We won.

Fractured Universe won 1st place in the MyDreamRPG contest. This is an exciting win for us, really providing a great motivator for us as essentially a volunteer team (minus funds that come in from winning contests) to continue development and reach our next deadline. April is the deadline and I think our goals for it are quite reasonable. It will be an exciting point in time for testing.

The confirmation of our efforts from the contest have been great and our team from before the contest is exactly the same as after the contest- which is very exciting. We’ve spent a lot of time since then both in development and discussing design (well, at least I have spent a lot of time discussing design and everything else, but that’s probably because i’m biased as lead). With that, we’ve made great progress and some changes. One in particular change is game mechanics / rules.

We originally were planning on using GURPS for the contest because of its versatility and that it’s relatively simplistic. However, through discussion, thankfully everyone on the team agreed with the decision to not only not use GURPS, but create our own game mechanics entirely. This is a big task and will end up requiring a lot of testing, but I think in the long run it’s for the best. It benefits us in a number of ways. In particular, it allows us a full and complete understanding of our game mechanics. This enables us to easily add new classes, worlds, campaigns, quests, spells, etc. that we would otherwise be bogged down having to read to make sure it’s all functioning properly. Second, it also avoids licensing issues and lowers costs there, which is also nice ;)

Be sure to watch the Fractured Universe website as we progress closer to April. The site during that time should begin to become much more formed with information about the game and so forth.

Dunkin Donuts has a treasure map

Seth Godin recently put up an image from Dunkin Donuts and labeled it the “missing manual.” Last month I mentioned how companies aught to focus on making a “treasure map” for their customers, making the process of dealing with their company as simple and straight forward to understand as possible. This picture from Seth just backs up the importance of that:

Community to Business Interaction

I’ve written before on my notion of what the ideal relationship between a business and its community is. I’ve began writing in a more full form what I find are the most important points and steps to creating a community are, as well as how to tell whether or not you’re on the right track. While that is not done, I would like to share a small portion from that.

My idea of the ideal relationship between myself (being a part of the business) and the community (the group of people whom we are privileged to have supporting our products) is when I know many (I don’t say all because I am terrible with names) of the members of our community by name, what is going on in their life, and what they are currently up to.

To sum it up in a more concise form: The interaction between a company and the community that creates it should be a relationship. That is, a two way, interactive, respectful, authentic, and caring relationship. 

The above takes a lot of work. A lot. It also requires a lot of caring and authenticity. I used to do community development and marketing for a team (of which I have now switched to design to help move things along) whose community I was authentically passionate and cared about. The results from this, from focusing on building the relationships between the community and between us and the community, were awesome. I could literally call up/e-mail/instant message, a member of this community who was now a friend and ask how he or she was doing. We would chat about my recent move, because they knew I made one. We would chat about how their new hobby was going, because I knew. These are the kind of relationships that create growing communities.

It is a relationship. I think relationships are what really matter between companies and their communities. The products [that make their lives better] and all that business related stuff is of equal importance, but I think those are simply the bridge to what matters- the relationships.

SmartPhones & Personal Maps

Having read Rohit’s latest post on Smartphone’s and Beaconvertising, definitely an interesting read, I thought of another idea that I am sure is not unique only to me. Now, I will admit, this could already be a feature of Samsungs Helio smartphone with GPS & landscape mapping, but I will share it none-the-less… because it excites me.

Landscape mapping and GPS to find your location on that map is pretty neat. But what about being able to customize your landscape map? That is, to be able to place locations or notes on the map yourself.

Say you visit a really great restaurant or a coffee shop you’d like to frequent. Just place a dot on your map so you can remember it later! You could even implement a rating system (5 stars) and/or a flag to notify you of its location next time you’re in the area. But there is still something beyond that.

What if you could share your personalized landscape map with your friends? Having the ability to make your map public or private so your friends can access it adds a whole new element. Say you just vacationed in Chicago a week ago and now one of your friends is heading there. He could lookup your map to see what restaurants you liked, what hotels you preferred, and so forth. Take it a step further- he could even comment on your map. Now you get collaborated maps. Here’s another scenario: maybe you two are planning to meet up at a coffee shop. Simply put a point on the location and then your friend can just take a look at it to know which one you’re talking about and how to get there.

With all the social aspects that have been occurring, it seems to me the next logical step is to migrate it to the phone as to provide even more social innovations. Thoughts?

MMORPG Contest Over: Fractured Universe

The MyDreamRPG contest came to a close yesterday. This, however, has not been any reason for Fractured Universe team to slow its development. While the contest has come to a close, we still have been ruthlessly plugging away developing, adding quests, and moving the game forward.

Originally, I debated whether or not I wanted to post anything about FU. Tony (SgtFlame) and Allyn (MrBloodworth) pretty much covered a lot of what might be said. While I personally could say a lot, most of it would be pertaining to design philosophy, concepts, or business which of course makes sense since that’s what i’m on the team for. But I feel it might not be as appealing as other topics. After much deliberation, though, I found two things I felt really aided our success that I wanted to comment on.

The first is a comment on Tony’s post mortem post. He made the comment that one thing he wouldn’t have done was start alpha testing as early as he did. While I generally agree with him, I personally think it was for the best as it brings in real feedback. Ideally, we would have started alpha testing about a month from now, maybe two at most. However, due to the time constraints, we wanted trusted people on and testing it now. It has really worked out for the best, and in my opinion, is a solid development philosophy. Get your target players (trusted, of course) testing as early as possible, even before you’re actually ready to test. It allows for you to take many of the concepts you have and receive real feedback. Why take the time developing guesses so far along when you can find out the answers at the beginning. It also allows for the appropriate trimming of gameplay which is the most important thing, irregardless of the number of features a game has.

Now, I have seen (and been with) teams that don’t like this philosophy simply because they don’t want to have a huge list of bugs early on and they’re afraid of frightening players off. Certainly a merited concern… but those are bugs you need to be squashing anyways, and just because it’s on a list doesn’t mean you have to fix it now. So long as frequent updates are occurring, players are going to be aware that what they’re playing is a work in progress that, best of all, they’re a part of. If you picked them right, they’ll understand it’s not final and that you’re actively working on it… which leads me to my next comment.

Regular, small updates. This is something I have seen other teams use with great success and that our team has thus far been using with great success. Frequent, small updates. They’re fantastic. They help keep the motivation flowing both within the team and within its community. People see development actively occurring, even if it is small, and it gives a sense of achievement. Not only that, it also helps bug fixing! But the bigger point here beyond regularity is size. By avoiding doing massive updates, it seems to me that feature creep can be more easily avoided, and that updates or bugs won’t be put off. In addition, it allows for newly implemented ideas to be quickly elaborated on, shrunk, or potential downfalls or necessary improvements with them noticed.

With large updates, however, it’s easy to get caught up in the “oh, we can’t release until we get X finished.” or “we can’t release this yet, it still has Y bug.” and inevitably your progress is slowed, if not halted for a time. I also I think this will cause the motivation within the team to be lowered for a number of reasons, and the community I know will be less motivated, or anxious at the least, which is just an additional strain on the team.

In ending, the contest, though challenging and time consuming has been a blast. Our team of about 5 core guys (including myself) has been an awesome bunch to work with. I don’t know about others, but I know that I am impressed with what we have put forth, even if all of us on the FU team would have liked to have had more. Best of all, whether we win the contest or not, we have the foundation and team to put out an indie MMORPG that will, if we have any say in it (which fortunately enough, we do!), will stretch the limits.

Also, the site has just been updated with Fractured Universe’s introduction.