De : [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] De la part de Xavier Antoviaque Envoyé : dimanche 3 octobre 2010 19:53 À : [email protected] Objet : [HackIt Bar] [Game design] Hiring or not hiring : ) 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. [David] I agree on the do it yourself and other aspects of your recommendation, for the reasons you give, more specifically both because we are the ones who know what we want and because it’s important that we ask ourselves the good questions rather than look for someone to provide them for us. This said, I think we agree that we could be much stronger if we find one or two key people still missing; I’m not sure if he/they will come from script writing or from game design but I don’t underestimate the quality that someone with this background can bring to the project. And it is going to take time to find this right person, because we expect many talents from him. Therefore, my recommendation would be to parallelize things : Do it ourselves for the current development of missions and basic gameplay, and adapt our vision once we have feedback from the players. And, in parallel, start the recruitment of our game designer/script writer, maybe on a slow pace to avoid spending too much time on it, but at least start discussing with a few candidates. My idea here is that it can take a long time to find the good match, so we should not start too late. And I’m not sure that the fact that we ourselves are still unclear about the direction of the game is an issue – yes, it can frighten some candidates, but at the same time, it can also help identify people who are comfortable with uncertainty, because I think this is the kind of profile we need; uncertainty will still be there in a few months from now on many topics, even if our proof of concept proves to be successful.
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