THE MAKING OF THE OLD IS THE NEW NEW SECTION

So we discussed how the Old is the new new came to be and some of how the contest ran. But that really only scratches the surface of this project.  So before I announce the contest 'winners', indulge me in a little background.

So the ONN contest was opened up to BattleTech Fact Checkers, Catalyst Commandos and BattleCorps Subscriber. We got an absolutely awesome amount of response to this contest. There were so many entries, that I was starting to boggle at how I would process through them all.

Enter one of the BT unsung heroes. Someone recently asked me "What exactly does Worktroll do?" My honest response was "Worktroll is." John has been a fixture of the community for an absolute ice age and a half. Any doubt of that, you just have to take a look at his post count to get an idea.  He's done this, that and the other thing for the BT community. One of the many things he's done was the BattleCorps Unique 'Mech contest. It was the these contest rules that formed the inspiration for the ONN entry criteria.

ONN entry criteria? You mean I can't just slap all I can fit on the design? Or to flip this around "Why didn't you put ferro fibrous armor on that?" Long time BattleCorps subscribers will remember the Unique 'Mech contest. Entrants were given 8 'design points' with which to modify an existing chassis to a unique. Different things cost a varying number of points. Swapping a PPC for ERPPC might cost 1 pt, while a standard to XL engine might cost 4 points. We updated these rules for the ONN, giving people 8 points with which to make their modified designs.

Back to Worktroll. Being as he wrote the rules I used to start the ONN contest and he happens to be someone who has no issues slogging through a mountain of data (Former meteorologist turned IT type guy), I dropped a mountain of emails on him and said "Sort this all out!"

Worktroll took all the ONN entries and put them into a spreadsheet. He verified the entries for rules compliance, and basic legality (We had probably five designs that were entirely unbuildable as described). He then provided a rating of each design on a scale of 1-10, based on his decades of BattleTech experience.

Work done, he passed the spreadsheet on to me. I promptly hid the columns for who submitted the entries and poured through every entry. For all the designs I then assigned my own 1-10 value. I then had a sorted list with point value ratings and design point costs. Okay great, but then there were the special factors.

No Omnis- We decided to not cover Omnis in this. Refits are refits, not new Omni loads. Later on in development we did put in a mention about Config U models of OmniMechs, but we chose not to describe these in the TRO.

No Project Phoenix- I've mentioned this before, but essentially if the unit was getting a full write up in the TRO, we wouldn't use them form ONN. There were a couple of truly great designs that just couldn't be left on the cutting room floor and those were put into the variants section for that design.

Is there a mini?- In Catalyst's continuing close ties with IronWind Metals, we worked with them on what designs were their best selling units. Where an ONN entry matched up to this best sellers list, the entry got an added boost. If it's a good selling mini, then it is probably a well loved design.

Only one- It is truly amazing how many designs that saw repeated entries. We received multiple Pegasus entries and Cyclops got an amazing amount of LOT love. When this happened I had to weed out the best from the rest. This was sometimes very, very hard as the designs were all good.

Too many Heavies- Some weight classes got more attention than others. There were far more heavies than I could justify putting in. Balance of weight classes was something we worked very hard on. Different players prefer different weight classes and we wanted to give attention to them all.

With all the special case stuff jumbling around my mind I carefully constructed the list of keepers.  There were a lot of designs that ended up on the cutting room floor, just because someone elses was just a little better, or I already had too many heavies.

Then once all the accepted contest entrants were placed on the list, I was left with the holes. The King No Longer section didn't get nearly the entries that the Field to Factory section did. Also, because of the pretty strict purpose of these units, there were a lot of great designs that just didn't fit the flavor. This meant the product developer had to roll up his sleeves and start designing. Then there were the very well loved IWN designs that no one had submitted an entry for. Starslayers appear to be a really popular mini, so once again I hit the design books and came up with a variant for it.

With all the holes filled in, we finally had a completed ONN.  At this point I actually looked at the names of the people who's entries were picked. I was surprised to say the least. Had I seen the numerous repeats of names, I certainly would have been concerned. The last thing we want is cries of favoritism. But these designs were judged on stats alone. 

So with one last nod to Worktroll, who went back through the ONN and matched them to the contest entrants, I give you the ONN stars.

Longinus (Magnetic) - Inspired by BattleCorps subscriber "Talz "

Sloth (interdictor) - Inspired by MUL team member Dan "DarkISI " Isberner

Scimitar (C3) - The Incredible Hawk

Chapparal (Case) - MUL team member Dan "DarkISI " Isberner

Fulcrum III Heavy Hovertank - MUL team member Joshua "NCKestrel" Franklin

Brutus (HPPC) -  MUL team member Joshua "NCKestrel" Franklin

Zhukov Heavy Tank (LBX) - BT Freelancer, Chris "Chinless" Wheeler

Ontos Heavy Tank (MML) - BT Freelancer, Chris "Chinless" Wheeler

Demolisher II (MML) - BattleCorps subscriber "Talz " 

Fireball ALM-10D - MUL team member Dan "DarkISI " Isberner

Spider SDR-7Kr - BT Freelancer, Chris "Chinless" Wheeler

Urbanmech UM-R80 - Fact Checker Mark Yingling

Hermes II HER-5Sr - BattleCorps Subscriber "LastChanceCav"

Vulcan VT-5Sr- BattleCorps Subscriber and CamoSpec artist plkangus / Wackrabbit!

