Balentine's Day!
Balentine's Day is not only what someone in Gaia actually submitted to me (it was a typo), but it's also a cutesy-wootsy way of describing the Valentine's Day event that's been running since Wednesday. I coded a lot of it but obviously dozens of people worked on it - several artists, several QA people, several UI people, plenty of mods, the Event team, etc. It's a group effort, and considering that I'm able to actually log on to the site and type this out, I think it went pretty well!
Well, I mean, it's still going on, so if you haven't gotten your 29,381 Labu Necklaces, now might be a good time to! Or just wait until they're worth 10gg in the marketplace lol
Seriously though, I want to talk a little about what I learned making this event...
Need more resources! Build more peons!
The problem (and magic) with an event like this is that you can't do it alone. I'm sure many of you sit around and think about making a video game or something, and you think about how the music would be, how the artwork would be, and how the gameplay would be, etc.
In real life, when faced with the task of actually creating something like that, you realize doing it all would take 34 years to make alone, and by the time you finished your idea will be outdated and you would likely have long since given up on life.
So you get a specialist in each of the facets of what you're doing (or a set of specialists) and hand off your vision to them. Then they all give you something back and you try to put it together into a single product.
Unfortunately, in the case of Gaia, everyone's working on other things, so you have to borrow people's time. So V-Day only had one event item (with 2 poses -- though I'm starting to think it would have been better if we had 2 event items with 1 pose) because the artists were too busy working on the MC-release.
Oh, that's another thing about wanting to make something great -- you often have to make concessions to get it out the door.
You Can't Always Get What You Want
With a site the size of Gaia's (population-wise) you have a lot of people to take into account:
- The newbs
The hardcore users
The casual users
The n00bs
The prommies
Users who can only use Gaia on the weekdays
Users who can't/won't be on Gaia for more than half an hour
Users who will be on for the entire event
Planning an event for everyone who will use it is serious business. It leads up to a lot of situations where some people are unhappy, and others think things could have been better.
In the end, sometimes comes down to:
1. Really great for some
2. Pretty great for all
And sometimes you gotta make that call.
Life of the Party
As just a final note, we all have a bet going on how many kisses Ron Bruise will get. Since he had the sticky up there he's gotten a ton of kisses. I can't be involved, because I know, but you might fancy a guess.
Hint: I got 1200 - 1500 kisses when I had a sticky up there for about half an hour rofl
I'll tell you guys the answer next week.
Community Member
I had fun the event. The inner pack rat in me had fun collecting all the necklaces.
ANNNNNNNND~ I'm excited about the Gaiaversery coming up.
^w^ heart
cool heart