event in their real life, they'd just upload the sites to uploaded to our forum and then someone else would take responsibility for them We also would pre-write most of the blog entries for characters so we could double check for spellings, continuity etc. * AmberJoy loved one blog in particular. ;) in WiBS, Tucker's blog updates were very specific as to what happened in the past week, up to the last minute and including specific player names and actions -- that's gotta be harder to plan ahead unless there is a template, fill in the blanks for most of the corporate training games, all of my content is written 3 days in advance of going live Cather that is what adds to the TINAG feel those fresh bits that get added at the last minute you can still have a schedule of what you plan to mention in the week's blog update writing it up doesn't take long if you have an outline Addie *nod* notes, take copious notes :) i don't know that those fresh bits are getting added at the last second... i think the blog is just being written then ;) not that i'd know, of course ;) heh We had a "game timeline" that had weekly goals and then a day by dat breakdown of what was happening - both in front of players as updates and where the backsoty things were happening. It really helped with continuity so, um, anyway... speaking of WiBS (and imbri knowing nothing *wink*), that game is winding down, and i'm sure their PMs want their life back, but we need closure! we need a post-game wrap up. Do you plan ahead for that too? Imbri, I wrote Stevie's blog on the fly, but we had specific points that had to get posted on specific days to move the story forward oh, absolutely, points need to be hit wrap-up as in a PM chat or as in an epilogue? Cather, we did for OC it's like the LCP credits which never appeared. we had a story arc planned out, then about 3 weeks before the end we wrote out the specifics for the final conflict in terms of timing if there is anything to be done after the game ends, you need to plan to get it done *before* the team goes their separate ways. yeah, we did that for metacortechs too *nod* yep! otherwise it gets difficult to coordinate people - esp volunteers but, honestly, we never planned that ahead for LJ or MU and my corp games don't have any sort of post-game anything Yeah after the game ended it was hard to go back to the forum that we were going to release and clean up the bits we needed to clean up heck, i don't think any of my players even know that i exist - just that some random people came in and gave them a game it became a less "time critical" thing to get stuff done after the game but, let's get back to balance! and the importance of it i think that there are two key factors at play there's a balance in the player community and in the way the game is structured and then there's a balance in the PM team and the way work is done and, yes, with updates, like we've been talking, the two merge and cross paths that's where the game design ties the two groups together but when it comes to saving the teams mental health, there's really a need to make sure that you aren't overextending yourselves beyond your capabilities *nod* That is important like with Lockjaw, for example, we had 2 people with a small amount of webdesign experience how do you know ahead of time though? are therea any signs to watch for? and 2 people that could put a website together if they absolutely had to (wolf and i) so i wound up putting in 60-80 hour weeks because I also had to teach myself graphic design and web design just so that we could get the game out there well, Matalanifesto: you know what your skills are and what strengths you have both individually and as a team and this could be actual skills or life issues (like, you always have to spend 5-7pm with the kids or Thursday night is poker night) Matalanifesto: when OC was just starting to put together the team, we listed what skills we had and how strong we were in each and how much time we had to devote you have to take all of that into consideration in the game design - if you know you can't be around on Thursday nights, it's not a good idea to make it so that a certain website always has to update on fridays if you know that you don't know PHP but kinda want to learn it - don't make some massive php based site a super important aspect of the game maybe put it in there initially (cause you want to learn php) but don't make it central or integral to the design or, as you start learning PHP, you might find that it takes you 8 times longer than you thought it would to do any/everything i see,so the key is don't go over reaching and know your limits. thankyou all. yeah, i think that's important because otherwise the game will suddenly become "work" and a "pain in the ass" :) Matalanifesto- it is easy to over estimate what your limits are i do it all too often and then motivation suffers and updates get behind and players get frustrated and a huge cycle begins you have got to be brutally honest about how much time you have and how long it will take to do things ARGs are huge undertakings and it's not really the time to be optimistic on your time and skills :) otherwise the game gets too big to handle i can see how they could very easily run away from you in all sorts of ways. we started writing OC and it quickly turned into a huge monster. Cutting it down to