Snake SNK-2Br - Catalyst Demo Team Agent Alex "GreyWolfActual" Kaempen

Vindicator VND-3Lr - BattleCorps Subscriber "LastChanceCav"

Enfield END-6R - Catalyst Demo Team Agent Craig Gulledge (Agent 200)

Nightstar NGT-6T -  Catalyst Demo Team Agent Jason M Rhodes,  (Agent 402)

Dervish DV-6Mr - MUL team member Dan "DarkISI " Isberner

StarSlayer STY-3Dr - BattleCorps subscriber "Gravedigger"

Quickdraw QKD-5Mr - Inspired by BT Freelancer and BattleCorps subscriber, Craig "trboturtle" Reed

Catapault CPLT-C5A - Catalyst Demo Team Agent Alex "GreyWolfActual" Kaempen

Gallowglass GAL-2GLSA - BattleCorps "Wolfhound88"

No-Dachi NDA-2KC - Inspired by the Battle Corps Legion "Fan" regiment.

Bandersnatch BNDR-1Ar - MUL team member Dan "DarkISI " Isberner

Falconer FLC-9R -  BattleCorps Subscriber "LastChanceCav"

Hammerhands HMH-6# - MUL Team Member Chris "Alex Knight" Marti

Rakshasa MDG-1Ar - MUL Team Member William "Mad Capellan" Gauthier

Hatamoto-Chi HTM-28Tr - MUL team member Dan "DarkISI " Isberner

Warlord BLR-2Dr - Inspired by the Battle Corps Legion "Fan" regiment.

Longbow LGV-8V - Fact Checker Chris "Goose" Searls

Cyclops CP-11-B - MUL team member Joshua "NCKestrel" Franklin

Albatross ALB-3Ur - MUL Team Member William "Mad Capellan" Gauthier

Banshee BNC-3Mr - MUL team member Dan "DarkISI " Isberner

King Crab KGC-005r- Inspired by BattleCorps subscriber Joseph Mallan

Hunchback IIC 4 - Fact Checker Andreas "Gaiten" Rudolph

Highlander IIC 3 - BattleCorps subscriber Steinbjorn07

Savannah Master (Interdictor) - Catalyst Demo Team Agent Alex "GreyWolfActual" Kaempen

Pegasus Scout Hovercraft (sealed) - BT Freelancer and BattleCorps subscriber, Craig "trboturtle" Reed

Plainsman (sealed)- Catalyst Demo Agent and BattleCorps subscriber Max "Medron Pryde" Prohaska

Hetzer Wheeled Assault Gun (sealed) - MUL team member Joshua "NCKestrel" Franklin

Goblin (sealed) - Inspired by BT Freelancer Chris "Chinless" Wheeler

Drillson Heavy Hover Tank (sealed) -Inspired by BT Freelancer Chris "Chinless" Wheeler

Greetings TRO readers,

Welcome to the year 3085 (Well to a small time warp to 3085, part of the universe is still happily plodding into 3079 with the second Liberation of Terra).  Just a scant four days have passed since the release of Catalyst's most jammed packed TRO and your reactions and enthusiasm has been off the charts. Of course with every cheer of enthusiasm, there are always the inevitable questions, shouts, and even down right well can we be generous and call them complaints?

Some folks say you are not a success until you have your first critic. If you take that approach then Catalyst and BattleTech must be the most popular thing since sliced bread. Well I can't speak for Catalyst as a whole, I'm still just a freelance product developer, but I can say I'm thrilled with the product reception and from what the bosses have deemed to pass onto me, they seem pretty darn happy as well.  The positive reception by far outweighs the not and this product is an overwhelming success. 

Still there are some reoccurring questions and themes in the last few days that I wanted to take a minute to expound upon.

The Night Wolf and the Targe: A lot of "focus" has been given to these designs. The Targe makes some 3025 Light 'Mechs look like a good thing. I mean how many people willingly use MRMs anymore? Unless you want a great mind clearer (MRM  20 and above), then they have some striking weaknesses as a weapon. Yes they do, and the Targe was designed to be bad from the get go. Bad design decisions, limited availability of equipment, and accelerated development all led to a design that makes lackluster seem like a stretch goal.

And that was exactly what the goal was. The Targe was never a stellar success in the Dark Age. If the DA version is an improvement, that kept the unit in use (though probably not still being produced), then you'd need a pretty horrid design for the original version. Designing a dangerous 'Mech is easy, a mediocre one takes work and a down right bad one is really hard.

The Night Wolf is a 'Mech that tries to be a lot and ends up being so so at a lot of things. When Herb first saw the stats for it, he paid it perhaps the best compliment the designer of the stats could have ever received. Herb said "Great cat, it's a Clan Albatross." When trying to build a bad Clan assault, you've got to work carefully. After all the 5/8 niche was filled way back in the original TRO:3050. So anyone who looks at the Night Wolf and thinks it is a design going through an identity crisis, well they are absolutely right.

