Questions and Answers for the Community

Thursday, June 03, 2010

There have been a lot of questions from the community over the past few days. I wrote some long responses in the forum at RCWorld and am reposting them here so that everyone can see them.

Below is an excerpt from the thread at RC World. The entire thread can be found at http://rcworld.de in the Web Forum under "Players Talk". (There is no direct link)

EXCERPT:

Wow guys, I turn away for 24 hours and I'm 17 posts behind. Glad to see we are getting the conversation going.
First off, I knew there would be a lot of questions and I think Bane and others are bringing up some very valid points and concerns. I hope to be able to address them.

First - Who is this guy?

Just a bit more about me and Geographical Media first. I started playing planets when it first came out and as a teenager I was running a BBS to host planets games. That got me interested in technology and I went to university to get a computer science degree and then worked professionally for years as a web developer and senior manager at some fast growing companies before founding Geographical Media. For the past four years the company has been developing scalable web technology that runs in the cloud. Our company is a small company with just a couple of full time staff and a large network of other consultants, designers, programmers, marketing people etc who we bring in to achieve the goals of our projects. We will be activating this network and hopefully expanding it to complete the VGA Planets remake.

This may sound crazy, but I personally have started to rebuild VGA Planets 2 times already. The first time was about 6 years ago when I still had a job. I put in a lot of effort, but discovered how large the project is. Ask any of the guys who've built a Planets client like VPA, or PCC how many hours they put in. I couldn't do it in my spare time and I scrapped the project.

The second time was about two years ago, this time, I thought, I'm just going to build a web based client and use the current host program. I poured through Stefan Reuters wonderful documentation and completely decoded all the files in planets, figured out how to read RSTs and how to produce TRNs and I almost completely built the client in 3 months. What stopped me in the end, was a few things, one, I ran out of money and needed to do some paid work, two, I couldn't build a really great client with all the boundaries imposed by the host program and lastly, faced with at least 2 more months of work, I felt overwhelmed by the possibility that the community may not accept the work and it would not ever get used. You never heard about that project despite a major time investment, and I'm guessing there are many other VGA Planets projects by other people that none of us have ever heard of as well.

So here I am on try number three. This time I'm going about it from a completely different angle. The big thing I have learned in the past few years running Geographical Media is that no one person can succeed on their own. They need support. I can't rebuild VGA Planets on my own. I need you, the VGA Planets community to want the project to exist, and to help me achieve it. Otherwise, its only my dream and idea and thats not big enough for this game.
It may seem a little crazy at first glance to ask for money up front to build it. But if you look at the rewards at kickstarter, I am not just asking for donations, I'm giving at least as much value back. What I'm asking you is to show your support to the project by pre-paying for some of your registration fees so that I know you'll use it when its live and so I have a little seed money to help offset the costs involved with the project. A top web developer gets paid between $80000 and $120000/year, this is a 4-6 month project and will involve a couple of developers, including myself and some graphic artists.

The $10000 I hope to raise is just a small amount of the cost of developing this new version. But its enough for me to know that you are supporting the project. Geographical Media and I are now in a position to make the rest of the investment required.

More questions answered in the next post...

Ok, a little more money talk.

Here's a story I've heard a couple of times:

"I paid $30 for my VGA Planets version from Tim Wisseman 15 years ago, I've been playing ever since and I've never had to pay another penny. Why should I now have to pay $30/year!?"

Well, there is no doubt that Tim has given us all a tremendous gift with VGA Planets and that pricing structure. I also paid $30 for my WinPlan version back in 1995 and so did my Father (Forger).

The trouble is, that after we all paid for the game there was now no way for Tim to make any more money on the project. Instead he had to build NEW games like VGA Planets 4. So instead of just making version 3 better he tried to sell a new game and that never really took off and so in the end he stopped developing. No one can work for free, not even our hero Tim.

Its only through the incredible efforts, time dedication and financial contributions (servers, bandwidth etc) of hosts like Ricki that we've all been lucky enough to play all these years.

Unfortunately, we've all seen one host after another finally give up, despite their love of the game.

What we need to do is build a stable foundation for VGA Planets for the future and the first step is financial stability. We all need to contribute a little to keep the game we love alive.

