Hitting the ground

This is my first post to this development blog. I intend to use this blog to keep track of my work, my roles, etc etc. Project management, basically.

So, first things first, we need to discuss the project. The project description says "To make an out-of-the-box experience with DarkStar." Making an out-of-the-box experience means we have to make a whole MMO, minus all of the artistic stuff (although a few artists would be nice). This means the server back-end, and a simple client. To reiterate, the game client is to be very simple. It needs to demonstrate, however, as many capabilities of the server as possible. The point of this is to attract developers.

Secondly, we need to discuss project pre-game. Jim Waldo is going to be showing up in a few hours in order to discuss his system. Paul, Robert, and I all need to go find a lot of research on the subject. MMO architecture technical documents are at the forefront of the research battleground. In addition, we need to dig through lots of modern MMOs, in addition to digging through data compression schemes. We need to dig through them from a technical perspective, pick out the features of each, and make a list of supported features. Proving that DarkStar is capable of anything already on the market is a logical first step. A logical second step, therefore, is to prove Darkstar can do some things that current games cannot. The simplest way to excite people is to show them something cool and shiny they've never seen before. Once Jim Waldo gives his presentation, I will post an update to this entry in order for it to more accurately reflect what's going down.

In short:

1. Form a team structure, and discuss in-team semantics.
2. Discuss pre-game research strategy, and points of interest
3. Conduct pre-game research.
4. Put forth a proposal.
5. DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT

Until next time.