something we could manage was hard but we had to do it yeah! I think that is a main cause of implosion see, i don't think cutting back is a big deal at all PMs get to ambitious and then can't carry everything out and i don't think looking at limits actually limits the potential of the game it actually makes it stronger because you are forced to find other ways to be creative to get the story out there I'm not saying cutting was bad, it was just difficult to decide what we really wanted to save, and what didn't fit the core story line but it did make the central story much stonger but you have got to be willing to cut stuff. (as a complete aside.... i really really really love david wilcox between the lines) (sorry, random itunes moment) :) (haven't heard this song in ages) so, we've hit balancing the PM team a bit and we've talked a bit about how updates bridge over to the players so i guess we should probably hit on how 'balancing' the players can also help maintain PM sanity and sense of life it seems a bit crazy to think that the players can be 'balanced' and/or that the players can have such an impact but i think that there's a valuable lesson from the beast here even if we aren't making beast type games they've often told the story about how when they launched, they had what they thought was many months of material and it was all solved in like an hour (or a week or some such thing) a slight exaggeration seeing as CM didn't form for several weeks after the game launched, but not a huge one because that's exactly what happened when CM got a hold of the game yep, that happened on FA... they would hand us a puzzle and we would solve it in 15 minutes and they were left to scratch their heads well, that will happen That's where we come to pacing, and the problem of scheduling updates i tend to assume that every puzzle that i throw out there will be solved in five minutes one monkeyand google vs 100 monkeys and google, the players will always win because you can't afford to not assume that - once it's out there, it's done *nod* but, if your player base is solid puzzlers or solid story types you're suddenly faced with some issues puzzlers will rip through ANY puzzle and, frequently, ignore the story impact and/or the less noticeable but perhaps just as important themes behind it story types might come across a puzzle and stop and suddenly post 100 pages of spec on everything that just happened :) * Magesteff raises a hand on being a story type... and guilty of posting 100 pages when things like that happen, the PM team is suddenly sent in a spin on "how to fix this" "how to get out important info x" so it's important to either balance the player base or to work on redesigning some aspects in order to meet the player base that you've attracted, but you need to recognize that so that it's not an overwhelming issue that causes a complete redesign of things I think a puzzle is fine, so long as it somehow IMPACTS the story... puzzles just for puzzle sake are... annoying to me ponytreegirl - agreed stories are puzzles to me, i don't get the difference. but i'm odd i guess. and i also think that, much as players say they don't want it, a puzzle has to be stamped with big red blinking letters saying "puzzle" *nod* We had a few puzzles that the players just missed a recent example from WiBS * catherwood perks up because they didn't have the big red arrow saying "puzzle" a character was missing or something, i dunno, i'm only kinda following along ;) and this other character was playing a game of "telephone" between the players and the guy's mom and in that posted a very subtle but pretty important puzzle that led to the characters location casually, she threw out some sentence that started with "emphasis" which, if you're playing telephone with someone could come out as "in memphis" it took about a day for the players to figure that out because a) they'd been trained that puzzles would be overt and b) they weren't expecting it poor design, i think though an elegantly placed puzzle for not puzzle's sake *nod* it wasn't stamped and flashing and so they missed it as a player, i thought we were supposed to shut up and listen when the characters started posting so much convo -- i felt like we were told to be quiet, not help out ;) poor design and that reaction is perfectly understandable in that turn of events, i actually knew they missed the turn to Nashville, looking on a road map, but didn't post it as spec -- then i was puzzled why the rescuer was heading to Nashville. how would you correct that design? well, the character could have been a bit more confused, perhaps (hinting that she needed help) yea that could work I'm always afraid that if we use too many easy to see puzzles that the players will miss the more subtile clues that get left around. also, the character could have posted other similar type misunderstandings in the past perhaps not as important yes, Deb was too confident about needing to go to Nashville (wrong city), that i as a player didn't feel compelled to argue with her. Confusion would have been better. but as a sort of training to the players I feel that life doesn't always hand you blatant things, so should it really be a requirement to make sure the players see all the puzzles? Do we need to train the players to look again? i don't think so, and in MU we didn't push the fact that there