I thought a lot about how much that would cost and felt that by charging $30/year, thats $2.50/month (less than the cost of a beer or a starbucks coffee) we will be able to achieve that stability, and have some money left over to reinvest in marketing our great game so that new players start to join.

So where is all that money going to go?

First off, its going to go toward ongoing development of the project, bug fixes, new graphics, small changes that the Game Council thinks will improve the game etc.

Second, its going to run the centralized servers. I'll talk more about this in my next post about the technology I intend to use but all games are going to be run from centralized, load balanced highly available servers which will be up 99.999% of the time.

Third, I have already said to Ricki and some of the other long time hosts, some of the money will go toward sponsoring them. I will provide free servers and hosting to any of them that want to take advantage of that. Also, we can have a lot of fun by giving t-shirts, posters, stickers and other cool prizes to hosts like RCWorld so they can give those prizes away to winners of big games, or the most reliable players of the year. That will help maintain and attract new players to the hosts.

Lastly, we will invest some of the money in advertising and public relations to market the game to new players. I believe by making the game easy to join and doing a little advertising we can get a lot of new players excited about Planets.

One last addition. I mentioned this on Kickstarter but will put it in here.

Any player will be allowed to join and play the game for FREE.

However, free players will be subject to the same restrictions that Tim put in the original Shareware version. Players can then upgrade to a "Registered" account and get all the benefits of the full game.

So new players will not be required to pay until they have tried the game and are ready to upgrade.

Alright, here will be my last big post for today.

What technology will we use and what will that mean to the game play?

This project will be a complete rewrite of both the host services and the client program we use to play the game.

The games themselves will exist on a centralized set of servers with modern databases (MySql).

Players will play at one of the host websites. When they come to the website, they will sign in and then they will see their current games listed on the web page. When they click on one of their games the game will load right in their browser window. There will not be any plugins to install or anything, the game itself will just be a web page using the new technology of HTML5.

When you click on a game you will see your home screen right in your browser with your messages and VCRs. You will then be able to load the star map, ships etc. right inside the window. It will feel a lot like it does now, but the difference is you will just be on the website of your host and playing from inside your browser instead of running your separate program for planets.

The game will use another technology called AJAX, so that you will not ever have any screen refreshes so it will feel very similar to how it feels when you play now.

By making the game playable in a browser we will get a few really big advantages and one disadvantage. The advantages include:

1) The game will run on ANY computer which has a modern web browser. So it will run on your PC, your MAC, your linux box and it will also run on you iPad and even your iPhone (though the screen may be a little small).

2) Nothing will need to be installed on the computer to play the game. So new players don't need to download anything or install anything they just sign up and play. This also means you can play on any of your computers. So you can play your turns at home, check your VCR's at work, or even log in and play your turns when you are travelling in an internet cafe.

3) You will not ever need to receive, unpack or pack and send in your turns. Since you will be interacting directly with the host server the turns will be automatically submitted. All you will need to do is check a box that says, "I'm ready" and the system will submit the turns when all players have marked that they are ready or the host time comes.

Ok, so whats the disadvantage? The disadvantage is that you will need to be connected to the internet to play. This is a real disadvantage. But I feel it is far overcome by the advantages. This is VGA Planets for the 21st century... and in the 21st century we are nearly always connected.

When players play the game at the host site, the host site will actually be connecting with the central servers to bring up the game. This will take the pressure off of the hosts to keep the game servers always running and allow new hosts to be able to create hosting sites a lot easier. We will work with the current host sites during the making of the game to set them up to host the new games when it is ready.

As for the actual game itself. The game will still be the same game, but with cool looking ships and transparent ion storms and other nice features.

Any changes to the game will first be approved by the new "Game Council". See the reward details at Kickstarter to see how to become a member of the council. First on the agenda will be the possibility of some small changes to the ship list, and I will propose the addition of a 12th race.

I have already done a few prototypes of the new HTML5 technology to ensure that we will be able to make the game this way. There is one sample here (works best in Google Chrome, Firefox or Safari): Sample Echo Cluster

I have also done some work on a prototype VCR system but its not ready to be posted.

Here is great example of HTML 5: BenJoffe Canvascape

I am totally open to your questions about the plan and as I said on Kickstarter I welcome the help of any programmers or artists who want to participate in the project.

Use the contact form on vgaplanets.nu or the message system at Kickstarter if you want to contact me directly or post your questions here.

