Post by tomasina on May 8, 2007 21:20:29 GMT -5
In response to the many people who have asked us how we were able to create the Spider-Man guide, our Editor-In-Chief put together the following thoughts. Although this is posted in a seperate string, I thought it was important enough to be made into its own string, and designated as a sticky.
Enjoy,
Tomasina
A Guide to Making an Unoffical Guide
Workers: We found this to be a challenge. The Project originally started out with only 3 people: Garry Timmons, Clint Freeman, and myself. Since I was outraged about Marvel's cancelling of the game (without giving it a decent chance) and due to my love of Spider-Man characters, I was made Editor-In-Chief of the project. I was reluctant to commit to the idea at first, but Garry and Clint encouraged him and convinced him that, that with their help I could do this.
Everyone pitched forth their ideas for characters and content to be featured. I quickly determined that we would emulate the style of the original writers and determined what content would be appropriate, etc. One of the first assignments we tackled was the characters (which turned out to be a mistake, but I'll tell you about that later.) Each person was assigned specific characters to write up. The write-ups would be sent out to the other 2 editors, and each person would provide feedback, and ideas on what they might do differently. Characters were passed back and forth several times, before finalizing what their actions/modifiers would be.
At some point during the character process, our original artist disappeared (stopped responding to email, etc.) and we realized that to continue we would need to find another artist. That was worrisome, but fortunately at that point we came across Danny Wall. He turned out to be a real Godsend. I soon realized that his talents went beyond graphic arts ability, and made him a fourth editor along with Garry and Clint. So soon it became the four of us, creating stats, passing along characters, discussing ideas on what content should be featured in the book. Since Danny was also a talented writer, he was assigned many of the first articles that were written. He also designed the web site.
During our character creation process we often addressed whether or not new Actions/Modifiers were needed for specific characters. Sometimes we realized that a new Action needed to be created. Other times, an old one would suffice. (Out of all of the characters created, it was Sandman that became the most challenging. Nobody was sure how to interpret his powers into the game system because it was a combination of Stretching, Density Control, Shrinking AND Growth. We wanted to make him strong enough to take on the Thing, but not so much of a powerhouse that he would immediately take out Spider-Man. At one point we gave him the new Body Weaponry Modifier, but later took it away because this ability could also be simulated with Stretching, and in his case, provided him with too many free stones.)
Another character-related problem that we faced was the team generator, which I was assigned to fulfill. Previous supplements featured many new team-oriented villains in these sections, but I was not able to find enough of them to give this section the bulk that it deserved. (Among the teams to be featured: The Spider Slayers, The Enforcers, The Maggia) Then, I remembered the Adventure Generator that Evan Jones had once mentioned in Garry's MURPG chat room. I asked Evan's permission to use it. He graciously told me that although the material was only in outline form, we were welcome to use it.
Eventually real world priorities took over and Clint and Garry had less time to devote to the project. At that point it became just Danny and myself. Overwhelmed with the amount of work still to be done, we realized that we would need more help to finish the project. I started to advertise for volunteers. Danny was writing, editing, and doing Graphic arts, I was writing, editing, and methodically ensuring that the style of the original books were being upheld in the flavor of the language, graphics, and content. (I know I have frustrated poor Danny many times in my quest for "perfection". We enlisted the help of many along the way; A couple of graphic artists assisted Danny (although he always bore the brunt of the graphic work), as well as writers that were assigned specific articles. Some articles passed through several different writers, started by one writer who would "disappear" into Cyberspace, then passed to the next. At some point we also found a marketing person who helped us to get set up on Bullseye's forum, so that we could spread the word about our project more efficiently.
That was when Tom Salmond entered the picture. I was having a hard time juggling the work of having to keep interest alive, answering questions in a timely manner, as well as the time-consuming editing, revision, and writing processes. I needed someone who would take a very pro-active approach to marketing, to answer all of the questions that he could on his own, (or inform me when he couldn't), write announcements, and keep general interest alive. Tom excelled in all of this, always keeping an informal, personal dialogue going with the fans serving as a mediator between editors and fans. He has also assisted with some writing and editing.