was a website that sat through updates of not being found (of a rather central character - dina) I don't want the players to feel that I as a Pm will hit them over the head with the puzzles if they had never found it, i'm not exactly sure what we would have done but we were letting it go and just giving other puzzles, not providing hints to the same puzzle (like we'd done oh so humorously? with where.gif in lockjaw) like greywethers in CTW that sat for 3 years before being solved One thing we learned with OC was "never have a puzzle trail where the character who created it is not able to make modifications to it " That was an oops we wont make again. We will just make new ones next time that probably added more than a few hours of work figuring out :) new oops... training the players on what to expect is good (so they don't say, "how were we supposed to know that?") but can backfire if they are a lazy spoonfed group yeah, that it can it's a balance ;) its a tightrope by the sounds of it Well, that brings up the question of how long should you wait to give hints if the players are just not making a connection? around the neck! :) * Magesteff hung herself a few times in terms of balancing enjoyment of the difficulty with frustration of not moving forward i think frustration snowballs *nod* it's like it starts off small but before you know it you have this huge mass that's just ready to take over everything as a player frustration seems to be contagious, the angst builds and you can't help but pick it up off the others at first it can only pick up little thumbtacks but before you know it, it's picking up people and even islands and rainbows (not that i'm a katamari addict) is there a trade secret for how PMs gauge the audience? lurking in their chat room, for example? *nod* We seem to get into a rut of thinking in terms of one direction of thought, and unable to get out of that even when going back over the clues. Cather, we lurked in the chat room and read uF it was really difficult to watch then get close then turn away from the answer i know players always laugh and say hello to the PM lurker, but we rarely know which nick is really a PM in hiding oh we had an accomplice who was sending echos to another room where we could watch lately, i've solely been going off of forums and blogs (for corporate training games, each player has a blog that they can comment on and whatnot) no chat whatsoever should the audience just assume that the PMs hear their thoughts? :) it's a mixed bag which is very different from how i dealt with metacortechs. i judged most mood bits by chat even though i followed the forums pretty religiously as well you get the good comments with the bad and can you tell the difference between casual whining ("we want a clue!) and actual frustration ("we NEED a clue!") That is a real tightrope yeah, you can tell the difference mainly the first few bits are casual whining we were worried the players would get into a habit of waiting to have extra hints then it becomes frustration well, if you train them that they'll get hints, they will :) gah, i hate that i'm using the word train, like they're dogs or something theres one the saity aspect, say you're getting a fair few negative comments, any good tips on detachment? sanity even is there a better word to use? ok Pavlovian conditioning ;) condition! much better not nearly as negative sounding sorry got some lag thing going on Matalanifesto - we had a room where we made comments to the player's comments to let off the steam sounds like a good idea Matalanifesto: the way i've always approached it is to a) expect the negative, it will always come you have to remember that when you do anything for public consumption, you will get public comments good and bad b) create a thread or a file where you post all the really cool stuff some are just people who spit at everything in metacortechs, i lived in the players love us thread :) and you have to learn to ignore, others you have to go by how much you trust their opnions on other things whenever i'd hear a negative comment, i'd go out and find a good one but! don't ignore the negative, learn from it, try to figure out the reason for it *nod* you're all secretly laughing at us, i just know it, but that's healthy too yeah, there's that too players are the worlds best source for humor :) Cather, there were times in OC where it was hilarious to watch the players reactions when we came up with something they didn't expect for me it's more the little random bs that players do that's impossible not to love watching 15 minutes of swearing was fun. like burn you in effigy? :p like all the character photoshopping that went on during metacortechs, omg! i loved that stuff being a PM means they will do that anyway Rowan * catherwood wonders about the life of a major league umpire instead i swear, there were days where that was the stuff that kept me going. i think every game should have a player humor something or other i think it's almost as important as player guides and whatnots We kept a thread over on the PM forums of the funny stuff, as well as when people said something nice it helps the players burn off some of their own steam and also have fun with things having the nice things available made the nasty comments easier to take detachment was mentioned. The player guides have to be frustrating for