My apologies to the beta testers for recycling a post I made some months ago. This has a few updated parts in it, but is basically the same. I'm a corner-cutter--yes, I am! For the rest of you guys that don't know what I'm talking about, it doesn't matter. Just read on!
Right Place, Right Time
I want DROD.net/CaravelNet to be some kind of legendary breeding ground for puzzle-making genius! We are already generating community activity here that has surpassed what other popular and classic puzzle games have done. People take hold authoring seriously. Other very good puzzle games with larger numbers of players don't have this respect and energy for extending the game. We've got people writing articles about how to make good holds. We've got a peer review and rating process. We've got enthusiastic participation in hold creation contests. This is a wonderful environment and I'm very proud of it.
Things will only get better. JtRH right now, without even talking about future features, has so much more potential for storytelling than AE did. We've enlarged the canon and exposed more of it with the story presented in JtRH. It's easier to add to the Eighth lore when you have better-defined characters and more material to draw from. The scripting features in the editor are a powerful new tool for creating holds that follow a story.
There are also going to be many different types of puzzles with all the new elements. I am surprised that people have been able to squeeze so much blood out of that rock we gave them. When I finished KDD, I was exhausted of puzzle ideas, but after years of exploration, the hold authors somehow keep finding more. Haven't made an exact count, but I think we've about tripled the number of game elements with JtRH, and the design techniques will have grown by an even larger amount because the possible element combinations suggest many new things that can be done. So for puzzle ideas, it will be a long time before people come up dry, and we'll likely have released even more new elements into the creative pot before that happens.
If you aren't impressed enough yet by the possibilities, I have to remind you of the new CaravelNet features. We will have the instant gratification of downloading new holds in-game, watching demos of people playing your holds minutes after you release them, high scores and progress stored on-line, and the ability to show only explored rooms to players in the hints and solutions browser. These are fantastic features that will make hold creation exciting. I'm anticipating a "
completionist"
mentality in some people where they will feel the need to finish every released hold so they can keep their online achievements perfect.
I think everything is in place to take one step further. We're going to say that there is potential for greatness in authoring holds. Authoring can be a casual puttering around type of thing, sure, but there is also a level above that where one gets serious about the craft and makes something special. For these creations, we will have the
Smitemaster's Selection.
Smitemaster's Selection
It's kind of like a quarterly magazine. We would have a "
Fall 2005 Smitemaster's Selection"
, "
Winter 2005 Smitemaster's Selection"
, etc. Each "
issue"
releases one or more official holds to CaravelNet users. They appear on the downloadable list of holds in the game. They are also announced by news ticker on the title screen, on the mailing list, and, of course, on the forum. A Smitemaster's Selection hold will be of the same or better quality as
Journey to Rooted Hold or
King Dugan's Dungeon. It will adhere to the story canon and perhaps add to it. The puzzles will be tested. The writing will be reviewed. It is possible that we will contribute new art or speech audio to the hold (I don't know yet--that depends on some unknowns).
Ulterior Motive
The Selections are exclusive to CaravelNet users, or in other words, people who have purchased the registered part of
Journey to Rooted Hold. I should explain straight away how this benefits Caravel, so you don't think I'm being sneaky.
You guys know that we are releasing the complete engine for free along with its source code. This is a terrible move for shareware marketing. It would be much better if we could limit what went into the demo in some obvious ways like removing the ability to create or play user-made holds. That would be a straightforward way to create incentive for registering, but it is not available to us because the project began from open source contributions that must be respected. So our "
trick"
has been to sell the media instead of the engine. Media includes bitmaps, music, speech, story, and holds. We want to have as much value in the media pile as we can. It is how we get past our handicap of open source generosity.
So we would benefit greatly from having the very best holds for sale in a package along with
Journey to Rooted Hold. I will never try to prevent people from releasing free holds, but I do have an interest in convincing some authors to make their holds CaravelNet-exclusive. I'm not going to put pressure or some kind of guilt trip on people who release free holds--that is valuable too and it'd be crummy to discourage it. The idea I am aiming for is that people will perceive that the best DROD-playing experience can be had by joining CaravelNet (buying JtRH) and getting Smitemaster's Selection.
