A discussion about RoN's future

[Renegade Implementor]

With the subject of how to rejuvenate RoN being mentioned recently, it seems like something that should be discussed and a decision made.  Below are several options that seem the most reasonable/able to implement.  Some have probably been discussed in the past.

Leave as is â€" No changes are made to the site.  The general size of the community will likely remain small as will yearly output of games.  Efforts focused in strongly promoting the series to become known and generate interest in new community members.
* Promoting the series is most likely a good thing in any case.

Reduce/Clean up character & game databases â€" Characters who fall under a certain classifications (such as high school students or merchants) or have appeared once/minor use could be bundled together on to one “themed” character page.  The more established characters would retain their separate pages.  A Wiki could be used as a resource for individual character bios.
Any games that has multiple versions could be condensed into one page.  The demos could be moved to the demo page.
Optional: This has been brought up in the past â€" a number of games could be removed and put on a separate location on the site so they would still be available for download.  In the past, this idea seems to stem from removing games that are dubious in quality.

Over-arcing theme â€" A scripted event that affects the series in an attempt to generate plot hooks and limit/temporarily remove characters for use.

Core team of writers â€" Rather than rely on the possibility of someone submitting a new game out of the blue, a team is formed with the purpose of generating new content and moving the series forward.  The Open submission format would still remain.

Reboot series â€" Series starts over from square one.  The general concept is retained as are a few character/character types.  For the reboot, the series is given a rough historical outline (and possible city map) to provide a bare-bones structure.  Every release from 2001 to the time of series reboot would be kept on a separate page, available for download.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

The first two (minus the optional part of the second) seem to be the best way to handle things.  RoN wasn't designed to have a 'core team' of anything, just people contributing fun stories, nor was there any theme beyond those made by certain individuals for their own episodes.  I don't think a reboot would do anything at all to draw new people, honestly.  A complete visual improvement would attract a lot of attention, but it's a two-way situation:  On one hand you'd have a ton of new people wanting to make higher quality games, on the other it could dissuade people of modest to no art skill from contributing.

[Nostradamus]

IMO reboot.
Start the series in another point of time or something, this way all the releases remain but you give people opportunity to make games without considering the 100 other games and be scared of it, but you still don't disown what's existing.
For example RON, a 100 years in the future. Everybody we know is dead. The series starts anew in the same town but none of the old characters is allowed. It will give place to change the city, raise new locations, etc. It it still RON and has the ROB brand and prestige but it's in the future so it's basically a new series with no real connection in plot or characters. Someone should make a few new characters for the first game and from there it continues. (P.S no "sons of, grandsons of" etc characters.)

There shouldn't be any limiting on who can submit a RON game. You barely have new games as it is.
I am in favor of putting the DasTobias like games in a separate archive.

[Radiant]

Imo, definitely clean up the database. Back when I wrote Root of All Evil, it took me quite a bit of time to read all (well, most) of the DB character entires to figure out what other important characters I was missing. The themes are a good idea, or perhaps simply a division between major and minor chars; I estimate the RONiverse has about 15-20 major characters and about a hundred minor ones.

A core team of writers goes against the entire spirit of RON. Now I'm not in any way a RON oldbie, but I suspect this isn't going to fly well.

Removing a bunch of characters with an over-arcing theme event, time shift, or reboot, well, I don't think that's going to work either. For one, it needs a substantial number of games released under the "new" paradigm to gather enough interest (and conversely, you are unlikely to see that number of games until it has gathered interest). For another, how exactly do you plan on enforcing this?

[Joseph DiPerla]

I agree on a team of core writers.

I think the best thing to do is keep the continuity of the series, allow others to continue the RON town story. But maybe instead of a reboot, we just create a new town and start a series on that. Its all in the same universe as RON, but geographically located elsewhere and characters and such can make Cameo's within the town. Eventually someone can make a game where you can travel to both towns.

Other than that, I do not suggest a reboot. Perhaps an organization project can be started to better organize whats there already.

[magintz]

I don't think much needs changing in the way of RoN. I definitely disagree with a core team of writers and I definitely disagree with rebooting the series.  A better organised system for new people to update themselves with the story and characters would be a bonus for the proliferation of RoN games.

[Sam.]

The only thing I can think of to do about RON would be a couple of pointers to it here and there, as a good place to learn. It's always been a community thing and anything that restricts the possibilities of it would spoil it. Just so long as noobies find it, then its good.