The last person we enlisted toward the end of the project who has remained with us is a proofreader named Derek A. Domike. Derek has done an excellent job of proofreading and spotting technical errors, which has also definitely helped to free up some of my time. My only regret regarding him, is that we did not find him sooner!
So the moral of the story:
In order to produce a guide, the driving force (the editor in chief) needs to be someone who has a lot of drive, the ability to stick with the project, and a lot of focus to oversee all of the small little details, assigning/editing projects, quality control, etc. Creating a guide is a VERY time intensive task which took years and a LOT of hard work to accomplish. Be prepared to put in a lot of time and effort, if you want to make your Guide a reality. The Editor in Chief also needs to prepared for people (especially online) to come and go, so it's important to ALWAYS keep searching for new talent (which also helps prevent burnout of the talent that is already there.)
If you want to produce a book that is graphically pleasing as well, you will also need a good graphic designer. (If he can design web sites, like Danny Wall, even better!) It seems that good graphic artists are hard to come by (and to keep). I lucked out BIG time with Danny wall because not only was he extremely talented and multi-faceted, but he had the devotion and focus to keep working on the project through to the very end.
Tom Salmond and Derek Domike were also essential, because the tasks that they performed helped free up my time, so I could better accomplish my duties as Editor-In-Chief. Ideally, the Editor-In-Chief wants to have as much of an overview as possible on the project. The more detail-oriented the people are working under you, the easier it becomes for the Editor-In-Chief to focus on the big picture. The more that the he/she is able to focus on that, the less chance there is for things to slide through the cracks.
We've made a lot of mistakes along the way, but we've also learned a lot along the way. Our first mistake, as mentioned earlier, was starting with characters. We were so eager to dive in that we began creating/designing characters before we had a good sense of the book's content. What wound up happening is that we didn't have as many pages as anticipated in other sections and had to expand the character section (which meant moving characters around since they are listed in Alphabetical order, and reformatting pages). This was quite an imposition on Danny, who bore the brunt of the work patiently. In retrospect we should have had the other sections completed and designed BEFORE we started working on the characters. That way it would have been easy to add or delete characters as we saw fit, based on the number of pages we had to work with.
So here's are the steps that I would suggest for an Editor-In-Cheif who undertakes a similar project:
1) Find Talent. Advertise online for writers and artists who are familiar with the MURPG system and tell them what you are trying to do. For artists, get character samples to see what they can do. Don't turn away ANYONE that wants to help. Even if their talent doesn't seem up to par, there may be another area that they can help you with.
2) Discuss content with talent and compile a MASSIVE master list of characters that may appear in your Guide. (But don't bother statting them up or designing them at this early stage, like we did!). Another thing we did not give much thought to is that your character list should include a wide variety of characters. There should be a good mix of Intelligence based characters, Power Armored characters, Magical characters, and characters that will highlight new Actions and Modifiers. (The lack of variety in our own publication was a mistake that we realized only after much of the character selection and design was well under way.) You should also think about which characters have Vehicles/Equipment since you will also want to feature a variety of these in your Appendix.
For more ideas on what kinds of sections could be included, see the MURPG table of contents for previous supplements. Remember, this is a collaborating process, so the more involved that people are in the project, the more enthusiastic they will become about seeing it through to the end.
As for the designers, at this stage you can also have them design the cover page, back cover page, splash page, table of contents, and all of the page borders for the different sections.that give you that MURPG feel. Designers (and design assistants) can also begin to search for and scan any pics that might be appropriate for the sourcebook.
3) Create a preliminary table of contents (with a plan of page length for each feature) and begin to assign the articles to be written. Try to be flexible with your assignments. Some sections may interest some writers more than others. If more than one writer is interested in working on the same section, let them collaborate on it together. It's important to try to keep everyone interested and happy with what they are working on since nobody is getting paid here!