The Gift Basket
There has to be a reason for authors to submit holds for exclusive use in Smitemaster's Selection. I figure that different people are motivated by different things, so I plan to hand out a "
gift basket"
to authors whose work we decide to publish. One or two items might sparkle and catch your eye, and if you aren't keen on the bath salts or don't like coffeecakes, the package as a whole may still entice. So in the basket we have several items of both concrete and intangible varieties:
* Fifty American Dollars - This is a semi-professional rate similar to what you'd receive for getting a story published in a genre fiction magazine. It is not a realistic compensation for your time compared to other activities that could earn your rent, but it is a token of respect that shows we take our relationship with you seriously.
*
About the Author Page - Besides the ego boost, it helps the community to have some "
big names"
in hold authoring. And actually, to some extent we are already have them. If Clayton, Agaricus5, Bibelot, or other people released a new hold, I'm sure ears would perk. With a few years of history behind us, it's probably about time to have a nice little page that says a bit about what holds people have released, what they are currently working on, their authoring styles, some personal info like how old, where they live, etc. A photo if they aren't too shy. You know--an author page.
* The author's work is considered official and is integrated into the canon. This puts a little more weight behind your release. Players who are particularly interested in story developments will not want to miss your hold.
* Authors will be given access to the official story canon. There is actually a growing amount of material that is stashed away in a secret place. We created it near the beginning of JtRH to help keep our writing consistent with the burgeoning Eighth reality and not lose track of our good ideas.
* Work experience releasing a software product - If you think you would like to pursue a career in the gaming industry, this isn't a bad entry on a resume applying for something entry-level like tester or level designer. There is a miniature product life cycle to follow here with a couple of quality assurance tests to get through. By the way, anyone who wants to add their experience on Caravel projects to a resume, just ask me and I will help you write something up.
* Certificate of Appreciation - You will be mailed an Eighth-style certificate thanking you for your help. My wife has a stationery business and she is master of all things paper. It will look very nice on your wall!
Submission Process
This process is going to be refined and detailed later, but I want to give you the gist. First your hold must be
accepted, which means Caravel has seen your hold and will work with you to get it ready to be
published.
The requirements for being accepted:
* You must be the author of at least one hold that was rated 8 or higher at least a month after release. This does a few things:
1. encourages holds to be made publicly available and discussed, which is healthy for the community, and
2. cuts down on the amount of time Caravel team spends reviewing submissions, which in my mind, threatens to be substantial.
* Hold must not have been publicly released. If at any time before, during, or after development you release your hold, then we can't publish that hold as a Smitemaster's Selection. We only want to publish holds that are new and exclusive.
* Hold should be complete and tested. You should distribute your hold to private testers to avoid problems like trivial solutions or rooms that aren't fun to play. We might create a directory of private testers at some point for this purpose.
* Hold must include a full set of victory demos that work.
* For more ambitious stories, you may wish to wait on writing all of the story content into the hold until after it is accepted and you can work with Caravel on it. In this case, a summary of the story events should be submitted with the hold that we can review.
After we've accepted your hold, then we have a few more hoops to jump through:
* You have to make story and quality fixes as described by the Caravel team. For example, you might describe a character doing something that conflicts with a future story event you had no way of knowing about. Or we might decide that your use of scenery has cosmetic problems.
* You would sign a publishing rights agreement with Caravel. It states, besides obvious things like "
Caravel will pay $x for y"
, that the hold will be exclusively published by Caravel. It will be our intent to only make the hold available to CaravelNet users.
Then you'd get the gift basket and we'd publish your fine hold in some issue of Smitemaster's Selection.
Last Dose of Grandiosity
It's not like I'm betting it all for some crazy leap into greatness here, because I'm going to be plenty happy with modest results. But I think we have a chance to make a unique impact on the genre of contemplative puzzle games. The key is that we take authorship seriously and provide incentives for our users to create works of art. Another thing to consider is that we are laying a framework for additional games to add to the Caravel collection, and the same approach we use for DROD authorship will translate to other games. In the future, I would like CaravelNet to be the very best place to be if you are a fan of contemplative puzzle games, and if you are an author published here, I want it to mean something.
-Erik
____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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