2017 Planning

2017 Planning

rbwhitaker 02 Jan 2017 15:52

I want to get the ball rolling on our plans for the competitions and collabs for the upcoming year.

When:

I think it would be good for us to get together in the chat room and discuss at some point, so I want to pick a time for that. The tentative plan is 12:00 noon this Saturday, January 7th, US Mountain Standard Time. That's 2:00 PM Eastern, 11:00 AM Pacific, and 7:00 PM UTC-0 time. (I've added that to the events calendar for now. If you want to propose an alternative time, please say so in the comments here.)

What It's About:

I wanted to provide people with an opportunity to weigh in on:

1. The number of competitions that we should do during the year.
2. The number of collabs that we should do during the year.
3. The lengths of the competitions that we should do.
4. Preferences for dates/times of the competitions and collabs.

If You Can't Make It:

I know not everybody will be able to come to our little chat room discussion. If you have an opinion on any of the above but know you can't make it to the discussion (or are unsure if you can) then please either:

• leave a comment on this thread,
• or leave a message/start a conversation about it in the chat room. (I'm making a specific #site-planning channel for this kind of conversation.)

Re: 2017 Planning

PiscesMike 03 Jan 2017 08:52

I'm voting a 4/4.

4 collaborations is 4 days a year. Three or Four, that's inconsequential.

That leaves us with competitions. And I do have to admit, I'm biased against the 100 day. It did not work out well for me.

That being said, I think what we need to focus on are actual dates.

I think a good starting goal for this would be to find an online calendar somewhere where we can mark certain dates as out. Christmas day, New Years day, Halloween, etc. (With a weeks buffer space) If we all work together on the same calendar to target days when we know we will not be able to participate, then maybe we can build a framework for when we will be able to.

---

"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Re: 2017 Planning

rbwhitaker 03 Jan 2017 14:44

Good point. I should say that the goal of this planning session on Saturday is indeed to come away with actual, concrete dates on the calendar, like you said. I suspect we probably won't officially finalize any of those plans until after our competition retro, which I'd like to do the next week and Saturday.

By the way, the site does now have a event calendar: http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/events

I might add that the 100-day competition didn't work out for me either, but neither did the 30-day competitions. The competition retrospective is something I'm looking forward to. I think it will help us refine or revise how competitions work to make them more useful, or more likely to be successful at getting completed games out there, or massive progress in uncompleted games.

Re: 2017 Planning

rbwhitaker 02 Jan 2017 15:56

Oh and for whatever it's worth, here's my initial thoughts on the scheduling:

My personal vote is for 3 competitions and 3 collabs.

I would prefer 2 30-day competitions and 1 100-day competition. If we didn't have a 100-day comp, then I'd probably vote for another competition as well.

I'll admit I'm much more vague on the value proposition of collabs right now than competitions, and I'd be willing to also reduce the number of collabs and increase the number of competitions as well, but probably not with a 1-to-1 exchange rate.

Perhaps some of those comments will get the brain juices flowing…

Re: 2017 Planning

Brett208 03 Jan 2017 19:17

I think 2-3 collabs is probably the sweet spot. We could try to do a collab in the Spring, Summer and Fall. Sort of spread out evenly over the year.

If we do 4 competitions that would be one every 3 months. This would set aside 120 days or a third of the year.

Doing two 30 day and one 100 days sets aside 160 days of the year, which is well over a third of the days.

I think either solution is good. I kind of like the idea of for 30 day competitions because it would be easier to roll into them as appropriate. I also think some serious game-making could be done in a 100 day span. So I lean a little more towards only 30 day competitions, but not a lot.

Re: 2017 Planning

rbwhitaker 07 Jan 2017 18:41

Just an email reminder about the collab/comp schedule planning meeting, since I know a lot of you are subscribed to get emails on forum posts. The meeting is 15 minutes from now. If you can't make it and you have an opinion on the matter, please take some time to either post in the forum here, or drop into the chat room and say what you'd like to see. We probably won't 100% finalize the schedule today, but it it will be more formalized than up to this point. Let's say it's set in wet concrete. Still changeable for now, but not forever. So state your opinion sooner rather than later. Or just come join us in the chat room in 15 minutes.

Re: 2017 Planning

rbwhitaker 07 Jan 2017 21:47

The above diagram is more or less what we decided on.

In particular:

• Four total competitions during the year, each one being 30/31 days long. (Four weeks plus an extra weekend.)
• Two collaborations, with the possibility of adding in some more, based on the outcome of our Collaboration Retrospective in the next couple of weeks.
• The two competitions are paired up in such a way that you could run a 100-day competition spanning two of the competitions.
• The collabs are placed between the larger gap that lies between the competition pairs.
• We're anchoring the calendar at Memorial Day, so the Spring Competition will always start Memorial Day weekend. This point in particular is open for discussion still. (Technically it all is, but I don't want to keep changing our plans around every single week.) We could pretty easily pick up this whole wheel and rotate it around on the calendar.

The single biggest corollary to this discussion is that our next competition will begin on February 3rd and last through March 5th. That's coming up pretty soon!