Hi, At the Open World Forum, we were discussing the recruitment of the Storyteller and the Gamedesigner with David, and there was one aspect which created a lot of debate. Basically, I tend to think lately that the recruitment is not as urgent as I once thought - we now have a lot of gameplay elements to test for Hackit/Gaia, especially quite a few missions to try out. This should give us plenty of playtesting material, and help us to refine the concept of the game.
The results of those playtests will allow us to get a better understanding of the direction of the game - we could find out that it works well, or to the contrary that we aren't going in the right direction. In both cases, we should be able to present the game more accurately once we have done this, which would help a lot to find the right people for this job. Right now I feel the concept of the game is too vague and we are still too unsure of what the game is to allow us to do a good recruitment. Moreover, I think it would put ourselves in a better psychological disposition - the hacker attitude of "do it yourself" for the gamedesign and the storytelling would have a good effect on us I think. Instead of waiting for someone to come and tell us what to do, it would push ourselves to find out what the game is. Today no one has a better understanding or is more motivated to make it a great game than us! But it doesn't mean that we should do all of this alone - I think one of the priorities for the time to come, especially while we implement the first missions, should be to start reaching out to players. Contacting existing communities, reaching random players through ads -- both would allow us to see how players react to the different types of missions. We could also ask them questions - what they liked and didn't liked, what types of missions they would like to see, etc. This approach would allow us to grow more organically, by progressively refining what we do with players, and once we have something that players like, we would be able to delegate -- either by bringing new hires, or (that would be ideal!) directly recruiting in the community we would have built by then. What do you think? Xavier.
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