Comic Books Are Where It's At.... As some may know from time to time I divest myself of one small mindless vice, City of Heroes. It's an online massive multi-player game where you get to be a Superhero, and if that's not cool I don't know what is.
Lets face it there's nothing cooler than being a hero. I don't get to play often but when I do - I play with a team of the best, a group of nut jobs who are affectionately known as the "Kings Row Taxi Service". I was once a leader of their cadre - and helped build them into one of the largest and longest running superhero groups on the Infinity server.
We had a website, coffee mugs, posters, you name it - we'd made the Kings Row Taxi Service the center of fun. (Yes, you can officially declare me a geek loser now.)
I haven't logged on in a long time due to work, and I haven't kept up the website there like I should. Like this site, it's designed to let me just update it when I need and the rest of the time I kinda let it slide so I can do things like, pay bills by working.
So - I logged on and discovered that in my absence... much had befallen the once great Taxis.
To help out - I devised a case study, and began working on a series of small projects which will help the guys at KRTS to expand on, allowing them to self maintain these projects and have fun and grow with them. .
A video trailer to help new members see what kinds of fun they're going to experience...
And I began assembling an Online comic book in part to provide exsiting users a perk and new users something to look forward to...
The Comic is comprised of the various screenshots the guys have collected, which, with a bit of photoshoping ... become comic book panel art work that I can bring into Planetwide Media's Comic Book Creator.
Now some people might say, "This sounds like a ton of fun but ... um...uh... How does this really relate to a Project? Or anything I can learn from?". Glad you asked, actually it's lesson number one of all good Program or Project Management: No matter what you do - do it well.
For the guys at KRTS, I wanted to give them a full blown branding, marketing and a method of reaching their users. For that... you need attack it just like any other project. Define the market, the needs, the goal, the mission, and resources - just like any other project.
Second step is of course to assemble those into project areas which we could tie to the mission and the goals. Finally, it's to execute on those goals.
So - my project this for the month of April ... was to make the Kings Row Taxi Service, the best known Superhero Group Website of their kind. :-) Mix work with pleasure whenever you can... it does wonders for both activities.