Over a year has past and I still think back upon the innocence of the early Magestic Games quite fondly. I continue to cite this game as a testament to what can be done by a small group in only seventy-two hours, with only one or two of them working overtime and compromising sleep. (What an overrated bodily function!!)
The Secret lay of course in the chance meeting of specialists. We had five members, no more and no less, distributed across at least two continents and at least three different time zones. This allowed us to work in shifts, passing work from one to another expediently and building upon one another’s accomplishments promptly and efficiently.
Of the five, two were tasked with the writing and doubled as composers. Two were programmers, which became a team of three once one of the writers switched over and I assumed her duties in writing the remaining routes and music. That combination of experience and interdependence, setting aside personal feelings in the pursuit of a Common Goal, topped off with a Visual Artist who could produce quickly, made Pirates of Gensokyo an award-winning work of doujin art, combining the multiple media native to the Visual Novel format in a manner I’ve seldom seen repeated across multiple works.
What helped most, perhaps, was that the Team Lead and I’d known each other for over seven years and had had our fair share of arguments previously. We lived within a twenty-minute drive of one another, and in spite of extreme tension between conflicting personalities, policies, and worldviews we managed to use our differences to the advantage of our work. (I was Creative Lead, and I’ve been designing and writing for a lifetime.) We’d also done Global Game Jam together earlier that same year. We brought mattresses.
I suspect that our next summit shall be a stimulating exchange of strategies. While there is still much that I have to teach you about the development of character(s), perhaps you’ve learned all ready how to do that which I’ve tried for years to master: to assemble a conspiracy of strangers who feel so compelled to do your bidding that they’d risk the lives of their own selves and others just to see a project to completion, with no hope of personal reward. Hats off to you. See you this Winter. I’ll be releasing some new content you should appreciate.
Rinzai Gigen.
Subliminal Mind Games.
Former Creative Lead, “Team Magestic”.
[({R.G.||S.M.G.)}]