[Stupot]

It's far too much to ask any newcomer to play every game just for the sake of continuity.
The town of Reality on the Norm, with its ensemble cast of wacky characters reminds me very much of Springfields, the Simpsons' home town.

The difference between the two is that RON seems to be more pedantic about continuity, whereas in The Simpsons, each cartoon is a brand new story and it doesn't matter if Homer grows a donut for a head, because you know he'll be back to normal at the beginning of the next episode.

As someone who has only just recently played a couple of RON games, I'd feel much more comfortable trying to write an episode of The Simpsons.  I know that I won't make some massive canonical hiccup because I missed some important detail due to not watching every episode.  But with RON I would have to do a lot of reseach to make sure I didn't unknowingly ressurect a dead character or something.

[Eggie]

I think Stupot may have stumbled upon a pretty good solution here.

Are people playing for the Canon or the characters? A more static, sitcom-like approach could be the way forward. Not that a lot of the game's weren't like that already.

[DeviantGent]

Im pretty sure if something was done with this, then all problems of continuity and running stories would be solved quite promptly.

[Stupot]

Hehehe.

The trouble is, even if everything was laid out in the wiki, it would save having to play every single game, but it would still mean that a newcomer might feel obliged read every page of the wiki, for exactly the same reasons.

I'm no RON expert, so it might not be my place to say, but I would suggest encouraging people NOT to worry too much about continuity...

But, on the other hand, we are adventure gamers, and as such we are sticklers for logic and I can fully appreciate why some people would want the RON multiverse to remain as consistant as possible.

[blueskirt]

The eternal RON future debate, one of my favorite topic. I'll try to keep it short for I'd rather not repeat everything that was said in the previous thread.

In the 5 solutions:
Solution #1 and #2 (without the optional part of solution 2) seems the most appropriated for RON.

Solution #3 could work or not. I have the impression that the problem is not that RON lacks interesting story hooks, but that people have different priorities right now than big community projects. Just do a quick poll and you will see there are still a lot of talented people and a lot of long time contributors who want to revisit the town for the Nth time but they'd rather finish their original projects rather than put them on hold to make a RON game.

Solution #4 goes against the principle of RON: a community created universe where everyone can add their own chapter to the series.

As for solution #5, a reboot of RON would be a giant insult for those who spent months of their time to create the current storyline, but also those who are currently working on RON games right now. It would quite possibly result in a drastic drop in interest from everyone who participated in the RON project so far.

Rather than erasing the current RON storyline and start a new one, a much better solution IMO would be simply to let RON continue its existence and create a new collective universe from scratch set in a different place, time, or atmosphere, something completly unrelated to the RON storyline, like they did with Maniac Mansion Mania.

One last think to consider before attempting solution #3 and #5 is: Are there enough people here with enough interest and free time to manage a big community project like RON? RON began and flourished in a time where most people here:
A) were in high school or college and had plenty of freetime in their hands,
B) all awfully lacked the skills and the talent to make the quality games we see today
Back then, RON was a nice way for everyone to have fun, practice their skills and be involved in a great project that wouldn't be overshadowed by games like Pleurghburg, Apprentice or the KQ remakes. Now that people are much more skilled, it wouldn't surprise me if more people nowaday prefered to work on their own project rather than a collective one.

I also think Stupot hit a very interesting nail here.

[Stupot]

After reading your post Blueskirt, I have decided that it all boils down to marketing.  You mentioned that RON flourished when most of the people were a) younger and b) less skilled, and that it is a great way for people to develop their skills.

In that case.  I think a few simple steps would help to get newcomers to AGS to consider making their first game a RON one.

a) There should be a feature about it on the AGS website.  And it should be big and brightly visible on the front page so that newcomers automatically consider it as an option.  Then they would automatically consider it as a first project.  You know, it was ages after I joined AGS until I discovered the RON project.  Looking back, if I'd have known about it from the start I might have been more inclined to get involved.

b) Perhaps there should be a RON section on the AGS forum... I know the RON website has it's own facilities, but at the moment it feels kind of separate to AGS, when really, AGS is RON's mother.  And also, it would be handy for newbies to be able to ask on the boards for help with their RON game, and those who are skilled and experienced might be more inclined to get involved by helping the newbies.  This would ensure that 1) more games get made and 2) there remains some level of quality in them.

I'm just thinking out loud here... I should be writing an essay... you can guarantee that if I was given "Discuss RoN's Future" as an essay title, I would get bored and start ranting about phonology instead, just to waste time.

[Layabout]

Reboot Reboot Reboot.

