Production/Development Q&A

[KLSymph]

Alright, while we wait for more people to sign up, I will start brainstorming questions for Production/Design to answer. It might be better to make this its own thread in the subforum and use it as the design doc, but for now let's start with these generic game project issues.

• What will the project be named? Is it just "Ranma: The Visual Novel"?
• What is purpose of the project? What conditions must be met to say "we succeeded"? What are the failure conditions?
• Who is our audience? What do we know about them? How will we cater to their interests?
• What will we not do, at least for now?
• Do we have a project schedule? Will we have one? Should we have one?
• Do we have project milestones? What should they be?
• Do we keep all the project development public, or will we keep parts of it private until distribution? Which parts?
• Will we prototype? Will we have a testing team? Will we beta-test?
• How will we spread the word about the project? How should we hype it to gather interest?
• How will we distribute the completed project?

[Brian]

It's ... secret on the server, yeah.  Huh.

No biggy -- it's advertised here.  I don't expect anyone to just wander in and be interested without coming here first. :)

Alright, while we wait for more people to sign up, I will start brainstorming questions for Production/Design to answer. It might be better to make this its own thread in the subforum and use it as the design doc, but for now let's start with these generic game project issues.

• What will the project be named? Is it just "Ranma: The Visual Novel"?

The working title is 'Ranma: The Visual Novel'.  A final project title will need to be chosen; that'll be one of my action items to gather a consensus on that.

• What is purpose of the project? What conditions must be met to say "we succeeded"? What are the failure conditions?

Very good question.  Okay.  The purpose of the project is to make an interactive fiction.

Action item: Check with technical staff to determine feasible limitations/deliverables.  We have what I see as relatively straightforward technical goals, but we need to sanity check that and make sure everything is within parameters.

Success: Completing the executable that we have not yet defined (er, we're ambitious?)

Failure: Okay.  The total wordcount should be writable by a single person in a period of two months easily in terms of free time.  Coding time would be I-don't-know; that time does take in revisions based on feedback.  Let's go ahead and say here that if we haven't hit a beta milestone in two months or figured out better, we've missed our goal and need to restrategize.

For the moment, failure is not getting a better release target than: 11/30/2001

This is not set in stone; just a best guess at a reasonable time based on the infos I gots.

• Who is our audience? What do we know about them? How will we cater to their interests?

Our audience for the moment is just ourselves; by and large this is more a technical exercise than anything else.

As far as catering to interests, we want to present a neutral (non-bashing, non-favoritist) view of the scene for the first part of the story, and then let the reader (player) choose which girl they want Ranma to end up with, and follow that storyline.  This gives us the potential to appeal to a wider base of fans, and gives the story what small replay value it does have. :p

• What will we not do, at least for now?

At a guess, we will not have: Graphics, beyond (maybe) a splash-screen of some sort for the opening screen.  Sound effects/music.

Once we have decided what we're going to include, we will not try to add more complex features because it seems like it will be fun; our limitations are going to be simple, and for the moment, not flexible.  We're not going to be using a complex system of flags, or anything more advanced than a simple decision tree with (at the moment), only four true branches (everything else basically loops back into the main story anyway).

• Do we have a project schedule? Will we have one? Should we have one?

We ... do not yet.  I believe we should!

It's a volunteer project, not a job, but at the same time, let's try and avoid another floundering community project that doesn't ever quite get off the ground.  We're going to try and set ourselves what we think are achievable goals, and try to reach them in what we agree feels like a reasonable amount of time.

If we aren't reaching those goals, since this is going to require effort from multiple people, then we can take a step back and look at what we're doing.

• Do we have project milestones? What should they be?

Not yet.  Ah ... I'll need to get back to you on that, though suggestions are welcome.

• Do we keep all the project development public, or will we keep parts of it private until distribution? Which parts?

I don't see any particular advantages to hiding it at this point, but if others prefer, that's an option.

• Will we prototype? Will we have a testing team? Will we beta-test?

Prototyping is going to have to be run past the technical team (another action item for me).  Logistically, if my primary concerns are generating content, then by the time we get to the implimentation phase, I should be free to help work on testing.

As a QA person, I believe we should beta-test, naturally. :p  Will be more fun than giving tech support for this game later. ^_^;

• How will we spread the word about the project? How should we hype it to gather interest?

