📌 Plus Adventure: community RPG project

Sunday. August 05, 2018 - 1 min

In August, Melissa and I launched a community project to create an RPG, called Plus Adventure. It took off very well (our Discord server has 250+ members!) and we spent most of that month, plus a decent chunk of the following months, working on it.

To be clear, I say this not because I want to promote my sister (although I do) - but Melissa did most of the heavy-lifting in regards to development, publicity, etc. This was her project, first and foremost.

What I was involved in was the organizational side of things. And actually, that was what I found the most interesting about this project: the administrative challenges it posed (dubbed “a whole knot of management spaghetti” by Melissa). Some of the questions we grappled with included:

• When so many people are involved, how do you coordinate the workflow?
• How do you attract talent?
• How do you make sure good ideas are heard?
• How do you keep people interested?
• How do you let them down gently, if the situation calls for it?

We didn’t quite figure everything out, and ultimately we put this project on hold. The other big reasons were that the codebase grew increasingly tangled and the two of us lost interest in the fandom. However, we learned valuable lessons about community-building, team management, and code architecture.

I’ll end this entry with a couple silly conversation snippets from the Discord. Both of us have made good friends through this project, which is always a plus (ha) in my book!