Once each section is complete, it needs to be proofread. Usually at this stage, I would do that myself, but it doesn't hurt to have a proofreader do that, as long as the Editor in Chief is sure to give the article a read-through before it gets sent to the designer. The designer will then design the pages, adding graphics as needed.
One of your goals in writing and design is to match your table of contents "plan" regarding the length of each feature, but be prepared to adjust your table of contents. (Sometimes, no matter how talented he may be, your graphic artist may not be able to stretch out or condense content enough to fit into the page length allotted for the section.) Once the designer is done with it, he/she should send it back as a PDF to the Editor-In-Chief.
At that point I usually gave a quick read-over to check for mistakes and checked alignments of graphics and text, as well as sent to our proofreader Derek to take a more detailed look at it the grammar itself. When mistakes were found by myself or Derek, I'd tell Danny the page, column, line # and what needed to be corrected.
In the early days, I would often find mistakes, give them to Danny to correct, only to find more mistakes later on. This meant Danny had to go into the original document to correct the mistakes, save it as a PDF, then go back in to Photoshop later again, correct "new" mistakes and save as a PDF again. To avoid frustrating your graphic artist, as I did, you really need to examine your document thoroughly the first time around so that you can send out ALL of the corrections at once.
4) You can begin to work on narrowing down your character selection once you begin to complete the sections. At that point, you should have a pretty good idea of how many characters you will need to use in order to fill your book to the standard 94 pages.
Again, when finalizing character selection, you want to be sure to choose characters who are going to allow you to highlight New Actions/Modifiers/Magical Actions/etc. You also want to highlight a good selection of Intelligence based characters, as well as Power Armored Characters. You will also want to make sure that your character choices are going to provide enough Equipment/Vehicles to be featured in the Appendix.
And if you've got an adventure, you should definitely include the main characters/villains that were included in that. If you're doing a team generator as well, give plenty of thought to which characters will go in there, and which can which can be listed in the main roster. Yup. It's plenty to think about!
5) Finish the sections that need to be completed. Assign characters to different people and discuss as a group. As with the sections assignment, it's important to be flexible in all of your character assignments. Some people may not know much about certain characters, and prefer not to work on certain characters because of lack of familiarity, others may request specific favorites. You ALWAYS receive better quality when the person who is doing the work is interested in what they are doing.
6) I previously didn't mention anything about marketing, because that's a tricky one to handle. On the one hand you do need it to enlist your volunteers. It also helps because it keeps your workers motivated and enthused when they realize that it's not just you depending on them, but also number of enthusiastic fans who just can't WAIT for this thing to be done.
However there is a flip side to all of this attention. Once you let the cat out of the bag, fans will want to see the finished project. If they feel that you're taking too long, or if you seem oblivious to their needs, or if you ignore their dialogue, then they may start to loose interest. The more time you you, as Editor-In-Chief, personally invest in communicating with the fans, the less time that you have for your work of quality control, people management, and tying up loose ends.
Tom always impressed me because he always took initiative, and I didn't have to "nag" him to keep on top of things. In fact, sometimes when we were taking a bit too long in getting things completed, it was Tom who would email me just as a helpful "reminder" that the fans have been waiting a while, and we really should make a new announcement or something to keep interest alive. Tom also brainstormed and found innovative ways to keep dialogue going and people interested. Those are the kind of traits you will be looking for when you're ready to market your guide.
We made many mistakes along the way (and I know I've often worked Danny and Tom's last nerve with my constant, and not-always-so-nice, insistence on "perfection"), but I also think we did do a few things right...
I think that keeping things true to the feel of a MURPG sourcebook definitely helped boost the popularity and quality of the finished project. (Showcasing our work and what you all had to say about it was also a factor in getting hired on my current job as a production assistant at the media company that I now work for.)
And, although the contest prize has stirred up a bit of controversy, I still believe it was a good way to keep people talking and enthused about the project through to the end (which is why we created a bonus contest after our "last" contest, which ran through to the day of the final release.)