Action item: Develop marketing team/acquire publicist/press manager.

• How will we distribute the completed project?

Ooh.  That's ... a very good question.  If it's small enough we can host it here.

I suspect Jon knows some good text adventure sharing websites, though we'll need to look into their stance on fanfiction.

Okay; any other questions (or suggestions/input on these questions, since I couldn't answer them all myself) appreciated! :D[/list]

[Halbarad]

Since I've been involved in a fair bit of project planning at work, I'll toss out a few suggestions for one thing.

Do we have project milestones? What should they be?

Some suggestions for these:

Stem plot outline complete
Decision tree complete
Branch path outlines complete

Stem plot first draft complete
Stem plot preread/first pass proofreading complete
Stem plot revision complete
Stem plot final proofing complete
Stem plot scripting complete

Branch path versions of all of the above.

Final scripting compilation complete
Beta testing complete
Publication

I won't presume to set dates or scheduling for any of these, but these seem like the important milestones you'd need to target.

[KLSymph]

For the purpose of communication, I think we should have a clear terminology to describe what we are doing. Talking about the structure of the story, in particular, could use a bit of consistency, since at the moment we are pulling terms from storytelling (endings), visual novels (decisions, branches, flags), and graph theory (nodes, paths). The fact that these terms are all legitimately part of visual novels muddles it a bit, so I propose we nail down the words and definitions.

Let's try this abstract description of the story.

An event is any in-story, in-universe occurrence.  A story must start and end, and ending is the accepted term in storytelling. "Beginning" I feel is less commonly used, so I suggest the pithier term origin. For story structure, the origin is the event in the story where the player enters the game, and the ending is the event where the player exits. Starting at the origin, the player progresses through a sequence of story events, at least one of which is a decision where the player to chooses two or more options that determines which ending he ultimately stops at. This sequence of origin-events/decisions-ending is a path.

As of this writing, the story structure seems split between A) a neutral sequence of events that establishes the story premise and includes a small number decisions that determine which matchup ending the player will reach, and B) four (or more) mutually exclusive sequences of events that lead to a matchup ending.  Using a tree metaphor, I propose we refer to the neutral event sequence plus the decisions as the story trunk, and each matchup-specific sequence a story branch.

To put it all together:

Branch: a sequence of events entered from the trunk that leads to an ending. We currently associate branches with matchup characters, e.g. the Akane branch, the Ukyou branch.

Decision: an event that requires the player to choose between two or more options. Currently the trunk ends at the decisions, which determine which branch the player continues on.

Ending: an event where the player leaves the game. For discussion purposes, a "bad end" causes the player to leave the game, but in practice we might implement it to toss him back in for player convenience.

Event: an in-story, in-universe occurrence.

Option: a possible choice for the player to take during a decision.

Origin: the event where the player enters the game. Currently we assume there is only one, and the trunk begins there.

Path: a sequence of events, starting from the origin and progressing to one ending, that the player takes.

Trunk: the sequence of events that start from the origin and continues until the player has passed through enough decisions to choose a branch.

Suggestions are welcomed!

[Brian]

Okay, that looks like a good terminology guide. :)

Ah ... sometime this weekend I'll need to start trying to assign dates to Milestones, and really prodding our tech team to see if they've got any concerns (or have already found something that Solves The Problem Forever).

[Jon]

KLSymph, I should send you some of the more academic books on interactive fiction. Sounds like you'd love them.

[KLSymph]

I would be interested!

[KLSymph]

For the moment, failure is not getting a better release target than: 11/30/2001

This is not set in stone; just a best guess at a reasonable time based on the infos I gots.

It's been two days (and ten years?!) past the scheduled day, so I guess it's time.  Progress report!

[Merc]

I think progress was transferred to the minecraft division. They're going to be building sprite/block art of the Ranma cast on the SR server to fill the visual component of the novel.

[Brian]

That would be a typo.  I have notes; I'll post them to the thread tomorrow or later tonight when I find free time.

It's difficult since I'm doing this solo, and there have been a lot of fires at work. :|

[Brian]

On second thought, this has stopped being fun.

I wanted a community project, not to do it myself.  There's no reason for a board if I'm going solo.

Declared a failure; scrapping.

[Jon]

Reasonable response.

That said, community projects are hard.

[KLSymph]

Yeah, I had a lot of work-related burdens too. Oh well, try try again.