a PM if the players get something wrong -- but it's their resource, not yours. and there's nothing like a little bit of love to motivate a pm and those things are pure love (even when made from hate;)) lol imbri true, but it also shows you where you need to do a bit more work to get them back on the right track you have to think about why they came to the wrong conclusion (yes, having players post even one "I'm enjoying x about the game" really makes a PM feel good) and yet, people say we don't do enough constructive criticism (maybe postgame is better for that) Yes, we were hoping for a lot more questiosn and critiques after OC, but we didn't get as much as we thought. have any of you needed to balance multiple PM gigs at the same time? Not eve over at Varin.org where the PM forums are yes, Cath yep O.O you truly are insane I can't imagine the work that would take but then again I'm mostly a stay-at-home-mom so I have more time than someone with a "real job" Imbri were yours corporate based ones or grassroots? and, um, well, it's my 'real job' not grassroots you just have to be careful not to mix anything between the two at one point this winter i had three things going on at the same time i think i lost my mind for that week fortunately, one was just more of a writing gig so that didn't take as much time has anyone mentioned the absolute need for a thick skin? oh, and the otehr was a replay, so it was just a matter of deploying things at the right time (pure project management type stuff and no asset creation or dealing with assets being created) Briefly Addie. if you take things personally it will make you never want to PM again But to bring that back to the Balance... You have to remember that if you are getting less sleep than normal it makes it hard to just let the bad things roll off your back you have to look at why someone's criticizing rather than the words they chose and see if there's merit in their statement so keep that in mind always *nod* Addie yep, agreed having been BTS for one of the games that's garnered a very high amount of criticism I could have easily developed a "Well to hell with you too" attitude some people complain about "style" rather than content... keep that in mind too also who you PM with can make a differnece too you really can't all out ignore statements, becuase if you do, you're likely to repeat some mistakes and/or not fix things that will cause others to post the same sorts of criticisms but you can ignore the tone with which some things are said right if the PM team works well toghether it is much easier than if you are always stuggling with them ARGtalk had some ugly things said about it, but if you looked at the subtext it was more people wanting game boundaries than anything else yep and sometimes, especially since PMs are anonymous, people will say things that they wouldn't say to your face yep! *nod* which, honestly, i appreciate which is a blessing as well as a curse right they're honest but occasionally brutal *nod* you need to glean the honesty out of the statement and leave the brutal behind keep in mind you also can't see facial expressions or tone of voice with the written word they might have been saying it in a gentle tone of voice, even if the words are curt any thoughts about balancing the role of PM team leader with being a friend and peer? work vs. personal relationships? I think there definitely needs to be a defined leader i can't really comment on that too much on a grassroots level as we never had a hierarchy heh heh obviously it'll work either way ;) (yeah, i know, we're an anomaly - we just really clicked) With OC given that we started out as a training mission, we started out on an equal level the heirarchy was different well, i guess we started off with a leader (ross, in lockjaw) but he disappeared i would think there could even be problems with "office romance", dating a fellow PM. we had a lead writer, Slyfox, and Varin was keeper of the storyboard definitely, Cath and, i guess, monk took up that role at first and if we had to define it, i probably took it over shortly after monk but i don't think any of us looked at it like that it was just more that i was the person that held the big summaries of what to do and such I think it depends on your style too - I like having one person be the leader not necessarily a dictator, but someone who is good at filtering suggestions even if you operate like the metacortechs/lj team - you definitely need someone holding the master play list right even if they aren't the master of it and someone who is good at looking for discrepancies/plot holes/inconsistency yep imbri : wow, two ross's? and, if i was a boy, i'd be a ross that's where a team member who doesn't necessarily have tech skills but is detail-oriented really shines if you want to be a PM you don't necessarily have to write puzzles or code websites - there are niches where just about any skillset can move in instead of getting named after my mom's maiden name, i got named after some soap opera character blech now the name 'ross' sounds funny to me if i was a boy i was going to be ross alexander I think one skillset some teams might be lacking is a techy perosn. err person instead i got brooke hunter then you're probably jealous of me yeah, it's nice to have someone who can keep up with updating software, checking for holes, etc.