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Length of time?
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Jenna
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Joined: 07 May 2006
Posts: 416
Location: Romford

 		Length of time?
Okay, sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, or if it's just a silly question but i was curious;

1/ how long should you plan your arg for before launching it?

2/how long should it typically last?
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 12:39 pm
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Phaedra
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Joined: 21 Sep 2004
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 		Re: Length of time?
Jenna wrote:
2/how long should it typically last?


That depends on how complicated your story is, how many people you have on the PM team, your resources, etc.

Most of the large-scale ARGs seem to go 2-4 months, although obviously PXC and edoc buck that trend by being continuous, and things like Stranger Adventures and Studio Cypher do shorter segments, but continue to come out with new segments (maybe not so much Stranger Adventures anymore).

I think it's sort of a trade-off: it looks like short and sweet has some real advantages in terms of costs on the PM team and of keeping player interest high, but if you're running a very short ARG, you also, I think, are under more pressure to grab the audience you want/need immediately, because you don't have time to build it more gradually. And obviously you're limited in the complexity of your story, and how much you can depend on the players to advance the story because you have less time to think of other ways to get them to do what you need them to do if it doesn't work out the first time.

On the other hand, the longer the ARG is, the more pressure I'd imagine there is to keep people entertained with New & Exciting Stuff(TM). What's entertaining for a week may not be for a month or two.

Not to mention the cost in the sheer volume of what you have to produce.

But that's just my guesses; I'll defer to people with actual PMing experience on the facts. Wink
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 12:47 pm
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rowan
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Joined: 12 Apr 2004
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 		Re: Length of time?
Jenna wrote:
1/ how long should you plan your arg for before launching it?
It depends on quickly you can produce the materials needed to launch your game. It's been said more than once that you should have your entire game 'done' before you launch. That is, you should have planned out at least how you would like the game to go and create enough material to allow players to get there. So if you know that the end game is going to involve a character hiding a code in a birthday invitation, you should have that all set to go before the game launches, instead of waiting 2 days before the game ends to create it.

The reason for this is invariably things go wrong and/or change on you as the game progresses, and you will be forced to compensate. So now 2 days before the end game, you might have to add a way for the birthday host to hire a pony for the party, and make up all the material for the players to accomplish this feat. If you had waited to create your birthday invitation at the same time, you end up with double the work in a very short time span, increasing the odds that something else will go wrong, forcing you to create another stop gap measure that could also go wrong. By getting as much done as possible before the game starts, the less likely you are to make mistakes simply because you were rushed.

So, if you are creating a small game with a fair number of PMs who can churn out content fairly quickly, your planning stage might be relatively small. But if you're doing a larger game with a small number of PMs who create material at a slower pace, your planning stage will be significantly longer. Mix up the size of the game, the number of PMs, and the amount of material they can produce every day, and there is a wide range of times that the planning stage could take. Two weeks or two years, it shouldn't really make a difference if you have created enough material to last until the end of the game.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 1:44 pm
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Phaedra
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 		Re: Length of time?
rowan wrote:
you might have to add a way for the birthday host to hire a pony for the party...


<3 your examples. Smile
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 1:49 pm
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MageSteff
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Joined: 06 Jun 2003
Posts: 2716
Location: State of Denial

 		Re: Length of time?
Jenna wrote:
Okay, sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, or if it's just a silly question but i was curious;

1/ how long should you plan your arg for before launching it?


Orbital Colony was 2 years in the making for a couple of months of running game time. This was due to a few reasons, mainly during the process several people had to leave during development due to real life interferences (death in the family, hurricanes and the like).

You should take as long as you need to get your story arc and puzzles ready, but you should also have a deadline that you can break if things are not ready for public consumption.

Quote:
2/how long should it typically last?


That you need to decide while preparing your story arc. How long will it take to tell the story (which is where having a good outline ahead of time helps). If you rush your story, players may have trouble keeping up, but if you have too much "free time" between clues, players will get frustrated the game is not moving fast enough.

A lot depends on your team and how much time they have to work on the project, and you should be prepared that it may run longer or shorter than you intended.

An ARG typically lasts until the story is told. (Note, this does not include implosions)
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 02, 2006 2:03 am
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AtionSong
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Joined: 29 Aug 2006
Posts: 352

 		Re: Length of time?
Jenna wrote:

2/how long should it typically last?


It should last for a length that will allow for the story unfold in a good fasion. If you have an ARG that could last for six months, but pack it into three, the puzzles will be coming at the players too fast, and they won't be able to solve them, and they'll quit playing.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you have an ARG that could last for three months and you stretch it out to six months, there will be too few updates to keep players hooked, they will lose interest, and quit playing.

Generally, I would plan out an ARG so that there's minor updates two to four times a week and one or two major updates a week.

PostPosted: Sat Dec 02, 2006 6:04 pm
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Nightmare Tony
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Joined: 07 Jun 2004
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Location: Meadowbrook

 		think we are pushing 3 years now for development time Smile
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 02, 2006 10:13 pm
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