Change is in the Wind
Posted by: Ruel Knudson in Developer Blog, E-RPG General DevelopmentSorry for the batch of quiet there. Changes are happening with Ironwood and that means busy busy for yours truly. We are moving some things around to different sites, and we have some products almost ready for press that we will be releasing this month (hopefully). So, in this entry I thought I’d run down some of the site changes, and why they are happening. Next entry will host the information on new products.
The first big change is the relocation of E-RPG content to the new site just for that content. The new site is www.sagasrpg.com. Piece by piece the contents of the current IronwoodNexus are getting transferred over. As I do this, I am trying my best to make sure that the sites are linking to each other. So, if the community is moved (and it has) and you click the community link on the nexus site it will take you to the community page on the new site. Now, if you click a link like Developer Blogs on the new site (which hasn’t been move yet, it will take you back to the old site.
Some parts of both sites will get locked down for new content. You won’t be able to post on certain content pages, you won’t see any new projects listed, and new products won’t get listed until after they move. This is simply to make my life a little easier when transferring the content.
You may be asking why? Why fix something that isn’t broken? Well, in my opinion it is a little broken from a site admin perspective. However, it isn’t so broken that I couldn’t have fixed the issues where they sit. The real reason is that Ironwood is actually done with its trial run. You see, we publish rpgs, but that isn’t all we want to publish. Publishing Sagas was a way of testing out the Ironwood format. We needed to know how to make some things work, if they would work, and make sure we got the kinks ironed out (no pun intended) before we moved on with our true purpose.
You see, Ironwood is like a development studio/agency. When we put this together we ran wild with ideas on things we could do with the print on demand and other resources we have. We really had no limit to what we could do except for one thing. As diverse as our talents are, no one had all the pieces necessary to pull off a project, even with our collected efforts. We had to find help. To do this we came up with an idea.
The idea is simple. A person has an idea. If the idea will ever go to market that person is going to need talent to get the product finished. However, if you are like me, you may not have the money to hire an illustrator up front, or a programmer. Instead, we would get our artist interested on two simple principles:
1. Artists will work on projects they are passionate about. If the project is good, artist will know this and respond.
2. A product will be better delivered by someone who has a personal vested interest in a project rather than a person who got paid to finish the job.
#1 is pretty obvious. It is number 2 that needs explaining. Number 2 means that I can commission a guy to do some art. He will like doing the job, may even love it. however, at the end of the day he just got paid and walked away from the job.
Now, Ironwood actually does it a bit different. For an Ironwood project an artists gets a percentage of the profits. The artists is part owner of the product in a sense. Having ownership of the work does something a bit differently to the job. It isn’t another task. It isn’t just another piece in your portfolio or a credit for your resume. This is your work.
At the end of the day a product will succeed or fail by the collective efforts of all people involved. Because each of these people involved in production worked on it on the idea that they will only get paid well if sales do well, their efforts would reflect this. It is a pretty big jump from the normal every day way business is handled. And the truth is, as an artist myself, it is much more fair to the artists. The artists gets paid well for success. As opposed to this, a person working on a project that gets paid a flat rate gets the same paycheck regardless if the product is a commercial success or an absolute flop. However, the same artists will not reap any fiscal reward for a commercial success. That’s why there was a writer’s strike for television this year. Artist tend to agree. They should get paid for their efforts, especially when their is a great success to their efforts.
And so we did this for all Sagas books. Everyone gets royalty checks. If you see an artistic credit, that person gets paid only royalties. The system is working, and it works well.
So Ironwood is going to open it up a bit. It is going to allow all types of products and anyone with ideas to build their own project teams. Basically a project lead (the person who will organize the artists and determine the royalties) comes up with the project, posts a basic outline of the project, and gets things rolling. Interested talent can browse the projects and apply to work on it. If the project lead can agree on the terms they sign a contract and get cracking. The final product can go for sale on ironwood storefronts.
Pretty simple. And it is not all that new. All over the place you can find listings for artists of various projects. However, a person with a good idea has a lot of fishing to do. We simply turn it around. Let the artists compete for the project, not the project compete for the artists. It is really about passion for the project. You don’t want some guy just doing another job. You want a guy who saw the idea of your project and said “that is friggin awesome - I want In!”
So that is it. the building of a new way of doing things in a wide range of possibilities.
BTW, the RPGs are my projects, and they aren’t stopping any time soon.
Happy Gaming
