While the overriding driver for the Brain Candy team to start Runes of Gallidon was a passion for the concept of building a shared world collaboratively, we also acknowledged that at some point we would have to figure out how we could share revenue with Artisans. Ah, the wonderfully tricky, sticky issues with money and [...]
Choosing a name for the world was an interesting experiment that involved not just finding something different, unique, and appealing, but also ensuring that we could get the URL for the domain and (hopefully) not infringe on an existing trademark.
One of the earlier realizations I had about handling content on the site was that if content can be digitized, the upsides of offering free digital copies far outweighed the downsides of not monetizing digital copies. Just the idea of trying to lock up the content seemed counter-productive to building an audience, if not outright [...]
Although Tony and I knew we wanted to limit the world to either fantasy or sci-fi, we still had to decide which one, as well as which sub-genre. High fantasy or low fantasy? Dark fantasy? Star Trek or Star Wars? Dune? Firefly? After a bit of research and Tony’s offer to use a future universe [...]
A deceptively small decision about how to handle the monitoring/editing/filtering of content submissions ended up having the largest impact to our approach to the site design, internal operations, and management of submissions.
Having put the basic framework of the world and the rough business model together, Tony and I began discussing exactly what kind of content we would want in that world. Based on Tony’s background as a writer and my brief, distant training as a writer (a B.A. in creative writing twenty years old and collecting [...]
Runes and Rice I committed to what became Runes of Gallidon while finishing a platter of bimimbap at a Seoul Brothers restaurant in April of 2008. I was having dinner with two friends, Tony Graham and Andy Underwood, and after a few weeks of evaluating our collective skill sets, I decided that our startup idea [...]