From will to real…

What a week!

I haven’t got a minute for me for the last 7 days with the launch of the website… First, I really wanted to be there to welcome the city builder fans and make sure we all agree on the movement: sharing our thoughts in a clever and polite way to build up what could become Cities Unlimited.

Then came this DoS (Denial of Service) attack on our email server which took 100% of our website bandwidth making almost impossible reaching the website on Sunday evening (between 0:00 and 3:00 GMT +1) and Monday afternoon  (between 17:00 and 22:00 GMT +1). But we get rid of that fortunatelly.

From Tuesday ’til Wednesday, getting all the other tasks done, answering some of the community questions and participating to the discussions on some topics that I like to participate :-).

Thursday and Friday have been hard days with the transportation strikes happening in France (hmmm… Maybe something that CU players may have to deal with?! ). Therefore I spent quite a lot of time working from home which is not what I prefer to do as I don’t have a chance to talk with the teams around working on some great features that I can see over some shoulders :-D.

Now that all this is behind, I can now focus back on the main topics and prepare the next iteration of content for the blog.

One week and  1500 members so far, I’m so excited getting a chance to talk with all these city builder fans.  Something that positively surprised me is that, even if I knew this community had a great habit in communicating in forums, being polite and maintaining real smart discussions, I thought I would soon see some members putting some mess around: and except a couple of threads that needed to be moved and some modifications (such as upper case subject titles), I made almost no moderation.

It’s just great to see this community being self-moderated: it’s a sign of maturity and it confirms we were right talking to them today.

As a reference to my previous blog entry where I said that I was Excited and Frightened : I can no say that I’m getting more and more excited with what’s going on and lesser frightned, that’s for sure… Until the next big step forward…

These are two feelings I’m meeting everyday for the last weeks… When you are in a creative process and you are performing on stage, you cannot avoid getting a bit of both. With the website I’m currently developing for Cities Unlimited, even if I’m not actually making a performance publicly, I’m putting all my heart and devotion into something I do place a lot of ambition.

You are therefore at the same time very excited to share it with others but also afraid of getting reactions (positive or negative). You have to prepare yourself to be tolerant and accept critics as well as not giving too much consideration to congratulations or you may find yourself doing the wrong things at ehe end not listening to the others.

I’m personally very happy with the website so far. It’s still in its early stages (just as the game itself) and we’ll be adding a lot of content and other fetaures to it as we move along. I’m not taking this with too much importance but what we’ve been doing with the City builder players’ communities is something that I never saw before in the game industry and when you do something new, you also meet for the first time the related problems with no references on how to solve them.

Hopefully, we’ll get around these and we’ll achieve our goals: making a great game and satisfying a lot of potential players around.

Excited and frightned, that’s how I feel today. But, lord, bless you for giving me the opportunity to live it