So! The talk I did. Here's how it went.
First, I had a scheduling snafu. I showed up two hours early, and almost hijjacked someone else's timeslot. Woops. Fortunately that got straightened out. But this may have been part of the cause of the next issue.
When I showed up and set up at the correct time, A/V had disabled the camera stream to the room I was in. I ended up running over to them and asking what was up, and they said there was some issue with scheduling, and there wasn't anything they could do... I'm 99% sure they didn't record the talk either. I'm pretty bummed about this. I wanted to set up my camera to record, but I was already late starting my talk, and when I pulled my camera out of the bag, it was in some sort of setup mode that I know would take me a few minutes to figure out, and with the audience sitting there staring at me, I just had to ditch that idea.
Sadness.I will post the slides online, and I will post the picture I took of the title slide in the room, but I'm at work right now, give me time to do that when I get home.
How did the talk go otherwise? It went great! There was about 30 people there, which was waaaay more than I was expecting for a talk on Friday at 6pm on a project that probably most people had never heard of. Only one person that showed up had actually played Morrowind (more on him later) but only about 5 people had never heard of Morrowind before the talk. The audience was very interested and receptive to the talk, and asked a lot of really good questions. The questions were all "I'm curious for more information on this part of the project" and not any "I don't understand what you're saying" so that means the talk was effective: people understood and were engaged. It was great.
These were the two best questions I got:
First, was from a guy who walked in late and missed the whole beginning that explained how cool Morrowind is, and how it has a huge modding comminity, and why we are re-making the engine. His question was "Why are you re-building an engine for an old game instead of creating an all-new game?" I countered that his question was like "Why would you release Lord of the Rings in an e-book when it's already in print?" And one of my friends who was there chimed in to say that it was like re-building a classic car; you re-build it because the original is worth enjoying. I wish I had stressed more to that guy that our engine was going to be able to capture all of the user-created content that comes along with Morrowind, but the rest of the audience that showed up on time got that point, so... oh well. Haha.
The second question was a guy who was asking about the 80/20 rule, in this case inquiring wether once the high profile, but low quantity tasks are completed, if the project is going to mire in inactivity while a large quantity of low-profile tasks remain pending. Basically, asking if the large amount of bugfixes and minor features needing to be implemented would hinder the project from being completed. Which is a really valid concern! I told him about our success with implementing script instructions, magic effects, skills, etc, showing how we've been successful at powering through some of the more quantitative tasks, but did concede that we have a lot of bugfixing and optimizations ahead of us, but said that from the dedication that the team has shown so far, I am very confident that we will get everything done.
Things I am really happy about:
- People showed up, learned about the project, and were excited and engaged
- People understood and appreciated the presentation
- I got to talk a lot about our PR and community efforts, and stress how important those have been to the project
- The talk + questions ran 55 minutes, which was perfect
Things I wish went better:
- The streaming and recording, obviously
- I missed showing an example of a release video
- I missed showing our water shader and the normal maps we have implemented, was more focused on the history and organization of the project
- I didn't get to do a "SPEEEARS" shout
So about that guy who had actually played Morrowind. I need to get in touch with him, but he works for Linux Pro Magazine and Massively, which is part of Joystiq. He wanted to know if he could feature us, or otherwise help with PR. Again, I need to get in touch with him to see exactly what he has in mind, but is this something we'd be interested in? I think it'd be great PR, and just a great way to commemorate the accomplishments of this project.
I'll post slides and pic asap! Thanks for letting me do this guys!
