Been a while since I've done one of these, and it's due to two reasons: First off, I haven't had anything interesting to write, so I refrained, and secondly: I've been busy with real life stuff - med. school and moving for my girlfriend, mostly.
Anyways, med. school is settling down again, and my girlfriend is well settled in.
I wanted to write something about the recruitment process for a mod project, because I think this is something people often underestimate. At the moment, Eternal Silence is looking for artists in most fields of game art. More specifically, we're looking for concept, 2d and 3d artists. You can check out our job ad here. Before that, we were looking for programmers(which we got, thankfully). For both recruitment processes, there's been a lot of wasted time and energy on "ghost applicants". By ghost applicants, I mean a certain type of people, that will apply to a job ad with apparent sincerity, only to go incommunicado immediately after. It happens like this:
Prospective staff member sends his CV and an application to yours truly. I go through it, evaluate his works, and then starts processing him as a trial staff member, by which I mean assigning him a trial task to complete, and write a long e-mail about how our team works and about how to get him started. Then - nothing. The prospective staff member never replies to the e-mail, never contacts anyone through steam, or registers on our forums.
Right now, you might just be going "Ahhh, I'm not buying that", but it is the simple truth, and it happens a lot more than you'd expect. You get a lot more ghost applicants than proper applicants with this sort of volunteer work.
Which is, of course, also the root of the problem. My estimation is, that these people are only half-interested in actually joining a team. They think it'd be cool to be a part of game development, but don't really consider the time and effort it takes to actually go anywhere with it. Realizing that(perhaps from my awe-inspiring wall o' text e-mail of doom), they get cold feet and back out. And it's much easier to just not reply to e-mails, than it is to write back that you're giving up before you've even started, right?
Which means a lot of time wasted on my part.
[/rage].
So, the promised insider-look on our little ES project - the carrot that may have gotten you through another blogging attempt of mine:
Development is ongoing at a steady rate, but fairly slow at the moment. The reason for this is, of course, obvious - start of the school year. Many of our staff members are in college/uni, and the beginning of a semester is always a bit hectic. You have to dust off your studying skillz and get a proper rhythm flowing in your daily life again. If you're starting at a new school, on a new education, it takes even more time.
However, we've decided on a feature lock, and a deadline, for the next patch. We're putting as much work into finishing the new additions to the game and ironing out some of the hiccups in the current build of the game as our education/social life/spouses allow us to. We'll get there - don't worry.
Meanwhile, YOU can help us out: If you know a good artist within the aforementioned fields, and think he might be interested in working on developing a HL2 mod, tell him to contact me at nox@eternal-silence.net.
Oh, and also, please leave a comment if you've actually read this blog post. It'd be interesting to see how many actually goes through this thing.
