Guns Of Icarus Online
Off-Topic => The Lounge => Topic started by: Lord Dick Tim on March 01, 2013, 04:58:51 am
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Ok, decided to put this topic in the lounge since its not rp, but more like talking about rp out of rp yet acknowledging we need some kind of rp.
So in another thread, which I'm not going to link cause it's a pain to do with the iPad, a fellow forum rat expressed a desire to see more of the news paper articles that appeared in the early days of the game. Dialogue flowed, people pledge commitments and now I'm here calling it out and saying, well, what are we going to write about?
Obvious targets are the Cogs league and the Bounty boards for starters. Now Presentation is a big thing, and it really boils down to just how tacky do we want to be?
Another topic, as I ramble along with this disorganized stream of thought, is how to approach the developers as characters in their own world. For example, an art team member could be interviewed from the perspective of a shipwrights, or an engineer well... Like an engineer. Their answers could remain largely unaltered because the questions where done from an in character perspective.
Ex.
Q. What kind of wood did you use in the construction of the Goldfish
A. We used a pine for the look of the grain, as well as the softer color.
Same goes for questioning crew and captains.
Q. What went threw your mind Zill, down by 3 points and suddenly your ally looses communication(disconnected) with you on the radio?
A. Ha, well, I thought that's it, we're dead. The cloud whaler was bearing down hard and her glorious guns and awesome captain just came right down on us like a vengeful god of the heavens.
So, thoughts, ideas?
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What do people want to read about?
I'd suggest two broad themes, the state of the game and game-related fiction.
State of the game
Match reports - Cogs, events, informal leagues, challenge matches (clan vs. clan, clan vs Muse), duels
Patch notes - bare facts, opinion on direction the game is taking, anticipated effects on established builds
Screenshots - arty, illustrative
Strategy and tactics - ship builds dissected, team builds, map discussion (eastern vs. western routes on Canyon, going over the mountains on Fjords), tutorials (counter-sniping, dealing with fire damage)
Duels - issued and accepted, "Lord Dick Tim, your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries, I challenge you to a duel in Canyons!"
Game-related fiction
Game lore expanded
Fan fiction submissions
Clan fiction
The state of the game stuff is what interests me, but getting regular metagame onservations and collating them could be a chore after a while. If Muse could be persuaded to provide (non-commercial) game stats could be useful and interesting - ship usage, weapon usage, ammunition usage - if these are collated. 30% of players choose Goldfish, 12% of players choose Spire; global hit percentage on all guns is 30%; 42% of all match outcomes can be predicted by the sum of player levels on the team; Hwacha use is up 30% following last weeks patch whilst Mercurys are down 60%, etc.. A lot of pivot table action to produce snippets of data.
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Awesome post pickle, your stream of thought flows better then mine.
Strategy and Tactics
I see this article being done in the arm chair general fashion, old salts writing editorials about past battles or current ones along with observations on general tactical advantages or disadvantages one has by taking that route, useing that weapon. It would take the form of a short essay, possibly only three paragraphs long. It would even fit in quite well as just observations on key parts of a battle, or situational responses. IE, knowing what to do when your opponent opens up Queens Gambit.
Collating data on battles was something the news teams in EVE found rather easier then expected, as battle where frequent and all the various MARS members had to do was follow the forums and kill boards then shoot tells or emails to Corporation leaders for comments on the battle if they hadn't attended themselves. Point by point accounts where rarely written about, unless it was a tournament or a very large battle, so the reports where generalized to belligerents, losses and accomplishments.
Here I think it would be easy enough to spotlight a random few matches once a week for a "News from the wastes!" article. Ask the players permission, establish belligerents and create a small fictional story for the conflict.
Game cannon
This is going to be a bit of an odd area for the player end. Our developer friends in their incredible efforts to get the game out and playable included enough flavor text and lore to allow for a feel of the game. But right now it's a painting without definable borders, and I hate mucking about with somebody else's creations when they have most of it still in their head, but not shared to the public yet.
Nothing says we can't just plow ahead and ignore/change errors later as more lore is expanded on. I'm just concerned one of my crazy ideas will catch on again and destroy some private part of the world before it was ever born.
