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Author Topic: Group Projects  (Read 4322 times)
Muz
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« on: July 31, 2012, 07:55:30 AM »

Going to try to keep it concise. Let me know if I don't cover enough detail Tongue


Community/Fun
In the real world, people get a job for the salary and stick around for other things. In indie groups, people do it for friends and for fun. Never lose sight of this. It's not the only factor, it may not even be the most important factor, but once you lose the community feel, you lose your group, and you lose your project.

Do anything it takes to recover this once you've lost it. Maintain full communication. Keep your project momentum going. If all else fails, just get together with them and play Minecraft or even Runescape together. Do something together. Just make sure that in their spare time, everyone logs on to your central hub at least a few times a week.


Inertia
This is vital. Don't start a project if you can't maintain momentum. It's really hard to start it back up once it stops. Try to keep someone constantly doing something, maintain an illusion of activity if you have to, even if it's by rambling about future plans on your blog. I highly recommend a weekly blog or report so everyone sees what's going on. Also recommend having a good solid plan when you start; you don't want to put the game on hold for 3 months to review those plans.


Communication
Ok, well, I started doing group projects back in the Web 1.0 days and poor communication often killed things. Early on, email communication is good, especially now that Gmail does thread support. Maybe sign up for a separate "work" email, but link it to your main mail to organize things.

Later on, once emails reach bureaucratic capacity, consider signing up for forums. This makes it easier to share files, share ideas, put up bug reports and to do lists - all those little threads that people will post about once in 2 months but want to quickly reference later.

If you're communicating solely by email, CC stuff to each other all the time. You don't want a "central point" project manager who knows everything but leaves everyone else in the dark. This is confusing and demoralizing, and puts stress on the project manager.

Real time communication sometimes works, but it sucks online. Most people don't really go on IRC unless it's a big group. Skype works better than most IMs. Facebook works too if you don't mind giving out personal details.


Leadership
This is a major point of argument among indie groups. This will make or break your group.

Democracy really sucks. It's slow, you have to wait for everyone to vote and not everyone logs on. It's pointless, people will just leave a group if they don't like the way it's being led.

Elect a leader, seriously. You will argue on a lot of points, the leader will settle this. Because of this, elect a leader who is the best decision maker. Quite often, this is the lead designer, because they have the best high level view of the game. Yeah, the fricking idea guy. Not a hard rule, though.

Keep in mind that the leader is not always the most skilled person in the group. (S)He's just the director. Respect him/her. If you can't respect them, choose someone who everyone does respect. There's bound to be someone better at programming/art, that's why you're in a group.


Credit
Grow the hell up. Stop fighting over credit or do everything yourself. You're not here to show off your skill, you're here to create something together. If someone demands credit, keep a close eye on them, and kick them out before they become parasites.

The leader does not necessarily take most of the credit. If you have a good enough project, ideally nobody should take the credit. You accomplish it together as a team.


Money
When it comes down to splitting money, figure it out before you make any money.. maybe late in the project when you see everyone's contribution.

Honestly, I think salaries with minor commission is the best approach, but not always ideal.

If everyone contributes equally, split the money equally. If someone put (more) money into the game, they get a larger share.

Sometimes you have a guy who invests most of the effort into it, from design to code to art. (S)He hires a few people to do background art, or sprites for a couple of levels, or code some of the minor parts of the game. Nice way to split the money is to give out 10% for minor contributions, 20% for dedicated contributors, 5% to contributions you can live without like background, music, level design. Not set in stone, just what has worked for me.


Project management
I find most RL approaches (gantt charts, etc) don't work in indie development. It's too complicated for a small group, unless you have 5+ full time workers. Part time, I've seen very large groups get managed just fine with a few people in charge.. but you'll eventually hit like 6 'senior leadership' people.

You may eventually want to create a heirarchy, like Lead Programmer, Lead Artist. Don't try to create a heirarchy for everything.. just because you have 3 programmers, it doesn't mean you have to 'promote' one of them. If you can manage it like that, don't fix it if it's not broken.

Seriously consider making a To Do list. You don't need expensive project management software. But people need to know what's being done, who's doing it, how long they (haven't) been doing it, who's responsible for all that.

And they need to know what to do. There are entire books written on how to commmunicate what needs to be done, figure out what works best for you.


Mutual interest
Also very important, make sure you have a group who agree on what the game should look like. Let everyone read the design docs. Nobody wants to make a game they don't want to play. Nobody wants to wonder if the game is going to end up like a game that they're not going to play; even if it does end up a good game, you want to remove all doubts.