Infantry: This section began  as an experiment. A wild idea of Randall's that was nothing more than a few sentences on the original outline. It became one of the runaway hits of the product. This was a labor of love and effort of many people, from Randall's initial vision and then brainstorm to stat out all the infantry types from Tactical Operations and TechManual to the stellar work of Chris Marti in taking the outlines for all the infantry and putting them to stats. Fill in the middle of that the product development work and all the fact checking and there are a lot of people to be pat on the back for some stellar team work.

And yes, it was the plan that any of these infantry units could be used as a generic type. Change the names and slap on a generic laser rifle and the Frogmen could be any faction SCUBA troopers.

Proofing of the product: My we do have a lot of missing commas, misplaced bold and other weirdness. Yes, we certainly do. On the one hand it breaks my heart. We worked really hard on this project and still we missed some things. Some of them we didn't even miss, we just got moving so fast at the very end that some of the fixes didn't get to the right place until it was too late. A lot of folks have said something to the nature of "I'd rather have seen the product delayed another week and more effort on proofing done." Sure we could have done that and caught a few more, but we'd never catch them all. So a place like Random House has the resources to rip a book apart and make sure it is perfect. Well almost perfect. Even the huge publishing companies make mistakes and they have far more resources than a small game company.

Someone else suggested a "Beta". This has been highly successful with the RPG. Truth be told, we planned to do that with the TRO. As has been oft cited, no plan survives contact with the enemy and nothing survives contact with reality. Last minute issues in the production schedule meant we ate that buffer we wanted for an external beta. But at the same time, that lost beta was still an internal review time and we never stopped improving the release.

In the end you have to decide when something is "good enough". To that Catalyst practices the adage of philosopher Voltaire, "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good." Is TRO:3085 perfect? No it may be Prefect, but it would be nigh on impossible to make it "perfect", so we went for as damned good as we could get. In the end, you have to ship at some point and we reached that point.

You gave away my factions cool tech! We're losing our faction uniqueness! Yes we did, no you're not.

There are enough of you loyal fans out there to help me out here. Reach back to TRO:3025. Now look over those original fifty five 'Mechs and accompanying ASF and vehicles. There were some themes, like the Free Worlds shortage of PPCs, but not a single nation had technology that the other nations didn't have. Anyone who remembers the early days of the game can attest that there was certainly plenty of faction uniqueness to go around. Stealth armor doesn't define the CapCon and the RAC may be a cool autocannon, but it no more makes the Davions, Davions then a coffee maker makes a store a coffee shop.

TRO:3085 is starting a new era of the game. In a lot of ways it is 3025 all over again. Level playing field, where it is how you use the technology, the armies, the politics that defines a faction, not the cool technology.

With all that said, I want to thank everyone for their comments. The good, the bad and the in between, Catalyst appreciates all the comments and the feedback. This game exists because of you and your comments are the feedback we use to guide the future.

Thank you,

Joel BC

TRO: 3085 Product Developer

Welcome to the Future

That's a wrap!

TRO:3085 is live and available for everyone to purchase, enjoy and admire!

Preorder Combo: http://www.battlecorps.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=2550

Preorder Boook: http://www.battlecorps.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=2555

PDF: http://www.battlecorps.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=2554

Speaking on behalf of all of Catalyst we are very exited and very pleased. To tell the truth we'd planned to hold the release until GenCon, launching it with a press release there. But then we realized that all you loyal GenCon attendees would be locking yourselves in your hotel rooms, hogging bandwidth and generally drooling all over it.

Randall decided that we just couldn't have that happening and we are bringing you the PDF now, the GenCon staff might get upset if everyone locked themselves in their hotel rooms to drool over all that Plog goodness (and all the other awesome artists).

So with a short and sweet blog, I welcome you to the future. It is 3085 and the Republic of the Sphere has published an intelligence handbook of the technology that has come to use in the ten years since the start of the offensive against the Word of Blake.

This is not the end of 'Mech Dreams, but from now on it will be more reflections parts of the process.

In fact, with Randall's blessings I am pleased to announce several other things related to TRO:3085.

Record Sheets 3085, Print Edition:

In a simultaneous release, the Print Record Sheet is on BattleShop now! It will follow the format of RS3039 and RS3075, showing off the primary variants of most of the units. It will also include two scenarios showcasing 3085 units and Quick Strike Rules for the Land Air BattleMechs.

Record Sheets 3085, Unabridged PDF:

Promising to be the single largest Record Sheet compilation ever, we are still trying to figure out just how to package this for release. RS3085u will feature all variants of the units, the Old is the New New section, Every Project Phoenix variant  that are not in 3039, and a ton of additional Easter Eggs. It will be big!

QuickStrike Cards 3085:

Once we release the Record Sheets for you full game players, we'll be doing the same for QuickStrike and BattleForce fans.

TRO:3085 Supplemental:

We've begun work on this project and are looking at exactly what the scope of it will be. We don't plan to disappoint.

TRO:3085 Iron Wind Metals Lance Pack:

http://ironwindmetals.com/d/?q=node/1599#attachments

In support of Catalyst Game Labs premier of the new TRO 3085 at Gencon this year, Iron Wind Metals will be offering a pre-release special pack of its upcoming 3085 Lance Pack Set - 10-045 – TRO 3085 Lance Pack (Prefect, Thunderbolt, Karhu, and Osprey Mechs) 

Stay tuned folks, this is only the beginning!