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imo, the above posts represent everything that could essentially be written about. So how do we want to go about doing this? have people volunteer to write in the different "Departments" like a real news room, or just get a hodgepodge of submissions and take lemons and make lemonade to speak. Also, how do we want to format this? do we want to make it a jpg like the originals? or try to make it forum based? if the former, we will need to create a generic template, and will probably have to implement a charater limit or something on submissions...
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I think it needs about six people to act as the editorial group, ideally one should be from Muse. They need to take a week or two behind the scenes to work out the format and frequency, and then come back with details of what can be submitted and how.
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Well, as much as I'd like to join in this venture, consequently, I've got two RP threads to maintain, but what I can contribute is this nifty world map Zill found from the old forum to help me. Should be useful for you guys as well.
http://i.imgur.com/jVubc.jpg
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I think it needs about six people to act as the editorial group, ideally one should be from Muse. They need to take a week or two behind the scenes to work out the format and frequency, and then come back with details of what can be submitted and how.
I'm all for helping out... though I'm sure from the original post, that Muse would only be able to provide limited assistance on this due to time constraints
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Alright, if we are going to do this, then we will have to iron out a couple of things.... First of all, let's go ahead and get an editorial team put together... Would anyone like to volunteer?
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I'm in for it. Matter of fact I was trolling GOI earlier looking for certain people to interview, but I got sucked in to a series of matches where I debated the finer points of the lumberjacks use. Needless to say, the lumberjack works like a dream again with the correct ammo.
I've also been looking at lead in questions, when addressing balance issues pose the question like this "How do you feel about the new safety feature on Flak Cannon ammo, the loss of close range fire power must have changed your strategy".
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I'm in for it as well. I could look around the forums and find some treads that look interesting and try to make something out of that. Or anything you guys put me into.
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Needs a gossip section that tracks actual gossip, for instance, Is Spasmic Monkey stepping down from head of SMAC?
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I'll join in on the editorial team
I also think one of the first articles should be on all the different teams/clans that are forming.
From the top of my head, Gentlemen, Murder of Crows, Pastafarians, SMAC, The Ducks, The Dandy Lions
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I'll join in on the editorial team
I also think one of the first articles should be on all the different teams/clans that are forming.
From the top of my head, Gentlemen, Murder of Crows, Pastafarians, SMAC, The Ducks, The Dandy Lions
This is a great idea... maybe get a comment from each of the leaders of said clans... So then we need to go over layout, and whatnot... do we want it to be multi-paged, or just one like the anchor is now? IMO, I like the simplicity of the one page documents, but if we do that, our articles will have to have set charater limits. Plus pictures could also affect how much we can write on one page... Mult-pages can give us the freedom, but do the people want to read that much? and how would we present it.... I was thinking of maybe doing a companion site, but it's been so long since I've touched web dev, that I'm not sure if I can do that :P.... (If you can't tell, I'm just spewing out the ideas that float in my head... sorry for the wall of text :P )
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Clara hasn't chipped in yet.. Muse needs to give a nod if it's to be official, or unofficially leak some of the brand artwork - which it should be doing anyway to provide support to the community to promote the game.
Producing it as a PDF is quite straight forward if Muse will host, in which case I suggest basing it on two sides of A4 to give us a back page. Text can be accepted in pretty much any format and the whole assembled in Word, Publisher, Open Office, etc. I think going with PDF is the easiest route to flexible formatting. It's also pretty much platform independent (we don't need to worry how it looks on different screens because we're producing it to b printed).
I'm in, once Clara says one way or the other whether or not Muse will support.
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Well I'm sure if asking we could get access to the used parts of the Broadside Anchor, but I don't see how MUSE should support more than that.
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Well I'm sure if asking we could get access to the used parts of the Broadside Anchor, but I don't see how MUSE should support more than that.
The basic minimum support that Muse should provide is something like the asset kit provided for GW2 (https://www.guildwars2.com/en-gb/media/asset-kit/) by arena.net
The media pack for GOIO is missing some fundemental basics for community generated promotion. There isn't even a "clean" version of the logo available that I've found.
