Introducing: "Creative Force"

8 years ago Forgehub's first forum thread was posted. It was a monumental event that changed so much. Thank you TrueDarkFusion and TheYavimayan for what you guys built. I was the 7th member of Forgehub being a part of the original Guilders team that ran Forgehub as AZN FTW. On this anniversary I wanted to announce an attempt to push further what they started.

A little over a month ago I announced an initiative to Change up the Forging Scene. Today I'm happy to announce the current culmination of this effort. I'd like to introduce the current members of our core team:

Creative Force [CF]​

CryptoKid - QA Manager
darkprince909 - Developer (Halo), Designer
GodlyPerfection - Project Manager, Designer
MythicFritz - Designer, Developer (Halo)
NEKTryhard - Community Manager
Randy 355 - Developer (Halo)
Sn1p3r C - Community Manager, Developer (Halo)
Whos Blaze - Designer, Developer (Halo)
WolfpackDragon - Designer, Developer (Unreal)​

In addition to the core team we have several members that are joining the internal testers team. As we go forward and start incorporating that team in our process I will make sure they get their due recognition. They will be just as crucial to the process going forward as the core team. In addition there are several others waiting to be added as part of the third wave so this roster is only the beginning.


The Past Month

We have been organizing and planning heavily in the background on our private Trello board. Everyday we push a little closer to Forge and we want to make sure that everyone on the team is in sync and ready to start pumping out content as a group. There are already several projects in planning. I'm currently estimating around 8 maps and 15 games (gametype/map combinations, both mini and full on standard gametypes) are currently being fleshed out. I'm excited for some of the ideas that are being thrown about. We also took a lot of time to figure out a team name that really spoke to the direction we want to take the team. There's planning on how we are going to fully support an entire pipeline that allows many individuals to participate in the process without steps being missed because there are a lot of cogs in place and we want to make sure we have the capability to make sure every cog plays a part and isn't missed. At this moment we are also going through the branding process with Logos, Social Network accounts, etc. A lot of work behind the scenes and I'm really proud of what the team is doing right now and excited to put the team to public use.


What does this "team" mean for you?

Well lots of things. Our goal is to provide for the community. We all share in this creation process as our passion. Improving the quality, variety, and availability of content for the Halo community is our goal. And we want to contribute to the community, not just be another isolated sector that grows as its own thing. We've seen enough of that in the past. Community splintering is something that I personally believe has hurt our image to non-forgers. So here are some of the things we want to bring to the community to attempt to strengthen it.

Community Available Testing Resources

We all know how important playtesting is. Not only does it allow a creator to gain feedback and experience on their content, it also helps them spread the word of their content. It allows their content to be seen. The Forge community has had trouble getting past the content of "popular" creators. We want to put a focus on quality content, not quality individuals. As part of our own initiative we need a LOT of testing, hence we have an internal testers team and QA managers. We will be taking this resource and using it to help others test their own creations. Our testing lobbies will usually not be specific to our content (certain types of testing will require that we repetitively play content in certain ways). We will encourage participants to provide their own content for testing. This helps support the community, provides variety in lobbies, and helps build solid relationships throughout the customs community. Many of us are aware how difficult it is to get testers sometimes so we want to ensure that we ease that pain for newer forgers or those who have a hard time so they can spend more time focusing on building better and more content.

Visibility for Forgers

The Forging community has always been small and a close family. We also haven't really been heard throughout the rest of the Halo community. We are looking to open up more channels of communication with different parts of the community. Getting visibility for the community as a whole. Whether it be Forge requests or the inclusion of Forge creations in e-sports or maybe inclusion of custom content (both maps and gametypes) in matchmaking or getting more features in place. The goal is to show the Halo world that we are worth paying attention to. This will not be an easy endeavor, but it is a goal. With a team in place we have resources to dedicate to this effort with a huge footprint to get our foot in the door. Our community managers will be focused on bridging that gap and we will work with community leaders to ensure that we come up with a strategy to help show the world that the forge community is worth recognizing and supporting.