So, anyway, those are my thoughts on creating a guide. If you have any more questions, or if you need any further help, please feel free to ask. We would love to be of assistance to you.
- Mike
Enjoy,
Tomasina
A Guide to Making an Unoffical Guide
Workers: We found this to be a challenge. The Project originally started out with only 3 people: Garry Timmons, Clint Freeman, and myself. Since I was outraged about Marvel's cancelling of the game (without giving it a decent chance) and due to my love of Spider-Man characters, I was made Editor-In-Chief of the project. I was reluctant to commit to the idea at first, but Garry and Clint encouraged him and convinced him that, that with their help I could do this.
Everyone pitched forth their ideas for characters and content to be featured. I quickly determined that we would emulate the style of the original writers and determined what content would be appropriate, etc. One of the first assignments we tackled was the characters (which turned out to be a mistake, but I'll tell you about that later.) Each person was assigned specific characters to write up. The write-ups would be sent out to the other 2 editors, and each person would provide feedback, and ideas on what they might do differently. Characters were passed back and forth several times, before finalizing what their actions/modifiers would be.
At some point during the character process, our original artist disappeared (stopped responding to email, etc.) and we realized that to continue we would need to find another artist. That was worrisome, but fortunately at that point we came across Danny Wall. He turned out to be a real Godsend. I soon realized that his talents went beyond graphic arts ability, and made him a fourth editor along with Garry and Clint. So soon it became the four of us, creating stats, passing along characters, discussing ideas on what content should be featured in the book. Since Danny was also a talented writer, he was assigned many of the first articles that were written. He also designed the web site.
During our character creation process we often addressed whether or not new Actions/Modifiers were needed for specific characters. Sometimes we realized that a new Action needed to be created. Other times, an old one would suffice. (Out of all of the characters created, it was Sandman that became the most challenging. Nobody was sure how to interpret his powers into the game system because it was a combination of Stretching, Density Control, Shrinking AND Growth. We wanted to make him strong enough to take on the Thing, but not so much of a powerhouse that he would immediately take out Spider-Man. At one point we gave him the new Body Weaponry Modifier, but later took it away because this ability could also be simulated with Stretching, and in his case, provided him with too many free stones.)
Another character-related problem that we faced was the team generator, which I was assigned to fulfill. Previous supplements featured many new team-oriented villains in these sections, but I was not able to find enough of them to give this section the bulk that it deserved. (Among the teams to be featured: The Spider Slayers, The Enforcers, The Maggia) Then, I remembered the Adventure Generator that Evan Jones had once mentioned in Garry's MURPG chat room. I asked Evan's permission to use it. He graciously told me that although the material was only in outline form, we were welcome to use it.
Eventually real world priorities took over and Clint and Garry had less time to devote to the project. At that point it became just Danny and myself. Overwhelmed with the amount of work still to be done, we realized that we would need more help to finish the project. I started to advertise for volunteers. Danny was writing, editing, and doing Graphic arts, I was writing, editing, and methodically ensuring that the style of the original books were being upheld in the flavor of the language, graphics, and content. (I know I have frustrated poor Danny many times in my quest for "perfection". We enlisted the help of many along the way; A couple of graphic artists assisted Danny (although he always bore the brunt of the graphic work), as well as writers that were assigned specific articles. Some articles passed through several different writers, started by one writer who would "disappear" into Cyberspace, then passed to the next. At some point we also found a marketing person who helped us to get set up on Bullseye's forum, so that we could spread the word about our project more efficiently.
That was when Tom Salmond entered the picture. I was having a hard time juggling the work of having to keep interest alive, answering questions in a timely manner, as well as the time-consuming editing, revision, and writing processes. I needed someone who would take a very pro-active approach to marketing, to answer all of the questions that he could on his own, (or inform me when he couldn't), write announcements, and keep general interest alive. Tom excelled in all of this, always keeping an informal, personal dialogue going with the fans serving as a mediator between editors and fans. He has also assisted with some writing and editing.
