Vaporware
July 25th, 2008–posted by Chris
Perhaps you have noticed that Storytron seems to be suffering from a bad case of the vapors. Our very first business plan called for us to publicly launch everything on January 1st, 2008. That didn’t happen. We pushed the launch date back to March 15th. But in early March I ran a playtest that convinced me that the Deikto interface was unacceptably obtuse. So I went back to the drawing board — and we pushed back the launch date to May 15th. I forget why we pushed it back from there, but I do recall that the next delay came when our alpha testing of Balance of Power 21st Century revealed many problems. So once again I went back to the drawing board and came up with major changes to the storyworld.
During all this time we had other difficulties: I had surgery that proved to be disabling for longer than I had expected. One of our programmers was human enough to take a vacation. I wasted two weeks on a trip to two conferences.
And despite the fact that our official launch date has been pushed back repeatedly, our progress has been relentless. We require five main pieces of software to launch Storytron:
1. Swat, the editing tool. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Swat has changed very little in the last six weeks. That’s because it’s in great shape. Facundo and Louis continue to work on it feverishly, but the work they’re doing has all been concerned with improving efficiency and security, and ferreting out tiny bugs that haven’t been reported by the users. It’s really reassuring when the programmers find the bugs before the users do.
2. Storyteller, the program you use to play a storyworld with. This too has been stable for about eight weeks. Again, the only changes on it have involved efficiency and security. It appears to be very solid now.
3. The website. The Storytron website has quite a few special capabilities that require some custom programming. There’s nothing earth-shattering, to be sure, but it is not a collection of HTML pages. There’s a lot more going on underneath the hood. Louis has been doing lots of coding to make all this work properly, and Pati and Laura have been deeply involved in organizing the overall effort.
4. The reference material and tutorials. This pile is huge. Worse, the technology it explains has been constantly changing. We made changes in April and May that required Pati to completely rewrite large portions of the tutorials. All in all, the content of the materials on the website adds up to about the size of a book — which Pati and Laura have generated in a matter of months.
5. Balance of Power 21st Century (BoP2K). This is the demo that will prove to a doubting world that Storytronics really works. As such, it has to be damned good, and it isn’t even venial-sin good yet. It can be fun sometimes, but there are still way too many nasty gotchas, and it needs a lot more tuning. This is entirely MY fault. I have been poking my nose into everything else that Storytron does, and not giving BoP2K the time it needs. So BoP2K struggles along, a step at a time.
So how much longer will Storytron remain in vapor? How much longer will we give you promises that we later break?
The board of directors discussed this matter at length at its recent meeting, and we hammered out the details of how we’re going to handle the launch. This time, though, we really want to be sure about our promises. Therefore, all we are saying at this time that the launch will NOT occur before August 18th. We are HOPEFUL that it will occur by September 1st. And that’s the best we can say at this time.
Please do not conclude that we couldn’t meet a deadline to save our lives. In every case, we have deferred the launch in order to improve the quality of our products. We could in fact have launched on January 1st, 2008, as originally planned — and the product we had ready at that time was better than what was originally planned. However, we deemed it to be unacceptable, so we pushed the deadline back. The same thing happened in mid-March; Swat and Storyteller were better than we had expected back in January — but they still weren’t good enough.
The changes we have been making have dramatically improved our technology. Yes, it’s frustrating to have to wait. You think you’re frustrated? However much you’re frustrated, I’m frustrated a lot more. But we only get one chance to show off to the venture capitalists, and we want to make this our best shot.
So all we can say is, stand by. We’ve been very open about keeping you up to date on the latest developments. We will continue to do so. It looks like we might have a release in about a month — but don’t hold us to that date.