Joel BC

Proud TRO3085 Father

Yeah I know, you just got a Blog earlier this week.  But I had some things I wanted to make sure I covered, before the TRO actually hits the virtual shelves (When ever that might be), so fyou get an increase in frequency.

Recently some of our internal folks had a chance to look at the book for the first time. They'd not seen any of the in progress work and gave a fresh review of the entire book.  Most also had not been following the blogs and didn't interface with the behind the scenes development process, so they were not aware of any background. Kind of the closet thing to a fresh fan review as we could get.

Well I knew it would happen, and I think I took it pretty well. Even inside the Catalyst curtain, we don't always see eye to eye on projects, timelines, etc. That's fine, disagreement actually makes for a better product. Still it was a hard thing to read those words. When you put a whole ton of yourself into a project, reading words like "custom designs look so munchy cause canon designs are nothing to sneeze at" or "You could have made that so much better, it's like the authors didn't understand how the rules for that worked?"

Now I've seen a lot harsher words tossed out at past TROs by the general fan base. We've all seen them, some are nicely couched and some are pretty brutal, especially on non-Catalyst forums. Heck I've read some down right vicious posts in my time, as people dissect everything from use of commas to the Clint IIC's lack of double heat sinks.

So one naturally then has to ask, "Well why did you let the suck?", "Couldn't you have given it more armor instead of that ERSL?", "Do you wish you would have done things differently?"

The answers, in order are "Because we set out to make it bad, No, and No."

So I've been designing BattleTech units for over twenty years. You add up the experience of all the people who contributed to the designing of 3085 and I'd not be surprised if we were pushing two hundred years of experience. It would have been absolutely easy to make every unit in 3085 a slam dunk energy boat zombie deadly machines of destruction. And while a lot of you are probably saying "Yeah that would be so cool!", I'm going to take a solid bet that there are a number of you that, on reflection, would say "You know that could get really boring fast."

Come on, the mace is an interesting weapon, but would you really use it over an ax? But when we built the Mjolnir we needed something that could look like Thor's hammer, so we went with a mace. How about, "You hard mounted the SRMs to the Flamberge, but it's an Omni, why?" Simple, we looked at the art and said to ourselves, those really look like they should be permanent fixtures, I don't see pod mounting in that location.

Designing a canon BattleTech unit is more than just tweaking game stats. You've got to work it into the game, the faction, the art, and more. Giving a 'Mech a flaw is a good thing, cause that's the way things usually work. How many military units of the 20th Century are completely perfect? Humans are fallible and rarely make the perfect weapon system.

When we set out to make a TRO, we set out to create a universe document, not a set of fully optimized designs that eek out the best of every single ton. Heck we purposely left unused tonnage on at least one Battle Armor, because BA rules are Max Tonnage, not "you must fill all the tonnage".

And yes, we took great pains to build some truly "sucktacular" designs. It's harder than you think, really.

So when you finally get your hands on the TRO and you ask yourselves "How could they have messed that up?" Be very assured, we didn't mess it up. We planned it.

Thank you,

Joel BC

TRO3085 Product Developer

The end is in nigh!

Okay, so in this case it's a good thing, but oh my there are times when it feels like the end of the world. Many of you have accurately guessed that at this point from a product developers role, TRO 3085 is in the can.  That is not to say the book is "done". There are some more things that go into releasing a product , but all of these are the ultra secret baliwick of Randall and the really behind the scenes players who get the book from layout to release (either electronic or print). So don't take this as anything regarding when the book will actually be released. Just take it that for the last week I've been able to think about things  other than if Ray got that last minute change request to put Chris Wheeler in the author's credits where he belongs.

So what does a product developer do when Elvis has left the building?

Why simple, count the number of sequins that are missing from the King's white jump suit. You've just spent the better part of six weeks working with the layout god and your crack fact checkers. You've found more errors in the last week that you thought there were words in the TRO. You feel damned good about the product. You know you and the combined team have turned out an incredible level of effort. Internal people have said its one of the best TROs they've ever seen. You spend about a day patting yourself on the back and looking at the developer PDF.

And then the glow wears off. "How the bloody hell did we miss that flank speed error? What do you mean we used the variant art of the Goliath and not the TRO stat version? My cat, did we really forgot to put a period on that sentence?" Then the inside folks that have not yet seen the product (books are often very silo in development. Some writers don't see some projects until the rest of you do) start reading it. And amid the "this is cool", "good job" and "Wow, nice art", you get the "Did you notice that you've got that PPC in the wrong torso for the art?" And then finally you get that email… It's the email that makes you ready to break down and cry, or open up at full auto. The email from one of the writers that says "Is it too late to change something?"

Makes a man want to curl up in a little ball and start gibbering about the air speed velocity of a swallow.

Then you get an email from someone that just glows about some aspect or another of the product and you crawl out of the corner and get to work.

Work? Aren't you done?

Yes and no, now begins the process of errata. As a first for Catalyst, we will be releasing the known errata on the same day we release the book. All the little things we've found since the book was "put to bed". All the missing commas, messed up italics and the blessedly few actual outright errors.

And then your boss, the Line Dev, asks about your next project and what the status is. You quickly shove the "what could have beens aside" and start working on that next project.  In this case I'm diving right into the Supplemental and some other super secret stuff.

