[Divunal-author]author efficiency (my two cents)

[Michael Dartt]

A few notes:

First of all, I commend Glyph, Dave, and James for putting so much hard
work into TR and Divunal.  It's great to have such a dedicated core of
developers.  I erred in not mentioning this in my letter; it would have
lessened the causticity a bit.  What I was taking issue with was that the
dedicated core needs to be more open with its developments so that the
rest of us can have an easier time creating things, which will distribute,
and thus ease, the load on everyone.

And, even though I come from a Mac background and bitch about poor
interfaces and documentation all the time, I understand how difficult it
is to motivate oneself to write it, even if it's just a couple of
paragraphs.  It feels like you're having to do the development all over
again, just in a different language.

I didn't mean to say that all of this would be easy, just that it's
necessary.  

On to a few specific points:

> I also concur that one of the number one things we need along with
> better documentation is a real TODO list. Something heavy-duty
> (allowing people to "sign up" for jobs, mark tasks as completed) and
> web-based is required. I'd like to volunteer to work on a cgi script
> for such a list.

	And I'll try to get ProjectMaster (a piece of project management
software I've done some design on) started ASAP...though that'll probably
be when school starts.  ::growls about incomplete work::

 
> As far as Michael's point about rather having one good writer than two
> programmers, I have to disagree. Since the key to divunal is supposed
> to be the puzzles, what is necessary is programmers who are also good
> writers, a rare breed. Few interesting puzzles can be created at this
> time without some sort of coding.

	Sure, ideally we'd have people who are talented in both areas.
However, it's likely that we'll have people whose strengths are weighted
one way or another, and it's probably going to be easier in most cases to
code a puzzle than it will be to design it.  In any event, I think we
should be open to having people who are "only" writers/designers on board,
and just let them know that they won't necessarily have people at their
beck and call.  It'd be cool, though, to have one or more people designing
things and posting their designs, letting coders grab them as they can.
Less down time that way.

	I can't really comment on the Avalon thing, since I haven't had
the time to look over their site, but I should probably mention that my
conception of Divunal is something more along the lines of a pen-and-paper
RPG, only a bit more autonomous.  (In that the computer takes care of all
the "rolling" and such.)  What killed my addiction to MUDs was the utter
lack of a goal with depth--killing for the sake of killing.  As I
mentioned in my other letter, I don't want us to fall into the same trap
with puzzles.

	On that note, I think we should add something to the TODO list: a
mission statement.  It'll be a lot easier to design things, including the
plot and the world, when we know what effect we're trying to achieve.


	Work's over.  Gotta go.



--Mike