ll be a writer or developer – yes, my writing samples are on the way! – but for now, from my outsider perspective, I think that the process works. Does it work PERFECTLY? Uh, no… But that’s why we constantly improve. Onyx Path does constantly improve, which is great!
I also hope I didn’t come off as negative towards ArMs creation process- my point was certainly always with the consideration that all game companies and most game lines can find working processes that are right for them. In fact, they have to. There is no perfect publishing model that works across every company in this business.
I think you may be right; that is why I am watching what happens with great interest. We’ve changed the way we do things for ArM before, and we could do it again. It’s not only true that there is no one method that’s right for everyone, I don’t even think that there’s one method that’s always right for one game line.
I think one of the things that confuses people, or at least me, is not understanding what publishing terms mean. Like, when a book is in redlines, I have no idea what that means and where in the process it is. Maybe somewhere you could post a flowchart or something which explains this?
These are the stages of a book as seen from a developer’s point of view:
* Developer writes an outline
* Developer hires freelancers to write
* Freelancers turn in first drafts
* Developer redlines drafts — going over the first draft, marking up corrections and alterations needed.
* Freelancers turn in final drafts
* Developer does another pass, making sure the book hangs together — if the fiction has a character doing X, can they do X? Also, compiles art notes.
* Book goes to editing. Art notes go to Chaney.
* Book comes back from editing. One last developer review to make sure ducks are in a row, then text goes to layout.
* Layout circulates a proof, containing text and art (or art placeholders) for review and to fix things like “page XX”s.
Thanks!
Keep making great art. Keep making great books. Keep taking your time. It’s working :).
Thanks!
To add something I mentioned in the above posts –
One reason I decided not to string out the conversation with Rich was that I did not want to clog up the Monday Meeting blog with the conversation. Since their is now a dedicated blot post I feel better about expanding out some of my points and also linking some of the stuff that other posters here have talked about.
1) I have a query regarding Rich’s comment of “We can not revitalize these game lines by prioritizing speed and shoveling out crap.”
I agree with his sentiment completely here completely. I’d like to link it to another point I feel is tangentially related to this issue.
I am curious about the contrast between the old WW way of publishing, which was very deadline restrictive and the new OP way of publishing, which is very deadline light.
WW pushed a lot of books in a year to a pretty tight schedule and while we can talk about the rough edges of some of the books (and agree that OP’s approach has overall meant an increase in book quality) I would not call any book published under the old WW schedule model “crap”. I was mainly a Masquerade fan in the early 2000’s and some of the lines best books came out at that time – Guide to the Sabbat, Guide to the Camarilla, Chaining the Beast etc. All of these were produced under the old “deadline heavy” model and they were all great.
Hence some of my cognitive dissidence on this issue. The old WW method produced some great books but had its flaws. The new OP method has produced some amazing books, but also has its flaws (from a consumer/fan point of view). Surely a middleground between the two could provide the theoretical best-of-both-worlds? Tighter dead-lining/scheduling to keep up a slightly faster pace of release and gain momentum in the marketplace, but enough wiggle room for the devs that an extra layer of polish on the product can occur?
Basically, my original point was not to “flip the switch” and have OP change policy to a very sales aggressive, deadline heavy business model. It was that maybe a little more structure/focus on the business side of OP as well as the artists side of OP might help mitigate some of the issues being discussed here.
Once again, I’m a complete novice when it comes to this area of business. So this is all just best-guess/observational theorizing.
2) I’m curious about the actual deadlining process itself. Rich mentions that everyone involved in a project has deadlines to meet. If they need extension then they get them. Rich voices his support for letting these people have the time do practice their art be it writing, drawing or editing.
How are deadlines worked out in regards to this? More importantly how seriously are deadlines taken by the creators? How seriously are they enforced? What sort of thing would actually cause a person to get called up on not meeting deadlines?
We’ve heard about people having family or health issues and having to leave books. That’s understandable, reasonable and entirely human and I don’t think anyone with a scrap of empathy would take issue with these things. However, I’m curious about the other end of the spectrum here as well.
Rich speaks about devs justifying delays to “get things right”. That’s also a good thing, as it means we get high quality products. However, I’m curious about if there is ever a point where something being “just right” is too far? We’ve all known perfectionists after all that sometimes go over the top, is their a mechanism in OP to cope with that?
3) As a reply to Rich’s comment about “When did I bring up being the only employee in this conversation? When did I say that we have abolished schedules and deadlines?”
I did not mean during the blog conversation in question. Simply that in the past the mainly freelance nature of OP’s employees has been brought up in regard to scheduling issues. I felt it sounded a bit like a “go to” answer for issue that are often repeated.
As my previous point mentioned I’m curious about the second half of Rich’s response. As while OP obviously does have a schedule of a sort, I was unaware before Rich mentioned in that OP was using deadlines beyond their general scheduling.
As an aside, I do believe that the “Schedule” page on website is kinda misnamed and may be the root of some of the fan frustration and issue that reoccur over delays and such. I think something like “Current Projects” or something would be better, as schedule inherently lends a temporal element of working towards a time/goal. This gives people a certain impression of release dates and such, rather then simply viewing the upcoming books as projects being worked on that will be released when they are finished.
Obviously a temporally structured schedule makes sense from a basic structural point of view. Its a format people are used to, familiar with and find easy to grasp. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a better layout style, but I’m sure something could be found.
With those responses out of the way, I’d like to move on to some extra points –
1) In regards to the Monday Meeting updates and transparency of process and such.
As Ascension mentions a lot of the updates can be simple repeats. Which is fair, its unreasonable to expect huge movements on each project in a weeks time. Likewise, Rich is always great at replying to comments and such about various projects that people ask about.
I think maybe furthering transparency more might help though alivate fan frustration though.
I’ve asked about several projects over the last couple of months. I’ve noticed that sometimes Rich has to respond by explaining that he gets the update info of Rose and Rose gets it off the devs. So if the devs don’t give her anything really then that’s the end of the story. Which is a little frustrating, but once again an understandable occurrence. If he’s not got the info he can’t give us an answer. Likewise, its unreasonable to expect a dev to give a substantial update every week about project development. These people have real lives after all.
Still, even backlogged info might be useful to provide a more zoomed in view on things. For example, Book of the Deceived for Mummy the Curse has been in the redline phase for about 6 months and is a book I’m eagerly awaiting. Two months ago a little extra description got added to its update for about 3 weeks (possibly more actually) about a writer having to drop out so a whole section needed to be written and redlined from scratch. This was frustrating news, but it made the delay understandable to me.
The issue for me was that I’d seen other books of comparable type (splat book) and length (between 100 and 200 pages) come into and out of the Redline process in the 4 months period that predated the writer delay. So I’m wondering why some things seem to get “fast-tracked” while others sit in one section for months on end and no one seems to do anything about it. I wanted to know why the book was seemingly “delayed” even before the writer issue. Yet the same word stared out at me every Monday update from December onward –
“Redlines”
The issue with Rich not having the info to really expand on