Not Fanatics but Fan Addicts

Once upon a time no particular producer I knew completed an extensive set of models for a game. The set was two days late in a rush scenario, was quite a meticulous labor of love, and attempted to make a lot of subsequent scripting assignments easier through the technique of pre-placement. Because this modeling set was completed by the producer, who had modeling skill, the actual impact on the project budget was no more than a couple of hundred dollars, taking the manager a couple of hundred hours in total to complete. It was meticulous, as I said, and a labor of love. Had a professional full time modeler done the work, in say, Vancouver, the set would cost around 2k at 2 1/2 to 3 weeks to complete; for essentially the same deliverable. The artist's lost is the producer's gain, even when they are the same person.



It is all well and good to use top professionals when building your interactive experiences, but if you could somehow bring the work from that special category of pre-professional, or semi-professional, to the market in the context of other apparently professional work, there should be some margin there, shouldn't there? Exploitation, for sure. I was fascinated by the biography of Roger Ebert, weren't you?

I love to throw around the big words. Speaking paradigmaticly, or otherwise, I would say that understanding the nature of the young designer is a pretty safe bet for any founding enterprise. Understand that they will go on to better things, they will take secrets, they will be unsatisfied, the pay will be just enough to live in this city. Everyone's always on their way out of the door; always looking for new talent for sure; an ever revolving door with only a couple months work planned ahead.

To start everything is up in the air and nothing is settled. One thing that is promised is that content developers are paid out of liquid assets, and not on spec. The operation is of such a small scale that there won't always be extra work; they are encouraged to pursue their own designs.

Regarding the platform, I find it a pretty handy device. You have a lot of options on the table; and at this point you should pursue everything relating to the type of media you want to produce. For a while I thought Source was it for me, with Steam as the distribution channel. Probably Steam is a better deal than Source, if you have a business model. My affection for Source was before I broke through with Virtools; and before I discovered how similar they really are at core. Anyway, bon voyage.

What's next for me is to get people who have the skill set to work on their own scripts. It's called production. It's a lot of ducking hassle, but its what gets the job done by the end of the day. Nobody likes to be managed. Too bad eh? Everybody likes to get paid.