runouw.com

I propose that every June Ruouw himself makes a statement on the state of his domain (aka Runouw.com and all the sites attached).

As we all know the site is dying, that much is evident. Sure, we can gain insight from other moderators and such as to what's going on behind the scenes, but what's the point if we don't get word from the main man himself? It seems a bit moot, to be honest. We need our leader, our founding father, to [at least] once a year come out and explain the situation through his viewpoint.

Maybe then we can better understand what's going on with him, maybe his life, and how he's running Runouw.com.

Please consider this notion, and maybe we can all learn from it.

First: With the group of active members we have, the site won't be dying. It's just a bit more quiet and smoother than some years ago. We've just recently had a silent yet very successful Runouw Votes. And we still get cool new members like Bam.

Second: I see your point, but as we have enough of engaged staff, Runouw doesn't need to look after the forums everytime and he can focus on his next games (especially LL). The staff is pretty much Runouw's extended arm. We have enough leaders like Amp and father-figures like Doram. However, of course it would be nice if Runouw shows up here and there and tells some things(which he mostly does in the News topic).

Runouw manages the games, and the moderators manage the forum. The tricky thing that's going on right now is that Suyo was demoted, and had really been the chief of the forums, having as much or at least almost as much forum control as Runouw from day one on. So we really don't have someone who can fill his shoes of being the forum spokesperson- everyone does their part but it's a group of dedicated people moreso than a single lightning rod. It takes some getting adjusted to.

There's a certain stigma that we're trying to move past. Runouw has rarely interacted much with the site at all, if his post count is any indication. Back when Moy was still the main social global moderator, I know he had alot of contact with Runouw via facebook, but I don't know how often they talked. For the most part, the rest of us were reluctant to ask him anything.

Now, we've made a better effort to keep in touch, with a staff Skype group which is more immediate than the sub forum. I can safely day that he's definitely communicating with us as staff. The next step will come, I'm certain.

I have to agree with nin10mode there, in that I was quite intimidated by Runouw for a long time, and didn't want to bother him, and was impressed by the connections Suyo and MoD seemed to have. Now that we are a couple of months into the swing of Suyo being gone, we've all heard more from Runouw in the Skype group than we have the entirety of the previous few years. It's an adjustment, and we are all changing, even Runouw. Amp, Chau, Nin, Raz, Ven and I have been more active of late than I have seen us be in quite some time, so the slack has definitely been picked up, and yes, it is weird to see us scatter to our projects like this instead of only seeing the singular and sweeping masterminds we have had in the past. In all honesty, that fact is a good example of growth by itself, because having more people on the job means more work can get done on each section, and problems only affect a part of the site, not the whole of it.

The thing is, there seems to be some desire, on Runouw's part, to evolve from the paradigm of being a for-free-made-on-free-time developer to a proper for-pay development company, and while some of us might be upset at the thought of having to pay for these games, most of the rest understand that if we want to continue to enjoy further wonders coming from this dev team, they should start being paid for it. Something that the staff of this site has struggled with from time to time has been the fact that we are all doing this on OUR free time, and sometimes life gets in the way. It's just a fact of life that when something isn't your job, it can't always move fast or consistently, no matter how much you love it.

Yes, the forums are not as busy as they used to be, but the people that are here have committed to the long haul (we all truly love this place), and we aren't going anywhere, and as long as we are here, this site will never die. Slow growth is not the same as no growth at all, and in all honesty, I see the potential for big things coming quite soon. The java version of LL will be amazing in its potential for allowing huge and detailed levels, and I know that we have the talent base right here, waiting and dreaming of what they can do. In all honesty, some of the recent contests have shown that as all of the best designers here have learned and grown, we have desired larger levels with more stuff in them, and we have been running into walls with the limitations of the games that we have been given thus far (we have been at that point in SM63 for a while, and as daunting as LL was in comparison, we are now plumbing its limits as well).

I'm not so sure that a "State of the Union" type update is a bad idea (though it probably should have been put in the Site Suggestions thread), but I do know that when there has been progress, we have been told, and the only truly agonizing part of that process is not knowing how long the wait will be. The growing team of developers behind these games have been hard at work on a lot of stuff, and have NOT been silent about it, because they have peen posting every few months between the News Forum here, and the Last Legacy Blog, so perhaps a bit of this is knowing where to look.

Finally, the development of any major game is a matter of years, and Runouw is technically new to big development. Even when you have an established franchise where games seem to come more often, it is just a matter of overlapping development, where there were things in the third game that they were technically working on as soon as the first game was released. And masterpieces take even more time. Look at The Legend of Zelda. It's generally been between 2 and 5 years between installments there, and that's from a well established company with immense resources. And Runouw is technically just getting started, so the key word here is patience. The Runouw development team is now an actual team, and not just the Hewitt brothers, and their members are just getting to know and work with each other, and moreover the guys at the top are now learning how to organize bigger projects with more people. That's a huge undertaking, before you even get to what is required to make a game. We are all excited, and we are all tired of waiting, and we all want things to be bigger, better, and most importantly faster. But the process is what it is, and there is ultimately nothing we can do (unless you want to join the dev team, of course).