TRO:3085 is on its way. So with that we at Catalyst are happy to present you with:

Table of Contents

Until the next blog,

Joel BC

TRO3085 Product Developer

Ray Arrastia. It's a name most of you are familiar with, if not by that name, then by his online identity of Adrian Gideon.  Ray's a multi talented BattleTech contributor. He's written, he heads the CamoSpec guys, Demo Team Alumni (too busy to do it full time anymore) , a dang fine artist and he also does layout.

I never really thought about the modern layout process. When I worked at BattleTechnology, layout was all still the old fashioned manual way. You had special poster boards with photo blue grid lines. Everything got printed out, cut to fit and laid on the boards. You then put it all in a big envelope and send it to a printer across the country. Now layout today, is all about computers, illustrator this, Adobe that, pagemaker, framemaker, haymaker, it's a all automated now. Must make it super easy now, right?

Bwahahahahahahahahaha…. Ow!, Ow!, Ow! Oh that hurts…

I've got a new respect for the guy at the end of the production process. He's got to take all this writing, match it to all this art, make it all fit on the page, make it look good and oh all to a certain style and template. That Ray didn't shoot Brent and I is probably only a factor of geography (in that he's on the other side of the country from us).

Honestly, it is the layout guys (Matt Heardt, aka Sulla, is our other Layout god) that make the books you all love. I can write text until my eyes bleed. Brent can draw until his hands cramp. But until they are stitched together they are just pieces. It is the act of laying them together, adjusting that text block, shifting the art so the cool background art show, tweaking transparencies, making all that paragraph fit in the second column so the singe word "won" isn't hanging all by itself. These are the things that the layout guy does. The opera may not be over until the fat lady sings. A book isn't over until the layout guys says it is.

So want to know the single biggest lesson I learned? Aside from just how many beers I owe Ray? The power of 8. Go grab a book off the shelf, any book, I have in my hands "Effective Project Management" right now. Count the pages. Not just the page number at the back of the book, count the unnumbered ones at the front and any blank pages at the back. Got that? Excellent, now divide by 8. Odds are you just got an even number. Now a quick spin of Wikipedia tells me there are two, four, eight, sixteen and even six page folio formats (If you can divide by 32 pages, you get a price break for printing!), but at least for Catalyst, eight is the number that rules us all. All the books are divisible by eight pages.

What does this mean? If you want to add pages, you do it eight at a time. You want to remove pages, you do it eight at a time. Kind of helps explain those old novels, with all the advertisements in the back. If the novel came out one page over the eight divisor, you had seven pages to fill.

What does this mean for TRO:3085. Well the good news was when we decided one page of art was not going to be enough to do the LAMs justice. We added eight pages and made the TRO the single largest TRO in history.  The bad news came this last week. No matter how hard you try, sometimes things just don't all come together. When you have writing, game stats, and art all being laid out, on a schedule, sometimes things don't make it. Last week I was faced with that reality. At one point it looked like five units wouldn't be ready to go. That's ten pages, so I was looking at the very unenviable possibility of having to cut three complete and ready to go units. By the end of the week we'd pulled a couple of miracles (including creating a brand new design, to match some art we had ready, overnight) and brought that number down to three. Which gave us six pages to cut.

But wait, you say, that's not divisible by eight. Right you are. And again I was faced with possibly having to cut a design. Or possibly just let Herb nuke us all and put us out of our misery. In rides Ray to the rescue. He crimped, he tweaked, he pulled a minor miracle and collapsed stuff to leave us two blank pages. Viola, we had our eight pages. Commence the cheering!

What? Okay fine, I can't get anything past you. You want to know about the other three designs. What happens to them? Poor lost orphans that will lie on the cutting room floor, to be swept into the Catalyst dust bin of history.

Did I mention I was a project manager for a living? Did I mention Risk Management is a specialty?

Way, way back in January we were facing a TRO that was not just going to be the biggest ever, but the biggest ever by a LOT. Between Dark Age, cross promotions, must have designs and enough space for new things, we just couldn't fit it all into the product. And of course there was the lingering risk that things could go horribly wrong and we wouldn't be ready ( I remember the final fire drill to get 3075 out, I was still a lowly BV Fact Checker then, but I remember). With the PDF series of products hitting their stride I proposed a new idea. The TRO Supplemental. A PDF only release that would be released sometime after the TRO itself released. The Supplemental would hold the stuff we just couldn't fit in the book and would serve as our emergency valve.

So those orphaned units won't be alone for long. They've jumped over to a new folder on my computer and will be part of the PDF Exclusive TRO 3085 Supplemental.

But Ray is still the hero of this show. Because of Ray, the TRO is back on track and we all are not going to get nuked by Herb.Being the guy that does the layout, he also tends to do all his work after the credits have been written. So when you finally get to see all the people I thanked in the 3085 credits, you won't see Ray's name. 

Let me correct that here and now. Ray, thank you. This book would literally not exist if it wasn't for your work. 

Now we talked about that layout , let me show you some of that. (Come on, we all know why you come to these blogs). 

The Ares Mark IX isn't just a new small craft for the aerospace fans to play with. The Ares is a step to closing up some very old inconsistencies as the AeroTech game line grew up.  I hope you enjoy.

