Castle Marrach , our first game, was developed by a team of three or four people in just a few months while we had lots of other stuff going on, such as our first major convention. And our tools have become faster and easier to use since then. The staffing question is a bit trickier. It's been our experience, looking at online games, that people love to take positions of responsibility in online games, so we think it will be fairly easy for StoryBuilders to recruit from our existing online community to get help in staffing their game. The practical advantages of prose over representational imagery are numerous and well known.
Text is relatively inexpensive to create, manipulate and serve.
We can implement fundamental architectural changes, quickly introduce vast new territories to explore, create significant new capabilities and special effects, and originate substantial in-game events with very little lead time. Speaking as an author, the prose format gives me the luxury to change my mind. I can experiment freely with color and tone, try different approaches and generally improvise with a degree of flexibility unheard-of in graphical games. None of this freedom is of any use if there's nobody to read what we've written. Fortunately, there are tens of thousands of dedicated connoisseurs online who appreciate the unique virtues of prose, and are willing to pay for it.