Weekly Update – 10/7/2018 Oct 7 - Tosh

Welcome back everyone, thank you all for the positive feedback from last week’s update, please keep the feedback rolling so we can tailor these updates to you. This week we’ll be showing some more work in progress models (no fishbowls) like Brute weaponry as well as showing off some of the amazing art you all do and share with us.

We Want You

If you are a talented developer with a passion for Halo, and making great games we’d love to bring you onto the team here. Find your nearest recruiting station below:

Join the i01 Team

Conception

Usually, before you see all the maps, armors, and weapons they’ve gone through tons of work, and polish over time. We’d like to throw out that notion in favor of being more transparent with you all and show you some behind the scenes before it’s finished. No, it's not a fishbowl.

Fishbowls are cool and all. But that’s not all we wanted to share with you today, a lot of you have been asking about a certain Brute weapon for a long time now... here it is, the Brute Shot!

It’s still in the early stages of development, but it’s getting there and will be ruining the fun in no time! This is by no means the last time you’ll see these models, but the next time you do they’ll be as pretty as Bean on his wedding day.

Models brought to you by Dynamic.

Community Guy

This week I’ve invited everyone else on the team, but they’re all busy making the game, so I’ll have to do it myself. Let’s get right into it.

What exactly does a community manager do?

Good question! Basically, a community manager on Installation 01 is a public-facing figure here to promote healthy discussion, gather feedback, write articles, advocate our brand on social platforms, keeping an open channel to content creators, and being the bridge between the community, and the rest of the team. In our case, we want to be as open as possible and as active as possible within our community to form a friendship-like-bond and trust.

Okay... but why do we need one?

To simply put it, every game has a community, and every developer is constantly working on making that game. Without a Community Manager, the developers themselves would have to take time off of work to constantly monitor feedback and engage the community in one way or another. Instead of doing this and adding more time to the development it is better to just have a person entirely dedicated to doing this and growing the community as a whole.

How do you refrain from banning every single person in this community that you manage?

It requires a lot of self-control, and composure haha. At the end of the day, you aren’t trying to stop people’s right to speak their mind, and a lot of the time you get the brunt of the bad as a CM. What sets a good CM apart from a bad one is if you can understand where the person is coming from and take from it what they mean instead of ignoring them. “Hate” always some form of truth in it, and you have to understand you’re the easiest person for them to do this “hate”, but understand more often than not it is a passion for the game you’re making that causes them to act this way. Of course, clear constructive feedback is always the goal, but it is a big part of the job to take all feedback and make it constructive for the developers and myself. This isn’t what happens 100% of the time and you do have to enforce rules which most of the time ends with a banhammer but it is not the priority to silence unhappy voices.

How do you keep everyone obeying the rules and acting as good community members?

I don’t. Well, at least not alone. A big tool you can utilize while managing such a large community is understanding that you can use passionate community members themselves for the job. This is why we utilize moderators for our forums on Discord and Reddit as well as identifying users who are always answering questions accurately by giving them a special color or “tag” to set them apart. Doing this allows you to manage a much smaller team who in turn manages the larger community at hand better than you could alone.

What do you do besides "managing a community"?

Well, as a fan project even though we have set roles we do bleed into anything else we can do, so I find myself doing things like Public Relations, Technical Writing, and Quality Assurance. I’m also one of the main “streamers” here on the team, it’ll be harder to find a stream I’m not involved in some way than one I am. I’m a go-to guy for questions, what we can and can’t say, stuff like that. I also do some social media managing for several platforms we have such as the official Twitter and Facebook.

What is community management like, is it hard or stressful?

I wouldn’t go as far to say It’s hard, but it can be extremely stressful. Anything you say or do is directly reflected onto the game your team is creating so you have to hold yourself to a much higher standard than you normally might. There’s that constant fear of leaking something, causing controversy, or pissing the wrong person off.

Thanks for all the questions, I hope you learned a little bit about what I do here, and what that exactly entails. We’ll be coming next week with a more technical side of things again this week we ran into some scheduling problems and had to make do.

Community Spotlight

It seemed like you all really enjoyed the community art showcase we did last week, well, we’re going to do it again this week because you’re all amazing. Thank you for sharing your work with us and being part of the community!

Art by ikki day#5079, Ikki on ArtStation

Art by Sgt. Squiddy#0661

Art by Delta307#0356, Delta307 on ArtStation, and @deltaindustries307 on Instagram.

Art by Iowa#8653

These art showcases are really cool, but what else would you like us to feature in these community spotlights? Please let me know @Tosh_i01 on Twitter, Tosh#4035 on Discord, or email me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from all of you!

Blame Bean

It is believed that this is the main suspect in an investigation to find out what happened to a campground that was attacked by a seemingly inhuman creature disguised as one of us. If you see this creature, please do not make contact with it, call us immediately.

That’s it for this week, again, thank you all for tuning in. Come back next week where we dive into animation, more work-in-progress models, and perhaps even some more Bean memes. As always, let me know what you’d like to see more of, or suggest entirely new sections for these updates. We’re listening.

Tosh