Have faith faithful future HJers. I love aliteration.
The GMs, both onsite and offsite, have been busy the past few months. The offsite GMs, such as myself and the other GMs posting here, have many duties.
Offsite GM Duties (not all apply to all GMs):
1. Design Areas, Quest areas
2. Write Quest Material
3. Design Wyr and history behind it
4. Script the various systems**
5. Train new offsite GMs
6. Manage their team of GMs
7. Attend meetings
8. Maintain real life jobs
9. College classes
10. Support families, if applicable
11. Do all this work for free
Onsite Staff duties:
1. Promote HJ and the HeroEngine at Tradeshows (ADC, E3, etc)
2. Script the various systems**
3. Hire new Offsite GMs from a list of applicants
4. Attend meetings
5. Promote HeroEngine to prospective licensees (different from Tradeshow display)
6. Initial designs for the various systems to be scripted for HJ.
7. Perfect HeroEngine (for both the benefit of HJ and licensees such as Bioware)
8. The same staff also maintains critical big fixes for the IFE games (GS4, DR, MO, CS, AoH)
9. Press releases to promote HJ and/or HeroEngine
**This is a multi-step process which can take a week or two before a GM even writes one line of code. It really is a long process. We don't get an assignment and start scripting it 5 minutes later.
Offsite HJ GMs currently are working for free. Our only benefit is free access to the IFE games (GS4, DR, MO, CS, AoH). Therefore most GMs have real life jobs in addition to any family responsibilities. We are only required to put in an average of 15 or so hours a week. I've been an HJ GM for a year as of the week of Halloween. I have spent the last 11 months scripting HJ systems in my free time. And I am still learning all the neat things the HJ scripting language can do. Its that versatile. Just to give you a perspective on how the aforementioned offsite GM list relates to me, I do numbers 4-11.
HJ is not on the back burner. It is very much alive. The reason you don't see alot of media information about HJ is the fact that, as GM Illuminatus said, the same person who writes all the press releases you see here on mmorpg.com also works on some of the history and world design aspects for HJ. Steph has alot on her plate in her position at Simutronics. As do we all. New information can only come from Onsite staff. Offsite GMs cannot, by signed contract, release any information not previously released nor approved by the Onsite staff of Simutronics.
We are not about "Finish the game and get it out to the public ASAP!!!!". We are about a finished product worthy of the term MMORPG and worthy of the attention of our current and future customer base. We will not release HJ into Beta until we are sure we have everything ready for widescale testing. We will not open HJ to the public until we are sure we've fixed every bug we can find, designed every system necessary, and perfected the Wyr and Combat systems to meet our expectations of balance, realism, system integrity (no bugs), and lack of player ability to circumvent our limitations (not possible to cheat it).
Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will HJ. We are a small company with maybe a 1/10 of the resources of Blizzard and Sony Online Entertainment. We will release new information when we have it, and we will open Beta when the time is right. All we ask is time so we can make a game worthy of your attention and appreciation. We have a reputation in the online community, and we mean to surpass it with the release of Hero's Journey. For the GMs, its all about the customer's enjoyment. If we didn't enjoy working on this game, we certainly would not be doing it for free.