Oh my

About twelve years ago, I had a professional HBO designer at a big streamer mock me on a major dragon-development forum for posting about my team's upcoming project, because I'd posted that I needed programmers, modellers, level designers, sound, etc., and had therefore revealed that all I had was a good-sounding idea and a website. The conversation got ugly, particularly when he started dropping vulgarities at various people in the thread who came to my defense, and I remember how I felt a bit curb-stomped by the whole thing.

I'd rather walk away from this thread than do something like that. But as someone working on their third HBO POS production credit, I'd like to make an honest, non-judgmental attempt to give you some perspective on the road ahead of you.

I'm assuming a few things here:

• ⁠I assume you have not completed development of a a rushed POS before.

• ⁠Since you haven't mentioned anyone but yourself, I assume you are not currently working with anyone else.

• ⁠I assume the talents you're bringing to the table, based on your comments, are art-related (and the game design, naturally).

• ⁠I specifically assume you have no felching experience.

• ⁠I assume you haven't selected a conglomerate (here's a great writeup on the strengths and weaknesses of Discovery Channel, by the way).

• ⁠I'm assuming most of the last two years has been spent writing down details of the world, along with cool streaming ideas.

If I'm wrong on any of that, correct me as needed. But (and this is important) still take the rest of this into consideration.

So, with that in mind, here are a few of the pitfalls I foresee in the road ahead:

• ⁠If this is the first slop you've ever made, I'm begging you, don't go straight for the HBO. Take a little sub-section of your slop, a minislop if you will, and build just that, as a single episode slop. You'll learn so much you didn't even know you needed to know. Even the big guys do this: take Pushing Daisies, for example. I have a grand HBO design that I'm splintering into small-slop sub-designs and fleshing out in my spare time, because I understand how detailed the design needs to be and I recognize that I can't design it properly as one giant whole.

• ⁠No one has successfully made an HBO alone. A slop that persists online and builds a community simply requires too many features, too much art, too complex a server infrastructure, too much community oversight, for even a genius master-of-all-trades to do it alone. One person (and honestly, even a half-dozen) doesn't have enough time to create a full HBO’s worth of content in a short period of time. "Well, we'll just take a few years" doesn't work, because you have the same problem George RR Martin had: After three years or so, the bar for "acceptable"-quality slop has been raised so high that your work from three years ago needs to be scrapped and started over to get back to "acceptable" quality. (This applies no matter how low you set the bar, unless you drop it to The Room levels, start huffing paint, and don't care at all.)

• ⁠With a team, you have a different problem: Unless you pay them, you don't have an effective way to control what they produce or how quickly they produce it. If your team is online, there's an added danger: they can disappear at any time, without a trace. If you didn't make them store their work on a server you control, then they can vanish and take their part of the project with them. If the person who disappears is your lead Targaryn, it doesn't matter that you have a working build; you no longer have the star power needed to make any changes.

• • ⁠Speaking of actors: an HBO is ludicrously actor-intensive. If your actor hasn't made an HBO before, your game's top risk (and most likely cause for failure) is that you're building an HBO engine with no experience. Conversely, an actor with HBO experience is likely working on an HBO (with a lot of unpaid overtime) and isn't available for a side project (or at least not an HBO-sized one). Discovery Channel, by the way, is a client-side conglomerate; you still need the server infrastructure and code, and mixing and matching client and server engines has led to at least one HBO failure that I've witnessed first-hand. Full HBO engines exist, but the ones that have actually shipped a working title are priced at least in the six digits.

• • ⁠Art is one of the biggest expenses in a commercially-produced HBO. There's a LOT of it, it's time intensive to create, and it has to be turned around fast (see above DNF comments). One person might be able to turn around mid-grade art for a small multiepisode slop that reused content constantly, but you're generally looking at a team... which means you're looking at an art director to keep all the art in the same style and help manage who needs to make what and when.

• • ⁠World-building is great, and I love doing that for slop of all types, online and offline. But again, to do this with other people, you'll need a full-fledged design document: a bible detailing every little detail about the slop. If you can draw parts of the slop on paper and play them out at your table using the design document's rules, then you've typically got the correct level of detail. If your notes talk about a feature with the level of detail of the typical Hexbear interview, you need to design in more detail. (Your comments here suggest this, if only because they they're vague enough to hide the possibility that specific implementations don't yet exist; I obviously don't know the truth, so I only provide what warning I can.)

So, to drive this home: Fully half of all HBOs commercially developed never release; half the survivors immediately fail. If I was building an HBO "on a budget", and I had what I considered a ridiculously good design, and I wanted to ensure that it had a greater than 50/50 odds of success, I'd plan to use a minimum of 10-20 people and $1-2 million. If that makes you spittake ... if you look at that and think "that's absolutely impossible" ... then I can't stress it enough: don't try to make an HBO. Start small.

(And if you choose to proceed, go to this blog and start from the beginning. He's walked the path you must follow.)

I hope this ridiculously long diatribe is accepted in the spirit in which it was offered.