Eric Heimburg’s Project Gorgon is absolutely fascinating, and I make no apology for featuring it as often as I do.
He’s trying to do the impossible – create an independent, full-featured, 3D MMORPG that’s (in some senses at least) competitive with the best of the genre. And as he does so, he’s blogging the entire process, and has been doing so for years now.
Today he’s got another massive update post, and whilst it doesn’t focus on any single aspect of his task, it’s a really, really interesting insight into all the thousands of details, skillsets and tasks he has to get right to make this enormous undertaking bear fruit.
“After talking with some players, I’ve decided that there really needs to be some better hints to the content. I mean, it’s an exploration game, and I want you to just go poking around and find cool stuff. But a lot of people have been aggressively trained not to do this by other games in the MMO genre.
So I’m implementing the “Stuff To Do List” real quick. Basically it’s just a check-list of stuff to find in the first couple of zones. It’s not a complete list, but enough to hopefully teach players that there’s tons more stuff out there.
The danger is that once they complete that list, they’ll assume they’ve done everything and quit. So do I keep making more checklists? I guess that’s reasonable. The later ones will be kind of vague, just so you know there’s stuff out there.
But I still don’t want to put everything in a list… so I need more advanced ways to convey that there’s lots of stuff out there for you to find.”
Read the rest of Gorgon Grab-Bag Update
