Psychochild's Blog

So, for tonight’s post I wanted to open things up a bit. Ask me questions about Storybricks. Tell me what you liked, what you didn’t like, and all that.

I’ll share a few things below that I think might be interesting.
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After a week of talking a bit about the promise and a little behind the scenes, I wanted to look at the reason why all this talk is reminiscing instead of excitement about what we’re doing. Storybricks is no longer around and I wanted to dig a bit into the reasons for this.

Let’s take a look at why something that had promise withered on the vine.
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I explained the concept of the original Storybricks setting yesterday with floating islands and a big bad with a world full of layers. Today I wanted to explain a bit about those layers and how they would work in my vision.

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So what would the initial Storybricks game have looked like if we had created it? My job was to lead the creation of the setting. While others were worrying about how to model a character’s emotions and behaviors, I was thinking about how to showcase this in a world that people would play in.

So let’s take a look at what I was thinking as I was building a world from scratch.
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Building on yesterday’s post, let’s look at how Storybricks could have worked. I’ll go into a little bit of the design philosophy as well as some of the initial design we had about an original IP to showcase the Storybricks AI technology.

I figure it’s been a couple years and some people might find this interesting enough. Of course, time dims memories so bear with me.
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In another kind of cray idea, I wanted to write a bit about Storybricks and what we wanted to do with it. It’s a concept I think still has a place in game development, but it was perhaps a little ahead of its time.

Lets jump in the Wayback Machine!
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This week I want to talk a bit about some crazy ideas I’ve had in the past. I’ll start with one I proposed long ago when I was working on Meridian 59 at 3DO. The head of the company wanted people to make suggestions and proposals for games. So I wrote one that happened to touch on some ideas 3DO had at the time.

Let’s dig into my memory, shall we? It is a scary place.
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“No plan survives contact with the enemy,” as the saying goes. Not that other people are necessarily the enemy, but your plans for a perfect community might not be unchanged when you run into reality.

So let me go over a few ways that a community might have to change after it’s formed. We’ll look at some of the decisions you might not have to make up front, but that might be forced as the community grows.
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I’m going to head off for a little well-deserved beach trip early next week, so I wanted to kick off the weekend with an “ask me for advice” type post. I’m here to answer your questions about how to start, develop, and grow your community! I’ll keep an eye here for the next few days so that I can answer questions the best I can.

I’ll give a few thoughts before opening it to questions in the comments!
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For today’s post I want to take a closer look at leaders of community, specifically of MMO guilds. What does good leadership require when you’re dealing with a loosely organized group of people who are doing something like playing a game “for fun”?

Let’s dig a little deeper into this, shall we?
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