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Ok, lets insanity check where we are right now
- Community Gossip
The forming and dispanding of prominent clans in the game. The coming and goings of Muse Staff, patch notes and release using an RP perspective. EX: Flak Cannon given a fuse timer/ Anvala Safety authorities have added a timer to Flak ammunition in response to the recent catastrophe at Acme Weapons Manufactures. Ammunition will now be inert on loading and will have a second long flight time before going live. - Contests/Events
Listing of events, upcoming along with faux holidays. A good grab would be using prominent holidays from the earlier WW1 era that would still be celebrated or some non-American holidays that would add diversity to the scene. For example, St. Davids Day a traditionally Welsh celebration which is happening today. - After Action Reports
NEWS FROM THE FRONT! Snippets of information from duels that are happening in the game, could be completely random. - Bountys
A listing of the current bounty season results, short stories surrounding particular bounty heads, interviews of bounty hunters. - Sporting Events/The Cogs
Here we given an account of the after action of sporting events, with links to streams.
Muse Support
Honestly, we don't need any MUSE support in this endeavor, it can be purely our own. Open Office is a free to use Word Processor and can be downloaded at OpenOffice.org By using the spreadsheet to create a template the articles can then be turned into a PDF in Adobe Reader. We can supply our own art assets and screen shots such as End scores, match pre-fits for selected teams, pictures from the bounty board.
Setting the Concrete
If you're serious, and you really want to get in this boat, send me a PM on the forums stating what area you want to get involved in and what kind of contributions you want to, can, or would like help getting together. I'm sacrificing my sanity to be the focal point of the intel gathering for now until we start to see who can actually lead this ship out into open waters.
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Just to make sure you don't get anything wrong about SMAC's situation, here are the facts:
-Spasmic Monkey is stepping down from his leadership position and giving GoIO a rest for a (long) while, since he's lost interest in the game.
-Hizumi is looking likely to grab the spot at the top of the clan, but it's not yet official.
-The clan is not dead. We still have a few active players, but others have been silent for quite a while.
-We're trying to assemble a team for Cogs, but it's been several days since we last discussed it and only 4 or 5 players have expressed interest.
That should be enough for a gossip article.
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Well I'm sure if asking we could get access to the used parts of the Broadside Anchor, but I don't see how MUSE should support more than that.
The basic minimum support that Muse should provide is something like the asset kit provided for GW2 (https://www.guildwars2.com/en-gb/media/asset-kit/) by arena.net
The media pack for GOIO is missing some fundemental basics for community generated promotion. There isn't even a "clean" version of the logo available that I've found.
I guess they haven't come around to doing such a thing, since it isn't IMO that extremely important.
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I got 3 PMs so far and have set a task for each person and either they will go, alright YA! or say, wtf LDT I wanna do this instead. Either way, it'll still be awesome. Sunder donated that bit for the gossip and Pickle I've asked to work on a format. Two others are working on editorials and whats left is a highlight on the bounty board. I'll shoot a pm to some of the bounty heads for a bounty article.
We also need screenshots. Mostly first person, with some third person. I could gank them from steam or have some user submitted ones. If you have anything completed you want to send me either PM me or send an attachmemt to the_kraikken@yahoo.com with the subject line, GOI Newspaper.
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We also need screenshots. Mostly first person, with some third person. I could gank them from steam or have some user submitted ones. If you have anything completed you want to send me either PM me or send an attachmemt to the_kraikken@yahoo.com with the subject line, GOI Newspaper.
Anything you want captured in screenshots in particular?
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Medium weapons and medium weapons firing. Perfect screen shot would be over the shouder of a gunner hitting a target in the practice range.
A close up of a ships hull with the SMAC clan tag printed on its hull too, narrow shot. That be good for the gossip portion.
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I'm sure somebody can PhotoShop SMAC's name onto a ship. It would probably look crap if I tried to.
I'll do my best to find good screenshots.
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I'm producing a mock-up concept them at the moment, if anyone wants to PM me text for a story then please do so.. I've generated quite a bit just from forum gossip.
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This idea is progressing quite well behind the scenes.. ..
