Here's where I'm going to delve into the roleplaying game that I help to write, which is Witch Hunter.
I can't really claim that this is "my" game, because it isn't. First of all, it was a group effort to produce. Also, if anyone can claim most of the credit, that would be Henry Lopez, who was the lead developer and had the overall vision for the project.
I'd worked for game companies before, but those were for established worlds with established backgrounds. Here, I was given an opportunity to sit down with a development team at the outset and help create an entire gaming world from the ground up. That was tremendously exciting.
With Witch Hunter, we started with pure brainstorming. It literally began with the lead developer (Henry Lopez) saying, "You know, it would be cool if we could have a game like this." It was his idea, his baby. The vast majority of the credit needs to go to him.
Of course, we contributed ideas and tossed concepts back and forth. It was a collaborative effort, but one person, that being Henry, had a leading vision. It’s been my experience that the most successful projects that are both creative and collaborative usually have one person at the helm who has a broad vision. That one person works with everyone else to help their ideas become part of that vision. It’s a group effort, not a dictatorship, but in the end you have to have someone being the “guide” so to speak.
So how did it all begin? Henry had always wanted to do a Solomon Kane type of game, that was set in the American Colonial period that featured both horror and swashbuckling. He got the idea from watching the movie Sleepy Hollow, but was further inspired by the writings of Robert E. Howard and his Solomon Kane universe.
Being gamers we all knew that there wasn't any types of games like this in the industry. We briefly looked at Northern Crown and determined that our game didn't have too much crossover with what was offered there.
Henry proposed his idea to his business partners and the development began. He contacted writers that he knew and had worked for him before - like Sean Molley and Brian Schoner. They, in turn, recommended that I be put on the project, because they knew my authorship from the Living Death Campaign that was run by the RPGA.
What was funny was that no one up at Paradigm knew that I had published material for Ravenloft, which would have actually given me more street cred. Instead, they wanted to hire me based on work that I was doing mostly for fun and assumed would get lost through the years one day. You never know what writing of yours will come up for review! So even if you’re writing fan fic or just putting something out on the web for fun, do a bang up job of it.
Henry contacted everyone, went over his initial ideas, and then we all went to a focus group meeting in Atlanta to hash out the game. We went about setting down the basic precepts in which the game would be founded.
This is where I pause and tell you that a larger company like White Wolf does things a little differently. When it comes time to consider a new line, say for example, Promethean, the developers all send in memo explaining their ideas for the next upcoming product. The proposals are all reviewed and examined, and the next idea is chosen from that pool. I don't know the details of how a proposal is accepted and finalized, but I highly suspect it is by consensus, with their CEO arbitrating the process.
So that you understand, most meetings of game companies are with people sitting around in their T-shirts and jeans. And just about everyone at the table will be friends. There’s no large power-point presentation, or people wearing power-ties. I’m sure the experience would be very similar to many peoples’ here of just sitting on couches, coming up with cool ideas.
Next time, I'll talk about building the game from the ground up.
0 comments:
Post a Comment