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First Post
Setting aside contractural and financial issues, was DungeonScape ever going to have succeeded as a software engineering project? I think not, and I say that as an ex-software engineer and long-time D&D player, having tested the web beta and seen the way it was designed and implemented. I haven't seen the eBook side of the product - it wasn't in the web beta - but I'm prepared to take on trust that it would have worked fine. It was the character builder that killed it.
Trapdoor are an eBook team. That's what they know about. When you are designing and building an eBook, the purpose of it is to get information from the author to the reader's brain as easily and painlessly as possible. Ideally, the software itself should fade into the background. The reader needs to be able to turn the page back and forth and do a few other things, but most of his attention is going to be on reading and assimilating the text. The primary information flow is one-way.
Trapdoor saw the character builder the same way. They thought that the primary purpose of the character builder was to present to players information about what a character is like but with the user being able to choose which pages to read - different pages for different classes, races, backgrounds and so on. In other words, an electronic PHB.
When they built that and offered it to us, they hit a wall. Because we don't see a character builder as a book. We see it as a tool for building characters. A software tool where we click buttons and out pops a character sheet.
A software tool, such as a word processor or a CAD package or a program development environment, is a quite different animal from an eBook reader. The way you go about designing it is fundamentally different at a conceptual level. The primary information flow is from the user to the software (with feedback to reassure the user that he has done what he intended) and the purpose of that is to control what goes into the document that he intends to produce. The document is not delivered from a remote author to the user, it is created by the user himself. A fundamentally different kind of software needing fundamentally different design techniques and, if you want to employ specialist software designers, you need a different set of people with different expertise.
Imagine you wrote an instruction manual for an electric screwdriver. It might be an excellent manual, telling the user exactly what he wanted to know, but the manual itself would nevertheless be useless for driving screws. For that, you need the actual tool, not the manual. And the right person to design an electric screwdriver is someone who understands torque and shear strength and the flow rate of cooling air. That's not the same person as the one who knows about punctuation and font sizes and wrote that excellent manual.
Trapdoor is a good team of people for doing what they are good at but they are completely the wrong team of people to design a character builder. They tried, but they failed. Releasing them from WotC's control, which is what has just happened, is the best thing all round. They can re-position themselves to concentrate on what they are good at, and maybe recoup some of their investment, while WotC go a different way.
Trapdoor are an eBook team. That's what they know about. When you are designing and building an eBook, the purpose of it is to get information from the author to the reader's brain as easily and painlessly as possible. Ideally, the software itself should fade into the background. The reader needs to be able to turn the page back and forth and do a few other things, but most of his attention is going to be on reading and assimilating the text. The primary information flow is one-way.
Trapdoor saw the character builder the same way. They thought that the primary purpose of the character builder was to present to players information about what a character is like but with the user being able to choose which pages to read - different pages for different classes, races, backgrounds and so on. In other words, an electronic PHB.
When they built that and offered it to us, they hit a wall. Because we don't see a character builder as a book. We see it as a tool for building characters. A software tool where we click buttons and out pops a character sheet.
A software tool, such as a word processor or a CAD package or a program development environment, is a quite different animal from an eBook reader. The way you go about designing it is fundamentally different at a conceptual level. The primary information flow is from the user to the software (with feedback to reassure the user that he has done what he intended) and the purpose of that is to control what goes into the document that he intends to produce. The document is not delivered from a remote author to the user, it is created by the user himself. A fundamentally different kind of software needing fundamentally different design techniques and, if you want to employ specialist software designers, you need a different set of people with different expertise.
Imagine you wrote an instruction manual for an electric screwdriver. It might be an excellent manual, telling the user exactly what he wanted to know, but the manual itself would nevertheless be useless for driving screws. For that, you need the actual tool, not the manual. And the right person to design an electric screwdriver is someone who understands torque and shear strength and the flow rate of cooling air. That's not the same person as the one who knows about punctuation and font sizes and wrote that excellent manual.
Trapdoor is a good team of people for doing what they are good at but they are completely the wrong team of people to design a character builder. They tried, but they failed. Releasing them from WotC's control, which is what has just happened, is the best thing all round. They can re-position themselves to concentrate on what they are good at, and maybe recoup some of their investment, while WotC go a different way.
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