Refined Content Pipeline

We are going to be refining this "pipeline" for us to create content thoroughly and efficiently. Working as a team is tough, but organized in the right way allows us to really provide a lot of content at a level of quality that no single individual could touch. When we have a solid refined process in place we would like to publish this for the community in case others would find value in it as a whole process or individual parts of it. When I talk about the pipeline I'm talking along the lines of a "checklist" of sorts. What should you consider in ideation, prototyping, design, development, alpha, beta, release candidate, publishing, maintenance, etc.? We will evolve this pipeline in-house and learn from experience. When it feels solid we want to put it out for other individual forgers or other potential teams to build upon and use as a guideline (never as law).

Tools and Resources

We are creating an ecosystem that will feel very repetitive and will definitely involve a lot of boiler plate manual labor. It comes with being a team with roles. To ease this process we will be creating tools to ease that work in-house. As we refine tools we will want to put them out for the community to use. Whether this is posting tools, analysis tools, organizational tools, etc. we want to help the community grow and improve everyone's ability to provide both better and more content. This could also include various resources that we find or make ourselves like the Design Vectors or perhaps map layouts for the base maps or a list of forge objects. We will also have several Tool Engineers (programmers) that will specialize in building tools to make everyone's life easier. Grease Monkey scripts, server side scripts, recurring processes, simple applications, API interacting, etc. Anything that makes our job easier. Anything that is usable by the community we will push outward to allow others to garner the same advantages.

Design Vectors

Some people remember my Forge Lessons from ages ago and maybe even a learning series of some forge contest that never went through. They served to introduce designers to new topics. Their goal was not to introduce law, but to open up new "vectors" for content creators to consider while working. Introducing new concepts to individuals for them to dive deeper. Design is a DEEP space and there is something that can be learned from other disciplines. So I wanted to revamp this series with what we learn from this movement. The biggest feedback for the lessons were that they were not in-depth despite loosely being communicated as complete lessons and they lacked solid backing and research. So with this iteration the goal is to clearly communicate that these are to introduce topics and considerations, NOT to dive deeply. Hence the name Design "Vectors", just new directions to bring into your own philosophies. To build on that and make them less speculative we also plan on linking outwards to other resources, helping designers build their library of resources to grow.

Keeping the Community Active

One of the biggest painful things I've seen over my time in the Forging community (and I've been around for a LONG time) is the constant splintering of the community. Between various websites the community splinters more and more. An ego heavy community has resulted in a community that has grown apart, which I personally don't think is for the better. We will be putting our focus in building the core communities rather than splintering them. Other than our use of Trello for organization, our participation in the community will be done through existing communities rather than making our own. And if we can find ways to help bring communities closer together and consolidating them rather than continuing to splinter them then awesome. So as the team lives, we will make sure places like Forgehub gain life force from our existence rather than us draining away from communities to build our own. That is not the goal.


We are always recruiting

If you are interested in this effort and playing a role in it, or building a partnership with something you have put together yourself please feel free to reach out to me. We are looking for every role to be filled and there are more specific roles I'd like filled that I haven't even talked about. Tools Engineer if you are a programmer, QA Manager if you love customs, Community Manager if the forums are your home, Designer if you live with sketches, sketchup, or dreams, Developer if you love to build and refine, Project Manager for those who would like the experience of managing resources, etc.


Just the Beginning

This is going to be an ongoing effort going forward. If any suggestions are put into place we will more than just consider them. We want to provide a valuable resource for the community. I feel that we as a team have a lot of experience, resources, connections, and history from each individual person. Combining all of this will allow us to do something that no single individual can accomplish on their own. So if you have any ideas that you think would be worth exploring with this sort of resource, please message me here on Forgehub or any place you know to reach me. More social channels will open up over time for communication sake as we get organized. For now I'll leave you to your thoughts on this and I look forward to hearing from all of you. Thank you for your time.

 

Finally finding time to get to this. I've been crazy busy. Thanks for the support guys. I'm looking to grow the ranks quickly to ensure that we have the resources to handle large tasks for the community. I just proposed that a new matchmaking curation system is put into place rather than continue with the CC system. Given enough support this could be an effort that is tackled by CF as well. I've got a couple potential programmers in line.

I've also reached out to a couple individuals about partnerships and have gotten some good responses. Things are looking up. And with the release of Forge next week... there's tons to come. I'm more than pumped for the future.

Also we are so close to finishing off our Logo design... it looks awesome IMO.