The PM integration with the RC is kicking my ass a little bit. I've been battling with the special handling of notes, formatting, saving, and loading. While I've taken a few hard punches over the last couple of days, I finally broken through and landed a couple of my own body shots. The formatting issues are nearly done. Notes now integrates field history, only saves changed fields and notes, doesn't reload notes on field only changes.

I also replaced my own keyboard javascript hacks for tabbing and formatting with a jQuery plug-in and it's pretty awesome now. I'm thinking about creating an example for source code sharing.

On a side note, I created a new asset for showing how to let players cast their own portals. See the New section in the Resource Center.

Now, for something a little more meatier. A while back, a person by the name of Schnitzelnagler asked me, "Who is your target audience?". This particular question has been bouncing around in my brain ever since. Recently, I came to a realization and consequently, a potential cross-road.

There are two "features" which essentially address two different user types. They both would benefit BYOND and the Resource Center but they focus on two completely different areas.

1. A BYOND School - Primary focus is on getting people to learn BYOND (for free) which essentially helps to bring people back to the BYOND eco-system repeatedly.

2. A Project Manager - Primary focus is on getting skilled contributors together for creating high quality projects and games for profit. The PM provides various incentives, collaboration tools, trust, funding, and more.

My dilemma of sorts:
The BYOND school would be a major project and the benefits are questionable. I mainly ponder about how well the school could teach folks and would they eventually stick around and contribute to BYOND eco-system. I know I can provide an awesome learning experience but providing learning materials would be a significant chore. I would stand alone in most of this process.

On the other side, to produce high quality games, we need teams of people. My goal with the PM/RC is to try and bring some high(er) quality people together to make games that sell. If that takes off, it would require a healthy amount of effort on my part. If my PopLava RC vision continues, I will be taking on more of a sponsor/producer role and will be contributing on a higher level across many projects. I would provide servers, advertising, collaboration tools, bring the people resources together, pay for art, handle the transactions for all involved, be the middle-man to protect each-other from financial disputes, and so on. The Project Manager is the base of this effort. It has little to do with the Catalog or School. Which means it would take away resources from those two things.

So, in the end, this is why I initially chose to start work on the PM first over the School. I felt that if I could get projects going, then I might be able to return to the school with teams of people vs going about this whole thing solo. The risk is that I will never get back to it. One successful game will deserve another and so on.

In short, both the School and Collaboration Center would be awesome additions to the RC. I've settled on getting back to the school only if I can form a coordinated team to get it done.

Comments welcome.
ts