The cast is too large and full of some redundant characters, some rather awful characters.

We are all grown up now, but our characters haven't really evolved. The town is laid out in a clumsy way due to people adding locations here and there.

Characters need new profiles, the town need to be better planned. I don't suggest getting rid of what has come before if they are integral to the series. It was supposed to be a fun project, and a fun place to set games in. There are just soo many characters to choose from, so many different locations, and it's difficult, unless you have played every RON game, to have this knowledge. Yes the wiki would be a great idea, but what we have at the moment.

And I guess everyone who mentions the Marketing of RON. I realise that if I were new to AGS, I wouldn't know that RON is the place to start. I don't think I'd know it exists.

And for the reboot thing. I don't want all the characters to be dead or anything, or have it set in space. Just to ignore all the canon that came before and start afresh.

[Renegade Implementor]

The suggestions in the initial post were culled from things people have said over the years.  They were presented to provide as many suggestions as possible to kick off this discussion and hopefully inspire other ideas.

<Ron admin hat off, community member hat on>

Personally, I'd prefer if things were left as is, with perhaps a tightening up of the games & character databases.  Of all the ideas that have come up over the years (see first post) none have seemed to me like the right thing to do.  I feel that RoN is still a viable and worthwhile idea with loads of untapped potential.  If I didn't I wouldn't have stayed for as long as I have.

I realize that the number of games & characters is enough to turn people away.  Perhaps an introductory primer could be devised to introduce the series concept, some of characters and a general history to ease people into RoN.  It might cut down on the feeling of having to do research, and allow someone to discover the other characters at their own leisure if they so choose.

As for continuity versus stand-alone games, I think that’s happened to an extent, even if no-one’s stamped a “stand alone” label on certain games.  Some people, my self-included, like the idea of a progressive universe where characters have the opportunity to “live” as it were.  It wouldn’t be too difficult to accommodate both type, maybe we just need a big rubber stamp.

What needs to happen, I think, is RoN needs to be promoted and get the word out that it exists, what it is (and what it’s not) and where to find it.

Finally, as for a reboot: I can see the argument for it and how it could be interesting.  It does leave anyone who’s in the midst of game production to either attempt to get their game finished before the reboot date, or go back and start reworking their game to fit in a rebooted universe.

[OneDollar]

It does leave anyone who’s in the midst of game production to either attempt to get their game finished before the reboot date, or go back and start reworking their game to conform to a rebooted universe.

Doesn't that depend on how the reboot is done? If people start working on RoN 2.0 (or whatever) new games can be RoN 2 games while people could still make 'original' RoN games if they wanted. If the difference between the old and new versions is made obvious enough, couldn't the two coexist?

Personally I'd like the reboot approach; I've never gone near making a RoN game for worry of misusing characters or locations, or messing up a time-line, and not wanting to do hundreds of games-worths research.

[Montague]

I've considered doing a RoN-game, I love the concept and the idea that something like this exists, but it was just too daunting. OneDollar probably has the right idea as far as I'm concerned, but the problem is, how to prevent 2.0 from being just as impenetrable before long? My suggestion would be to unleash anarchy in RoN 1.0 and have a few ground rules for RoN 2.0. I agree that the "core team" idea goes against the idea behind it, but there are some stages in between police state and total anarchy. I'd like to see the veterans of the community create some key "untouchable" characters that should always be restored to their original state by the end of each game; we can't kill them, overthrow them or significantly alter them in any way. That would go a long way to preserve a certain continuity and allow the canon to be presented in a short & sweet manner for newbies.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Instead of a long-winded wiki entry, someone could always make a primer game about RoN that introduces all the central characters with short, narrator bios that pop up when they are first introduced, as well as a small pop up narration about their location.  You could of course add some gameplay as well, but it would definitely serve to introduce any new people to the most important characters and locations of the series as well as provide a little back story.  Kind of like condensing a bunch of flashback scenes together .

[DeviantGent]

Instead of a long-winded wiki entry, someone could always make a primer game about RoN that introduces all the central characters with short, narrator bios that pop up when they are first introduced, as well as a small pop up narration about their location.  You could of course add some gameplay as well, but it would definitely serve to introduce any new people to the most important characters and locations of the series as well as provide a little back story.  Kind of like condensing a bunch of flashback scenes together .

This. THIS. THIS I SAY!!!

[Radiant]

If the difference between the old and new versions is made obvious enough, couldn't the two coexist?

I think that the old version continuing is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of a reboot (and, mind you, I prefer the former).