Until next time,

Joel BC

TRO3085 Product Developer

Murphy is my co-pilot.

At least during the period from Fact Check to Final Layout, that's the way it can feel for a product developer. In recent commiserations with Ben (Ghostbear), I've learned that my experience is pretty typical.  In the run up to GenCon, last year, he was about ready to kill anything that moved as he pushed Master's and Minions through the final hurdles.

Murphy can be a gentle friend, a subtle "Hey, that planet there, doesn't belong to the Kuritans anymore."

Murphy can be brutal, "Um.. Guys? That art isn't even close to the unit."

Murphy can mock you, "I've stared at that entry a hundred times! Nine other people have stared at it a hundred times. How the hell did we miss that it was five tons overweight?"

In the end what can truly be said is that "Murphy just is". Once you accept that. Once you accept that your detailed plans will get trashed and rewritten a hundred times, once you accept you will be making last minute changes by iPhone while standing in a gas station a hundred miles from home, once you accept that the final product will not be what you wanted but what can be done, that authors will probably be ready to string you up for "ruining my work!", then you'll be fine. Or start raving bonkers… No wait, both.

How does this relate to general production of a TRO?

The Fact Check process is an exercise in sheer information overload. You send the files out to upwards of 50-60 people and ask for all comments. The first FC round I did this, I was utterly swamped in documents. Some folks used track changes, others comments, and still others just poured it all into one document, in many different styles and formats. It took me over a week to pile through all the comments just so I could put them into some kind of sane order. Took another week to review them all and decided if they needed to go in and make those changes. Now the subsequent rounds went a lot saner. I instituted a simple spreadsheet and everyone provided their comments that way. Then I was able to put it all in one sheet and sort it. Remove the duplicates and I could make the final decisions.

Now I'm not going to pick on any of the great writers here. Not when I can pick on myself (I did write a number of the entries myself). I've been involved in BT for decades. Since I came back to the game I've buried myself into the universe and the rules. I'm one of four people who make rules calls in the Rules threads on CBT. When it comes to certain areas of the universe I approach Roosterboy levels of knowledge. And man did I make some truly abysmal mistakes. My original work Winston has Victor as the Commanding General in 3085, even though I was one of the four people who worked out the command structure for the RAF's initial years and knew darn well Victor stepped down before 3085 to be a Paladin. On one of the Ranger variants (remember all variants have been stated as part of development, to make production of the Record Sheets easier) totally ignored the basic slot rules for placing equipment and had to be scrapped.

So you can imagine how frustrating it can be as the product developer of something like this. You know from personal experience how hard it can be to work something into this wonderfully complex universe, or how our construction rules allow for awesome flexibility but require careful attention. At the same time you have to deal with dozens if not hundreds of these little errors from all the writers.

As the Product Developer it was literally a case by case basis on what to do with the problems. Early in the process, a lot of stuff would go back to the author,  "Yo, Roland! You're 300 words over, fix it", "Hey Ken', you're overweight you want to drop that MPL to an ERML or drop a heat sink?".  Other times it fell to me, as the developer, to make the changes. Sometimes it's a simple change and a no brainer. Other times the change was a little more extensive,  but to ensure universe/book fit I did it. And then there was the one design that in the eleventh hour we all went "Whoops, this design doesn't have a missile launcher… Err the artist isn't available right now, Joel we need a design with an SRM 2" I've heard rumors from Herb about how authors swarm him with questions after a product goes out and I start to understand what he goes through. When Ken' sees the Eldinger he's gonna ask "Where did the other ATM rack go?" And I get to answer "Well I totally forgot this had to match some art we already had and that requires it to carry Elementals, I had to cut the firepower."

Something else that falls to the developer is book continuity. Universe continuity is part of fact check, and we've got some truly awesome folks that help keep things straight here (The knowledge of folks like Pat "Roosterboy", Øystein, Mike Miller and the members of the  Master Unit List Team make this possible). But a book has a certain flavor, a certain theme. On something like a HotSpot book, this flavor is the core driver of the book and I believe (You'd have to ask Herb) that this makes it easier to keep that flow. But when you have a TRO, you're weaving in history in as little snippets here and there. With over dozen or so authors you have different styles, voices and areas of focus. As the product developer, you often have to tweak entries. First to prevent outright conflicts, "Hey, we've got the 8th Hastati on Shipka and Liao at the same time", to subtle weave ins like having the Ranger entry mention the Osprey in the deployment section and then tying a chapter art to this.

And can I just talk about basic grammar for a second? The book has been professionally edited, it's gone through tons of reviews with some truly detail oriented people, it's been through the Roosterboy shredder, its had other editors look it over informally. And we are still finding bloody little things like a period instead of a comma, a word half italics and half bold. It's insane. When you slam that many words into a book, it just becomes a mine field of little edit quirks. I think in a fiction novel we tend to miss a lot of these kinds of things, as we get into the flow of the story. With a technical game based book, they jump out more. And yet we're still finding them and I know the minute we let you all see the full book, there will be a dozen more found.

Well we're farther along than we were last week, but not where will be next week.

For now, let me leave you with something a bit different. Below is a text except from the "Old is the new new" section. And posted to the 3085 previews section you will find a Record Sheet for one of the ONN designs. This RS will be part of the PDF only release of the 3085 Record Sheet. Battle Corps fans will recognize where this design came from.