If any clans would like to submit news (change of leadership), match reports (beaten a rival clan? beaten the Muse team?), adverts for new members, etc. please PM me the details. About 50 words is ideal. At the moment we have a little gossip collected from the forums speculating on SMAC and King's Gambit - any official news might have a small chance to replace the scandalous rumours we're otherwise embellishing with sordid speculation.
If any of the Muse team want to play the role of Deep Throat and spill the beans on the details of ******'s saucy hotel room affair with ****** after the team's post-Steam Sale party, please drop me a PM (confirmation about the chicken, and is it true about the bellboy and the wet suit?). Or just to leak some details of forthcoming builds, new maps or details of the new airships and when they'll be released.
If anyone else wants to submit a short item along the same lines, these are also welcome.
There is room in the layout for a letters section, ideally 50-150 words, if you have anything to say about the game or the game-world in general.
There is the possibility that there is room for fan art and fan fiction submissions. Contact me or Lord Dick Tim if you have any material of this type.
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this would be a really cool way of letting us see patch notes.
and in other news. there has been a ban on the incindiary type rocket manufactured for the banshee, and as a result. all banshees will be required to use the outdated *normal rockets
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this would be a really cool way of letting us see patch notes.
and in other news. there has been a ban on the incindiary type rocket manufactured for the banshee, and as a result. all banshees will be required to use the outdated *normal rockets
How about putting that as a request in a letter to be published in the newspaper? ;)
- I'll pencil you in for 50 words.. ..
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well that would probbly have to be handled by whoever writes up the patch notes in the first place.
though it would really depend on the relise times of the paper and the relise times of patches
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Looks like you guys are off to a good start with this. :)
Just in case you're still waiting for a word from me, I say go ahead and make this your own...I still might bring back the Broadside Anchor someday, but I'd like to see something completely new created by you all.
As far as a fansite/community kit, Spoon is right and while we'd love to put one together someday, it just isn't something we've had a whole lot of time for. Heck, we still have a hard time tracking down things for our internal use!
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To add to the SMAC gossip...
We've lost another prominent player. I won't say who, since I respect them and don't know if they want to be mentioned, but it's not Hizumi. Maybe they'll they'll you themselves, but that's their choice.
Nobody's responded ever since I tried getting SMAC talking about Cogs, so I'm a bit worried about whether we'll even survive as a clan. I think that I'm going to see if anybody else wants to take me on their team for Cogs.
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Oh, and I'm leaving SMAC. You can throw that in.
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I was just thinking, when this newspaper is up an running, think I would be able to read new editions out on my stream? Could be interesting. Or I could even record it and throw some old time news effect in.
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I was just thinking, when this newspaper is up an running, think I would be able to read new editions out on my stream? Could be interesting. Or I could even record it and throw some old time news effect in.
THIS JUST IN! BREAKING FLASH NEWS REPORT!
FIRESTONE JUST FARTED. HIS MIC WAS LIVE. SHAME ON THE RALPH WIGGUM.
MORE AT 11.
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I see no issue with reading out segments on your stream, he'll even ribbing the writers or articles a bit would fall squarely into the kind of immersive environment this endeavor is set out to foster.
The more community jabber we get back and forth on things relative to guns, the deeper the world can become on its own.
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If you guys need anything web related, I'm your guy. Websites are what I do.
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There may come a time, we will keep you posted jazza.
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A quick update.. the first issue is now about 95% there. Final editing and formating should be finished over the weekend. It's in pdf format, the one uncertainty at the moment is how to distribute it.
We are still accepting for the first edition (but get them in today/tomorrow):
- Screenshots (anything that replaces our own efforts!)
- Short gossip snippets up to 50 words
There will be a letters feature in later editions, please send them to me or Lord Dick Tim by PM for the time being until we sort out an editorial email address.
We are now taking articles for the second issue, there's a half-column article in the first issue describing what we're looking for. In response to a query, yes we will accept coursework articles and can stretch the word length limits by a couple of different means to accomodate that. If you're interested in this, PM me directly with your ideas.
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Oooo course work, hadn't even considered that!