It’s a common yet unsung occurance: the failure of indie game projects. It happens for many reasons, maybe your coder was a prique, your artist was lazy, or your designer couldn’t stop redesigning everything. For one reason or another the process and progress dies off and all that work only counts for experience. I’ve experienced this too many times, and have identified the points of failure, and they kinda go like this:
Organization:
You need to be well connected with your team members. They need to know the vision, and their part in creating it. You may think that a single forum thread or an email list is all you need, but that is FAR from enough. You need a way for everyone on your team to collaborate. An entire forum could be used, a project task tracker (JIRA for example) would be useful, and group chats are fantastic. Basically anything that allows a team to communicate enough to function as a single entity is what you want. This means a decent portion of the time a member spends on development needs to be communicating. Here is a list of things you NEED:
-Permanent place to keep track of game progress: forums, project task trackers, websites/applications of similar natures.
-Permanent place to keep the evolving vision for the game: a wiki is perfect for this.
-Temporary place to discuss details: im or voice chat
-A way to notify everyone on your project reliably: email can fill this void easily, being able to text your team is better sometimes. (yes, after working with interweb people for long enough you are allowed to trust them)
*A way for everyone to add to the project at whim: game engines and 'git’s are very good at this. It is very nice for an artist to be able to simply add in their art into the game engine, and give it a test run. When they have to hand it off to a coder, then there can be issues that need streamlined out.
Motivation:
A project that is proposed elegantly can be received well, and your team may have grand vigor at the start. Yet as time goes on the vision starts to wane. Keeping a team excited about a project is the MOST DIFFICULT part of leading a team. Here are some ways to keep the fire burning:
-talk about it regularly: just keeping the idea on the mind is good enough sometimes
-allow room for creativity: make sure to have the same vision, but always allow all contributing members of the team to have enough freedom in their craft to express themselves. Let them add their personality into it, and they will love it more.
-Recognition: so that rookie artist just leveled up and put his heart and soul into making the best elvish dagger model you’ve ever seen. Praise him in a part of an email to the whole team. I’m sure he used too many polys, but you have to look past small errors. See the good in the other and it will magically grow.
-Milestones: a pinprick of light from then end of a tunnel is TONS better than pure darkness. A manageable milestone such as a rudimentary demo/testing level is usually farther than it seems, but it lets the team know what to focus on. Also accomplishing a milestone, and being able to play your game with X more features is AW$EOME!
Other:
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Keep your project scope down: no your mmo will NEVER be finished, and yes a platformer is much more manageable.
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Keep the basic vision, let go of the specific details(if need be).
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Don’t recruit people who: are not skilled, ambitious, motivated, or sane enough to see the project to completion.
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Be fair and honest. So you made the rabbit look like it has a terrible disease: I should be allowed to tell you that in a non-offensive manner.
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Don’t start what you can’t finish
I hope you can contribute to this. And I hope this fits in the ‘team projects’ forum okay and all. (it sooo does Mr. moderator)