Infiltrator Mk. II (Magnetic): Designed for the active battlefield, the parafoil and AP mount are removed to make way for magnetic clamps.

Yellow Jacket (PPC): A light fusion engine grants a top speed of 151 kph. A C3 system compensates for the loss of firepower, making the ER PPC more accurate.

Warlord BLR-2Dr: Dropping one heavy PPC for an ER PPC, the lasers are reconfigured to make better use of triple-strength myomer and C3 is installed for lance coordination.

Until next week-ish…

Joel BC

TRO3085 Product Developer

So deciding who writes what can be easy and it can be a royal pain. 

We ended up with two rounds of pitches, for TRO:3085. The first round of the pitch was focused on the numerous Dark Age designs being introduced, the infantry and the Project Phoenix designs.  All the new designs would go out in a second pitch after the artists had a chance to come up with some concept designs. Some TROs have been stat first and some have been art first. TRO:3085 split the middle.

Some designs were really easy to assign. For example, only Joel Steverson showed any interest in the Maxim II. Conversely, four writers wanted to bring the  Eisenfaust to life.  With spreadsheet in hand I put the authors in columns and a 1 in each row of a design they wanted to do. For those keeping score, Ken' Horner and Dave McCulloch both tied for the most pitches, at 15 each.

Once I got the easy task of looking at all the designs with only one pitch, then I dug into the multi pitch units. In the end it really comes down to a gut check. Writers who followed the pitch guidelines got a decided preference, but that only covered so much. In some cases it came down to designs, the flawed tank design from one writer winning over the heavily maxed design. Other cases it was the fluff concept.  Craig Erne is one of our 'younger' writers, but I really liked his concept on the Eisenfaust and despite competing with some really good, long standing writers, he got the nod. An interesting thing  in all this  was the infantry. Not a single infantry was double pitched.

Done right? Ah heck no. Now I had to figure out how to fill all the unpitched designs. With TRO3085 having so much of it already defined it left less room for writers to come up with completely new ideas. Combine that with some other major writing projects going on and we had at least a third of the first pitch unclaimed. Step in the pinch hitters. First was myself, of course. I originally took on ten assignments for phase one. Randall and Ben Rome would both eagerly accept a large allotment each and   even our esteemed BC Editor in Chief would step in to take on a batch of units I just assigned him. In the end, 15 writers had divvied up the first 96 entries and writing would begin. In two weeks I'd have 96 entries on my "desk" ready to start fact checking.

Yeah, right!

Not long after writing formally began, things exploded on Catalyst's business front. This sucked up Randall's entire being, so that all but one of his assignments had to be reassigned. Ben Rome would suffer a terminal case of life and have to slide off most of his assignments. Dave M would also be sucked into the abyss, his entries only finally coming in with the Round Two writing.

Thus began the true work of TRO:3085. "Are you done yet? Now? How about now?" or "Ken', so you got time to do a few more? You can, good, by tomorrow? Why are you laughing?"

In the end all the writing would get in, but know who was the very last person to turn in their work?

Why is everyone looking at me? Oh all right, you guessed! I know understand the stress that Herb and Randall come under when a book is trying to go to fact check. Having spent two months managing all the other writers, checking everything for basic conformity and getting dropped assignments covered, I ended up horribly behind on my own writing. I got it all done and on time, but there were some long nights there to catch up.

Whew.. The writing was done. Can I take a break now?

Herb, why is Randall laughing at me?

Next week, "So now what?"

Until then, I want to leave you with what I think may be one of the coolest new pieces of art in TRO:3085. Sometimes cool isn't about how deadly or how fast your unit is. Sometimes cool can be a whole other kettle of fish.  That's the case with the Twenty-fourth Hellfire Firefighting Battalion, Eighty-fourth Avalon Light Infantry, Seventeenth Avalon Hussars. Yes that's right folks, Firefighters!

See you all sometime next week.

Joel BC

TRO3085 Product Developer

It's a strange thing, really. Looking back at where you were, where you're at now and where you're going. Sounds cliche of course (because it is), but times like these you can't help yourself. 

For those of you that attended Gen Con 2001 after FASA closed its doors (and actually managed to find our booth), you'll remember it was 2 tables, in a single 10' x 20' booth space, buried deep in the hall (behind a pillar), with only Rob to keep me company.  For the next several years the goal was to stabilize BattleTech and then to start to re-grow the fanbase lost when FASA closed and so many wrote off the game as dead.

I consider Origins Award wins a great little litmus test on whether a game is doing well or not. After all, it's a popularity contest, and if you're winning awards, that means you've got fans interested in your game. The last Origins Awards win by FASA for BattleTech was in 1998 for the BattleTech Master Rules. Despite winning 5 other awards previously in the 90s, BattleTech would go through a huge dry spell of a decade without winning another Origins Award. However, I'd like to think BattleTech simply was taking time to re-establish itself and give us the time to bring the vision of the new BattleTech rulebooks to fruition. Despite mis-steps along the way (and there's been plenty), as those books started to roll out, the awards started to come once more.