Comments

There are 7 comments - add your comment

Marius - Tuesday, June 08, 2010 9:43 PM

If I'm going to have to pay every year to play, why should I also pay now to support your fund raising? I don't get it.
I would financially support this project if that was to be released as freeware, not otherwise.

joshua - Tuesday, June 08, 2010 9:47 PM

Hi Marius,

If you support the project now you will get free registered time to play the game when it is live as well as some other rewards.

By asking you to "pay in advance" we are able to gauge the players real interest in developing a new game. Its a very expensive project, so we need to ensure that people are invested and interested enough to put down $5, $20 or $50 in advance to see it happen.

Marius - Wednesday, June 09, 2010 4:25 PM

Hi Joshua,
thanks for the answer. If I understand correctly this project will start only if you raise $ 10.000

What happens if you raise only 5.000? Would everything die there? If so would the donors get their money back since the development would not proceed?

Joshua - Wednesday, June 09, 2010 4:28 PM

Hi Marius, the way the Kickstarter fundraising system works is an "all or nothing" system. So if the $10000 is not reached, then the money pledged by the backers is not charged on their credit cards. So if we only reach $5000, we will get nothing, and none of the backers will be charged.

More details can be found here: http://www.kickstarter.com/he lp/faq#AllFund

James - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 12:58 PM

Hi,
I have a couple of questions before I participate in this:
- Type of host: I remember that in the 90s most communities I played in were annoyed by bugs, drawbacks and lack of configurability of Tim's original host. So they switched to phost, an open-source portable host where you can configure everything. What kind of host will you create? If it's based on Tim's host rather than phost it would definitely be a step back. Maybe you can even use some of phost's code, check it out at phost.de
- Will it be possible to set up the host on my own server?
- A subscription based model, even though increasingly popular, is something that, in my opinion, conflicts with the VGA Planets spirit of the 90s. Come up with something else, maybe a one-time-fee, an ad-supported site or whatever. But I doubt that you will draw lots of old VGA-planets fans to your project with a subscription model. I also think that asking for $10k funding for something that will then be subscription based and thus carry the potential to make you rich is a bit too much. In that case you should carry the risk (and the $10k) yourself.

Pobs - Monday, August 16, 2010 9:38 PM

I've not played VGAP for quite some time, and I'm excited to see this.

As for the charging monthly, then that makes total sense.

$2.50 / month !! Anyone who complains at that is crazy, there are some games that got so good that people probably would have paid $2.50 per turn at times. Like you said its the price of 1 coffee a month. Too manyn people used to downlaoding everything for free these days I think!

The only thing I dont like is the permanent connection bit. Planets for me was often done locked away on my laptop whilst traveling or sat in airports and therefore the permanent connection is a bit of a pain, especially in a game where deadlines are so critical.

I see many comments about hosting, and I guess that many people liked to host and gained the feeling of ownership of their games. Some thought needs to go into allowing people to host, and configure their games exactly as they want to, afterall its the enthusiasm about new games that draws people in. You need the hosters, and a good method for hosters/new games to be visible and advertised by the people who set them up.

Off to look at the fund raiser now. Sounds like a good deal to me.

ProHobo - Tuesday, December 07, 2010 10:39 PM

It is pretty simple - I am a long time VGAP guy and haven't played in a couple of years.

1. I would pay to build a iphone/ipad app.
2. I would pay to build a nice web-based app as well.

The problem if I did this - I would want to be the major equity owner in the project, thus receive future revenue for that effort - and investment risk.

I am a partner and owner of a software company and there are huge risks to building and deploying any software (time, materials, and of course money). Thus I would only consider venturing down this road if it is worth the financial effort of such a task.

It would most likely be a licensing agreement with Tim - with a payment of a net % revenue stream or a one time upfront fee or a combination of both.

Of course putting up the money is one thing, managing the project is another. I would (as the primary investor) would want full control and decisions over the deployment of such a project. Primarily to avoid cost over-runs and dreaded scope creep - which I believe plagued VGAP4.

Reality - it is pay-to-play.

I would also need to know the logistics of such a project. How many current players, how many potential clients, how much could one charge, expected reoccurring costs vs. revenue. It's all about the margins...

Tim built it out of love, the next person needs to make it work financially.

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