Of board rooms, free lunches and the essence of awesomeness
True Sacrifice
I remember when I first started working in an office. I would see my managers swanning off to sit in meetings all day long and be jealous of them bunking off from work. Then I joined the despicable ranks of management myself and I realised the truth. Nothing has the ability to be so ridiculously spirit crushing, so soul sappingly tedious as endless long meetings.
Therefore my heart goes out to the heads of the development team who, recently spent pretty much spent the whole of week in an ongoing series of gruelling meetings. Do they do this for fun? No, they don't. Do they do this because of the charming view from the boardroom? Of course not. Do they do it for the free lunch?
Well. Probably not. The food was damned tasty.
They do it because, quite simply, that is what is takes to put together a plan of such awesomeness that entire nations will weep at its brilliance. A plan that will make grizzled veterans of wars so vicious and bloody that all sense of humanity has been shredded away doff the caps in respect. A plan that will be brought out and dusted off in centuries to come and cause beings sitting in their cities of crystal and candyfloss, with intelligences vastly superior to our own, to sob into their diamond edged sleeves at the realisation of how far they have fallen from greatness.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen... I am referring to the next phase of development for the glory that is Football Superstars.
Cue drum roll.
Cutting through the meet of the matter
I was up in Nottingham with these fine folks for a couple of meetings at the start of what was to be a very important week. The overall aim was to lay down a plan for the development of the game over the next few months, looking at which areas required the most attention and what we really wanted to achieve.
The first meeting was a quick one hour job during which we were going to load up the game, have a quick play through and get an overview of the experience of a new player. Four and a half hours later we were done. Why did it take this long, you ask? The reason is because we went beyond a cursory overview and ended up tearing the whole thing apart, looking at what worked, what could be improved and throwing in any new ideas we had for cool additions. This included character creation, the tutorial, the opening areas of the world and the surrounding NPCs. Basically, charting the progress of a new player from sign-up through to the end of their first game.
We already had a pretty good idea of what we were looking for thanks to our own observations and the feedback we had received from you guys, but even so it was excellent to get so many different thoughts and opinions. There was a massive amount of gaming experience in that room and it was inspiring to see the passion involved. I occasionally come across disparaging comments on the forums about Devs who don't care, or don't know the game. How very wrong they are.
Once we finally had that done and out of the way (and bumped another meeting waaaaaay back), we moved on. Actually that is a lie. First we had the tasty, tasty lunch. Then we moved on.
The second meeting was the one I was really there for and it saw you guys take centre stage. I was presenting all of the feedback which you've been giving for the last few months, with a great deal of focus on the feedback following the patch: what you were happy with, what needed more work and what you were disappointed by. Thankfully I had started prepping this a few days earlier as you guys are a fairly verbose bunch when it comes to giving your opinions. I had a whole heap of feedback, requests, demands and complements to deliver. All of it was digested, not one thing glossed over and everything incorporated into the task wishlist. That was another couple of hours right there.
The Definition of Epic
By this time we were getting close to the end of the day. We had one more thing to go through, and that was to take everything we had been discussing and put together a list of all the things we want to see happen over the next few months.
O to the M to the G.
The list is huge. Mammoth. It dwarves mountains and blots out the stars. You thought that was night falling? Wrong, that was our list eclipsing the sun. However, what is most impressive (if something can be said to be more impressive than an excel file blocking out a ball of fire 865,000 miles wide) was how readily everyone accepted the challenge. There were no shirkers, no-one took a step backwards and the only tears were those of a proud parent looking upon something wonderful.
Oh how I wish I could tell you of the joys which are to come. Alas, I can't just yet. I was there for just one day, but the Dev leads have been at it all week working out the exact details of the whats, the whens and the hows.
Rest assured that I'll be giving you all an update soon on what you can expect to see, and you'll even have a chance to hear it straight from the mouths of the insane geniuses who will be making it all happen.
Until then, be strong. Your patience will be rewarded with great big huge piles of win.
I give you my word.