The last person we enlisted toward the end of the project who has remained with us is a proofreader named Derek A. Domike. Derek has done an excellent job of proofreading and spotting technical errors, which has also definitely helped to free up some of my time. My only regret regarding him, is that we did not find him sooner!
So the moral of the story:
In order to produce a guide, the driving force (the editor in chief) needs to be someone who has a lot of drive, the ability to stick with the project, and a lot of focus to oversee all of the small little details, assigning/editing projects, quality control, etc. Creating a guide is a VERY time intensive task which took years and a LOT of hard work to accomplish. Be prepared to put in a lot of time and effort, if you want to make your Guide a reality. The Editor in Chief also needs to prepared for people (especially online) to come and go, so it's important to ALWAYS keep searching for new talent (which also helps prevent burnout of the talent that is already there.)
If you want to produce a book that is graphically pleasing as well, you will also need a good graphic designer. (If he can design web sites, like Danny Wall, even better!) It seems that good graphic artists are hard to come by (and to keep). I lucked out BIG time with Danny wall because not only was he extremely talented and multi-faceted, but he had the devotion and focus to keep working on the project through to the very end.
Tom Salmond and Derek Domike were also essential, because the tasks that they performed helped free up my time, so I could better accomplish my duties as Editor-In-Chief. Ideally, the Editor-In-Chief wants to have as much of an overview as possible on the project. The more detail-oriented the people are working under you, the easier it becomes for the Editor-In-Chief to focus on the big picture. The more that the he/she is able to focus on that, the less chance there is for things to slide through the cracks.
We've made a lot of mistakes along the way, but we've also learned a lot along the way. Our first mistake, as mentioned earlier, was starting with characters. We were so eager to dive in that we began creating/designing characters before we had a good sense of the book's content. What wound up happening is that we didn't have as many pages as anticipated in other sections and had to expand the character section (which meant moving characters around since they are listed in Alphabetical order, and reformatting pages). This was quite an imposition on Danny, who bore the brunt of the work patiently. In retrospect we should have had the other sections completed and designed BEFORE we started working on the characters. That way it would have been easy to add or delete characters as we saw fit, based on the number of pages we had to work with.
So here's are the steps that I would suggest for an Editor-In-Cheif who undertakes a similar project:
1) Find Talent. Advertise online for writers and artists who are familiar with the MURPG system and tell them what you are trying to do. For artists, get character samples to see what they can do. Don't turn away ANYONE that wants to help. Even if their talent doesn't seem up to par, there may be another area that they can help you with.
2) Discuss content with talent and compile a MASSIVE master list of characters that may appear in your Guide. (But don't bother statting them up or designing them at this early stage, like we did!). Another thing we did not give much thought to is that your character list should include a wide variety of characters. There should be a good mix of Intelligence based characters, Power Armored characters, Magical characters, and characters that will highlight new Actions and Modifiers. (The lack of variety in our own publication was a mistake that we realized only after much of the character selection and design was well under way.) You should also think about which characters have Vehicles/Equipment since you will also want to feature a variety of these in your Appendix.
For more ideas on what kinds of sections could be included, see the MURPG table of contents for previous supplements. Remember, this is a collaborating process, so the more involved that people are in the project, the more enthusiastic they will become about seeing it through to the end.
As for the designers, at this stage you can also have them design the cover page, back cover page, splash page, table of contents, and all of the page borders for the different sections.that give you that MURPG feel. Designers (and design assistants) can also begin to search for and scan any pics that might be appropriate for the sourcebook.
3) Create a preliminary table of contents (with a plan of page length for each feature) and begin to assign the articles to be written. Try to be flexible with your assignments. Some sections may interest some writers more than others. If more than one writer is interested in working on the same section, let them collaborate on it together. It's important to try to keep everyone interested and happy with what they are working on since nobody is getting paid here!
Once each section is complete, it needs to be proofread. Usually at this stage, I would do that myself, but it doesn't hurt to have a proofreader do that, as long as the Editor in Chief is sure to give the article a read-through before it gets sent to the designer. The designer will then design the pages, adding graphics as needed.
