MUD Meeting Notes from 3/3/12

[Gatz]

The MUD Meeting that went down on Saturday (3/3/12) was pretty good, had a fairly decent turn out. Some of what we discussed I left it to players to further post on the forum. No one had any crazy issues to address, so I'm left to believe that most people were happy with my adjustments to the game or at least not upset enough to complain. Below is a really off the cuff summary of what was mentioned in the meeting.

I outlined a short-term road map for NarutoMUD which was getting the Myth/Legacy system up and running by the time my birthday rolls around (March 19th). The goal is to have about 5-10 skills go in, including passives, just enough to let people get a bit of a taste, then slowly add more over time. I want to be realistic with things and honest, that there is a chance some skills people are dying for won't be in at launch of Myth, but will trickle in over time.

I mentioned the contest, which has been officially announced, about the first person to hit level 300 in each Village will get a special skill dedicated to them. I think everyone is excited about this. Not much to say, except good luck to the people who will try to grind like mad to get it.

Before I can really get cracking on Myth/Legacy, I want to give Cloud a little bit more skill-wise, but not much. I have 3 skills roughly in my head I'd like to give them before I call it quits for now, and then they'll get more love late March/early April, once Myth is in. Right now, they are tenatively Taijutsu, Ninjutsu and Ningu skills, but if it starts to go long, I'll cut it off anyways. When I put in Cloud, I warned early Cloud-nin that they would be sort of the gimpy village for awhile, and then they'd get a lot of love.

In terms of areas, Gai and Madi are working their butts off making neat zones. Since these are their first, I think there might be some hang-time making sure we QA them well, and do a limited trial for players to make sure they really fit with NM. However, my goal is to have at least one of these guys have their area out by the 19th. Then our focus shifts to Chuunin/Jounin missions. I believe Zetsu will be free to help me actually design and implement the Chuunin Exam and Jounin Exam, but I want to make sure they are fun and provide some form of challenge. For now, they exist in concept form only.

So, that is about it. I would really love to get about 3 more builders to help, because once we get around 25-50 Chuunin and 25-50 Jounin missions in, I want to shift gears to doing primary villages and gearing up for the Beta launch. I realize some people reading this are going to start freaking out and getting pumped, but there is still a mountain of work left to do. The majority of the task will fall on the heads of our builders. With only 2 (plus Zetsuke), it'll take probably 2 years to be ready and with a team of 5 (plus Zetsuke) we could probably make it feasible to launch by the time of our anniversary this year or plan some staggered release where we open a new village every other month.

However, any kind of beta talk is best saved for a later time and the only type of discussion I'd like to have on it is about our builder staff needs. Also, I'd like to hire on at least 1 RP Imm and 1 Historian, who'd primarily work to help with room descriptions and fixing typos and other misc tasks like writing helpfiles.

Anyways, thanks for coming, if there is enough interesting in doing another meeting, I'd be game for April or May, when Myth is ready to launch, I plan on doing a big party to debut it, so stay tuned for that.