Wild Bill
Posts: 6821
Joined: 4/7/2000
From: Smyrna, Ga, 30080
Status: offline
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Since so many of you have gotten into the Mega Campaign scene, I thought I would share what it takes to put one of these jewels together.
Constructing a Mega Campaign has been one of the most difficult tasks I have ever undertaken. Perhaps you would like to know something of the process.
Step One: The first step is David Heath and the Matrix Staff in picking a theme and the ideal person to coordinatge the campaign creation and development.
The person then chosen begins by looking for the best designers and testers he can find to work with him.
Step Two: Once a team is formed, the leader of the project must be sure that every member of that team understands what is being done and what is expected of each one.
Step Three: An outline of the project would be next, picking the battles of a particular area and time period that adeequately portray the action. This takes time and quite a bit of research. Team Captains and members are urged to do some reading also and get their own background on the subject. Preparing the outline and the flow chart for a mega campaign takes time...a lot of time.
Step Four: Scenarios are assigned to the designers. Each is given a list of the scenarios he is to do. The size of that list will depend on the time and the ability of the designer. The team captains also beginning assigning scenarios to be tested by the testers.
Step Five: Simultaneously, the Project leader, while keeping up correspondence with team leaders and members and in addition to his own scenario work, is continuing to research, looking for ideas for articles pertinent to the subject at hand.
This means many more hours of reading, then writing, then correcting, spell checking and putting literally dozens and dozens of documents in order.
Also involved here is looking for and scanning dozens and dozens of pictures, sorting them renaming them, cropping them and then turning them into lbm files.
Step Six: almost simultaneously the project leader is working with the musicians and artists who will be doing the title page, the special medals and awards pages, the campaign maps and other battle maps. Then there are the sound files, so very important to the campaign. We want to be sure they are done properly and provide the proper ambience to the campaign.
Step Seven: The testing and retesting of all the scenarios continue. Designers receive reports, adjust scenarios and send them out again. WHile this is going on the project leader is sorting the articles and the pictures and then placing them within the mega campaign according to the nodes. This is a much laborious process than what you might think. The names have to be typed in exactly as they are. One letter out of place and the MC won't find them.
Also during this time the project leader is writing at least six text files for each node. That includes the intro file and the five result files. That means that anywhere from 300-600 text files will have to be composed, written and checked. This is in addition to the other documents that are included with each node.
Step Eight: The finalized scenarios begin to come in, they are put into the Mega Campaign. Collating all of this material is a monumental task...no way to describe it.
Step Nine: Now that all the material is finally in place, we have to see if it works. That means testing the campaign as a whole. A few hearty individuals again volunteer this arduous task.
Further corrections are done as the reports come in. Pictures that don't appear, articles with mistakes, nodes that don't follow the proper sequence, all of that has to be checked.
Then one day, one glorious day...it is done, or as done as we can make it. With great apprehension we send it to Matrix. Now the real test will come. The gamers will have it in their hands.
All those many hours of work have come to a point of no return. I assure you that this is a rather unnerving experience. Will they like it? Did we do it right? Does it work okay? Will there be problems?
We do everything we humanly can to eliminate any difficulties and then prepare for the worst.
Telling you all this is not a cry for sympathy. We do it because we want to do it. I just wanted to give you an idea of what is involved in creating and producing a mega campaign.
Its always a relief and a pleasant surprise when the gaming community responds as you have done.
Thank you very much. you great gamers make it all worthwhile for me and the teams with which I have been involved in creating MCNA and MC-W. We appreciate all of you.
Wild Bill
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 In Arduis Fidelis Wild Bill Wilder Independent Game Consultant
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