One of your goals in writing and design is to match your table of contents "plan" regarding the length of each feature, but be prepared to adjust your table of contents. (Sometimes, no matter how talented he may be, your graphic artist may not be able to stretch out or condense content enough to fit into the page length allotted for the section.) Once the designer is done with it, he/she should send it back as a PDF to the Editor-In-Chief.
At that point I usually gave a quick read-over to check for mistakes and checked alignments of graphics and text, as well as sent to our proofreader Derek to take a more detailed look at it the grammar itself. When mistakes were found by myself or Derek, I'd tell Danny the page, column, line # and what needed to be corrected.
In the early days, I would often find mistakes, give them to Danny to correct, only to find more mistakes later on. This meant Danny had to go into the original document to correct the mistakes, save it as a PDF, then go back in to Photoshop later again, correct "new" mistakes and save as a PDF again. To avoid frustrating your graphic artist, as I did, you really need to examine your document thoroughly the first time around so that you can send out ALL of the corrections at once.
4) You can begin to work on narrowing down your character selection once you begin to complete the sections. At that point, you should have a pretty good idea of how many characters you will need to use in order to fill your book to the standard 94 pages.
Again, when finalizing character selection, you want to be sure to choose characters who are going to allow you to highlight New Actions/Modifiers/Magical Actions/etc. You also want to highlight a good selection of Intelligence based characters, as well as Power Armored Characters. You will also want to make sure that your character choices are going to provide enough Equipment/Vehicles to be featured in the Appendix.
And if you've got an adventure, you should definitely include the main characters/villains that were included in that. If you're doing a team generator as well, give plenty of thought to which characters will go in there, and which can which can be listed in the main roster. Yup. It's plenty to think about!
5) Finish the sections that need to be completed. Assign characters to different people and discuss as a group. As with the sections assignment, it's important to be flexible in all of your character assignments. Some people may not know much about certain characters, and prefer not to work on certain characters because of lack of familiarity, others may request specific favorites. You ALWAYS receive better quality when the person who is doing the work is interested in what they are doing.
6) I previously didn't mention anything about marketing, because that's a tricky one to handle. On the one hand you do need it to enlist your volunteers. It also helps because it keeps your workers motivated and enthused when they realize that it's not just you depending on them, but also number of enthusiastic fans who just can't WAIT for this thing to be done.
However there is a flip side to all of this attention. Once you let the cat out of the bag, fans will want to see the finished project. If they feel that you're taking too long, or if you seem oblivious to their needs, or if you ignore their dialogue, then they may start to loose interest. The more time you you, as Editor-In-Chief, personally invest in communicating with the fans, the less time that you have for your work of quality control, people management, and tying up loose ends.
Tom always impressed me because he always took initiative, and I didn't have to "nag" him to keep on top of things. In fact, sometimes when we were taking a bit too long in getting things completed, it was Tom who would email me just as a helpful "reminder" that the fans have been waiting a while, and we really should make a new announcement or something to keep interest alive. Tom also brainstormed and found innovative ways to keep dialogue going and people interested. Those are the kind of traits you will be looking for when you're ready to market your guide.
We made many mistakes along the way (and I know I've often worked Danny and Tom's last nerve with my constant, and not-always-so-nice, insistence on "perfection"), but I also think we did do a few things right...
I think that keeping things true to the feel of a MURPG sourcebook definitely helped boost the popularity and quality of the finished project. (Showcasing our work and what you all had to say about it was also a factor in getting hired on my current job as a production assistant at the media company that I now work for.)
And, although the contest prize has stirred up a bit of controversy, I still believe it was a good way to keep people talking and enthused about the project through to the end (which is why we created a bonus contest after our "last" contest, which ran through to the day of the final release.)
So, anyway, those are my thoughts on creating a guide. If you have any more questions, or if you need any further help, please feel free to ask. We would love to be of assistance to you.
- Mike