On July 13th, 2008, two mysterious emails were sent to select players from an individual by the name of the “The Guide”. That led to a mysterious sign up page for some curious project named Rachel’s Walk, a project nobody knew anything about were nonetheless intrigued.

Over a thousand unique signups later, how things have changed.

Ever since that mail was sent I’ve been asked the same question numerous times: why send out an email for something that was hardly even planned? Didn’t it seem premature, especially considering the publicity circus that took place leading up to the last project?

Well, time for a glimpse at Rachel’s Walk history…

I thought of the concept for this project in mid-June, actually during a week of vacation when both my wife and son celebrate birthdays. At the time it was nowhere near the scope it is now, but it got me excited enough that I simply couldn’t contain myself.

But along with that I had an idea for an experiment: my last project, the one I personally called Shadow Watch (or BoL/SiD to the players), had a decent amount of signups because people knew I was the one running it. What kind of response would we get if people didn’t know I was running it? Would it be worth it to do? In order to find that out, the signup page has always asked for only the email address (since people knew it was me for Shadow Watch, they were more willing to provide full contact information. Such is not the case here; that level of trust did not exist). And, as expected, the signup page did not do as well as Shadow Watch did, at least not until the day we announced that we were doing it (for the record, that day we go 116 signups).

But what was Rachel’s Walk at the time the page went up? One could argue that it wasn’t anything: not much more than a passing thought, scribbles on a notebook I carry around. Besides the signup page, there wasn’t a line of code written, a single creative element designed. But as time progressed, especially after the involvement of Lauren and the others, we realized that this project could be so much more. And so it began to grow, and grow, and grow…

To give you a comparative reference, here is how the project currently stands compared to the past:

• Shadow Watch was a single database with a grand total of eleven tables in it (everything else was driven by XML). Rachel’s Walk is currently over 70 tables (does not include databases created by third party applications and services) that span at least five separate Microsoft SQL and mySQL servers.
• Every project we have run up to now was on the same physical server hosted at GoDaddy. For Rachel’s Walk we currently have six hosted servers at two separate locations, and a third location coming soon. One of our websites is load balanced for the first time.
• We have acquired six times more stock imagery for Rachel’s Walk than for all our past projects combined.
• I have a drive partition for all game content that has had to be increased in size at least three times (for those that are wondering: I have three separate backups I run – to DVD, off-site and to a separate USB thumb drive – that are run throughout the week).
  
• The Rachel’s Walk Visual Studio solution is at least ten times larger than Shadow Watch. It spans four separate assemblies, an undisclosed number of websites, and at last count contains over 50,000 lines of code (in C#) written entirely in house and specifically for this project.
• We have had at least three (maybe four) different project management solutions. To put the amount of content in perspective, the current project management site we are using has almost as many informational pages in it than the entire Wiki for The Lost Ring.
• In my original concept, I had planned no more than three “in game” characters. At last count, Rachel’s Walk has over twenty and climbing.
• Looking Glass Laboratories cost a little under $100 to execute. Shadow Watch had a total cost of $350. Rachel’s Walk has a running cost of over $4,000 so far in terms of hosting (websites, domains, bandwidth, etc…), content acquisition (stock images, software, third party licenses, etc…) and materials.
• I was doing this alone at first. We now have four active team members: graphic designers, content generators, professional writers, etc…

…and all the above is not counting the things we can’t really tell you. Suffice to say, it’s become something more than just a random thought in my head, and not something I was able to predict when the signup page went up.

From an implementation perspective, the workload involved in the design and development of this project is no different than other major productions out there. There is one big difference though: we don’t do this for a living. Unfortunately, we do have real world commitments, things that prevent us from giving exclusive attention to this project. For example, during this project’s existance I have lived in two different homes, had owned three different computers and have had no less than four different full-time jobs.

Had we the resources to work on this all day, this project would have launched and probably finished by now. But, alas, such is not the case. We try to set our own personal milestones, but everything from real life situations to changes in scope have pushed the dates further and further ahead, much to our personal dismay.

So, by today’s standards, we realize the signup page did go up too soon. But that was never the intention, and the page was never meant to linger for so long before game launch. The project simply matured, outgrowing the registration page and the short timeline that was originally planned. Would we do this sort of thing again, put up a page without any idea when the game will actually start? Admittedly, it’s hard to keep quiet about future projects anyway, but we will take these lessons in to consideration for future endeavors.

What does this mean for this game though? Rachel’s Walk continues being developed, inching closer and closer to the day when it is unleashed upon the world. Will it launch in 2009? Sadly, no… Right now my more realistic prediction is around mid-April 2010.

In the meantime, we would like to thank all of you and we continue to ask for patience and understanding for what we are trying to accomplish. We think it’s worth it: everyone that has come in and seen “behind the curtain” has seen how this project is doing everything possible to be revolutionary and shape the image of ARGs for years to come. We’re not going anywhere, and will continue putting our hearts and souls in this project to make it the best it possibly can be.

We hope you will not be disappointed, and we hope you enjoy the ride.

“Ever forward…”