Re: How not to be still-born
You'll notice, however, that there are a fair few gaps in the , as it was a real struggle to keep myself motivated (particularly as interest from the rest of the team waned, leaving me doing more and more of the work myself).
At the beginning of the second year, I invited players to a closed beta test, and their participation and feedback made it far easier to keep motivated. My concern with making the mud public was that people would try the mud and discount it forever based on an early version - but the invite-only solution seemed to work pretty well, revealed a lot of issues that would have required a lot more work to fix later on down the line, and gave me the drive I needed to start pushing development forward once more.
After a few months, the closed beta testers lost interest (which was fair enough, as there wasn't much to do), so I create a separate spin-off game (with a different name) from the same engine - with no classes, advancement, mobs, or explorable world, it only took me about a week to create. The resulting pure PK mud felt like a far more complete game, and was able to maintain a small playerbase, which was enough to keep me motivated until the real game was sufficiently fleshed out that I could go into open beta.
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