2008 Best Miniatures Rules: BattleTech Introductory Box Set  

2009 Best Miniatures Rules: BattleTech Tactical Operations

2010 Best Miniatures Rules: BattleTech Strategic Operations

A great three-peat to showcase that BattleTech is growing in popularity and strength more than it has in a long, long time. The 2010 Best Game-Related Book win for 25 Years of Art & Fiction was a wonderful icing on the cake. 

I can't thank enough all the authors and volunteers that have seen BattleTech through the hard times and are still here working hard to see it into a brightening future. It's been a pleasure and honor to work with so many dozens of wonderfully creative individuals over the years.

And of course the fans are what it's all about. As I've mentioned through endless blogs and chats for over a decade, it's the fans that deserve accolades. You the community that have supported and voted and help to bring BattleTech to where it's at today. So give yourselves a giant pat on the back and raise a PPC toast (spiked with your faction's favorite additive) to the game we all love!

Thank you all!

Randall 

Whoof. Amazing how a week just runs away from you. Before you know it, it's next week already. Apologies for the late post, I've been helping out with another major BT project (If you follow Randall's Catalyst twitters you can make a guess). With that let's dive into the blog and of course I know you're all waiting for that next preview.

So when we last left the outline, it was going out to the writing community. I've not worked with any other game company but I imagine the process if fairly similar (perhaps Roland can illuminate us with a forum response in the BattleBlog thread). I've been on the receiving end before and with TRO3085 I got to stumble my way through the developer side.

As a writer you get these emails from the void, okay usually from Herb's email account. Sometimes you know they are coming, based on the working roadmap shared with the core writers. Then there are times when they come completely out of the void. That happened to me with JHS:3076. I'd gotten my one little writing gig in Blake's Doc (Joey Nicole's bio) by being in the right place at the right time as one of Herb's trusted fact checkers. It was a blast to do that and I'd not expected anything else from it. When I was included on the JHS:3076 pitch I about flipped.

So a question that was asked early on was "How does someone get tapped to work on a BT product". Well I'm still convinced that Herb has a magic dart board somewhere and he tosses darts at it while saying "What fanboy can I turn on his own faction this week?" But seriously I know a bit about how I ended up being tapped but I know a lot more about how the three new writers got tapped, cause I tapped them.

So most CBT regulars know Jellico. If you've ever even stepped into the aerospace forum you'll feel his presence immediately. Jellico has been around for years, has a great reputation with the moderators, a strong respect among his fellow fans and an incredible level of subject matter expertise in aerospace and the SLDF (turns out he's no mean slouch in factories and Ghost Bear either). Way back during the development of Tactical Operations, I was working with Randall on aerospace rules. As TO grew we shoved this all into SO, but this all started before that. I was tasked with developing the updated fighter squadron rules. Our goal was to keep them highly playable but balance them without nerfing them. The majority of aerospace fans have enthusiastically adopted the new SO Squadrons rules and Jellico gets a big nod for that happening.

After I finished something like my third draft of the rules both Randall and I loved them. We thought they were awesome. We thought they covered it all. We didn't see anyway to improve them. But we knew how much Murphy loved to hear things like that. I was the resident aerospace expect at the time and we needed a set of fresh eyes. So armed with an NDA I went hunting. The first thing I did, was turn to my fellow moderators, in what's become a standard practice for all new Fact Checkers and most Play Testers.  In what amounts to the Catalyst version of a background check, Jellico's online presence was reviewed. Was his behavior up to the standards of the Catalyst Code of Conduct (yes we have one)? With a resounding thumbs up, from the  moderators, I tapped Luke to be our Squadron reviewer.

That began Luke Robertson's tenure as the founding member of the Aerospace Cabal. Since then Luke has been there whenever we needed something. First with aerospace and then branching into battle value and from that into being one of the key members of the Master Unit List team. In that time he's created numerous internal documents that read more like tactical treatise on warfare then an OOC report. When I built the outline for TRO:3085 I turned to Luke for help in base stats for all the aerospace units. He didn't just deliver suggestions, he completely disassembled all factions aerospace abilities and provided in universe justifications for all of it.

I'd have been a fool not to offer him a chance to bring some of these aerospace units to greater life. So with Herb's permission, he was added to the super secret authors pitch list and was invited to write for TRO:3085.

So… back to the pitch process. It's pretty simple. The developer sends out the outline with specific instructions to the writers on what is being looked for in a pitch. In the case of 3085 this amounted to "Full stats on the primary version and notes on your desired variants and a paragraph or two on how you would position the fluff of the unit." They got two weeks to pitch and then I got to sort through the pile of entries.

Which we can talk about next week.

For now, I've heard folks ask about what non BattleMech stuff will appear in the TRO. For BattleCorps subscribers we posted Catalyst's take on the Fox Armored Car (which is really a hover craft). Early feedback on it amounts to "You made a horrible DA unit cool!". 

For ClassicBattlTech we're giving you a glimpse at an "old" / new unit. Folks who've played 'MechAssault may remember the cool looking, rotorless VTOL. Well we've reached back to that design and will be giving it a nod. You'll have to wait for the TRO, to see the art, but wet your whistle on the Aeron Strike VTOL.

Until next time,

Joel BC

TRO3085 Product Developer

PS- Origins attendees! Be sure to stop by the Catalyst Demo Team table for an exclusive TRO:3085 preview.