Mutual design
One bad general is better than two good generals.

Give full control of design to one person. ONLY one person. One of the biggest mistakes I've ever made was to share design with someone. I based the design similar to Secret of Mana, he made his design similar to Sonic. It became really awkward that our designs just didn't click. Nobody spoke up because they were afraid of hurting feelings, until the group disbanded. Doing a post mortem, we easily identified it as the reason why the project failed.

Of course, make sure your Lead Designer isn't lazy. And everyone is free to recommend things to this Lead Designer, his/her job would be to filter out unsuitable ideas or modify/fix them in a way that they fit in with the rest of the design.


The Mascot/Cheerleader/Village Idiot
There's very often that guy who does nothing. Somehow you let him/her in. He/she might make FPSes while everyone else is making a RPG. Or he/she could just be really incompetent. But they have such an enthusiasm with the project itself that you can't bear to kick them out.

Don't kick them. Morale is vital (see my first point). It's infectious. The attitude of this useless person pays off far more than it does on paper. Give them something minor to do. There's always admin work; cleaning up threads, sorting bug reports and suggestions, setting up repositories or whatever.

Failing that, just keep them for beta testing or updating the project blog (if they can write properly). Or customer service/moderation.
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vinheim3
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« Reply #1 on: July 31, 2012, 01:56:29 PM »

A lot of great points here, a lot of which I wouldn't have thought of

Community/Fun

Definitely a major problem in group work is that the teammates don't get along quite well, they think of each other as just colleagues or workmates. When they inevitably quit, there is no guilt. Keeping a vibrant community that gets along and has a fun occasional break sounds like a good solution. The only way I thought of was just creating the occasional personal or joke level to keep the person interested, but off course playing multiplayer games together is also another good way.

Inertia

This is why I think a design doc is important. Even if there is the occasional roadblock, all the major ones would've been easily passed if everyone can see the bigger picture. I'm not sure how to make people continue pumping something out for the group, my best bet was that everyone has a deadline on a different day of the week, and if there were more than 7 people, they would be spread out evenly among the days. This way, we always see progress done everyday and it also pressure people to take up their part

Communication

While all the points tie in with each other, communication is definitely the central point. It's easy to see how it helps with the community, inertia and the other following points. From my experience, Skype chat was the most effective, but I've yet to see how well communication works if discussion on the project is done alongside playing multiplayer games. Seems like a fun way to discuss progress as well as relaxing people so they let out any current roadblocks/failures.

Leadership

Nothing much to say here, although if there are multiple leaders managing different things, would it be more beneficial to have 1 leader managing these ones or just having these leaders be at the top?
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moi
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« Reply #2 on: July 31, 2012, 03:10:47 PM »


Leadership
This is a major point of argument among indie groups. This will make or break your group.

Democracy really sucks. It's slow, you have to wait for everyone to vote and not everyone logs on. It's pointless, people will just leave a group if they don't like the way it's being led.

Elect a leader, seriously. You will argue on a lot of points, the leader will settle this. Because of this, elect a leader who is the best decision maker. Quite often, this is the lead designer, because they have the best high level view of the game. Yeah, the fricking idea guy. Not a hard rule, though.

Keep in mind that the leader is not always the most skilled person in the group. (S)He's just the director. Respect him/her. If you can't respect them, choose someone who everyone does respect. There's bound to be someone better at programming/art, that's why you're in a group.

I'm thinking it should be more like a klingon rite of succession where if the leader loses interest (and this WILL happen, believe me), someone should challenge him for the leadership. The one with the most enthusiasm for the project should be designed as the leader.
But this should only be allowed if the current leader shows weakness.
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subsystems   subsystems   subsystems
kamac
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« Reply #3 on: August 01, 2012, 02:34:00 AM »

Quote
The Mascot/Cheerleader/Village Idiot
There's very often that guy who does nothing. Somehow you let him/her in. He/she might make FPSes while everyone else is making a RPG. Or he/she could just be really incompetent. But they have such an enthusiasm with the project itself that you can't bear to kick them out.

Don't kick them. Morale is vital (see my first point). It's infectious. The attitude of this useless person pays off far more than it does on paper. Give them something minor to do. There's always admin work; cleaning up threads, sorting bug reports and suggestions, setting up repositories or whatever.

Failing that, just keep them for beta testing or updating the project blog (if they can write properly). Or customer service/moderation.

Wonder how to split the money with him then. If you offer him fewer profit than to the others, he might not be too happy about it.
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Sir Wolf
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« Reply #4 on: August 01, 2012, 03:07:42 AM »

Wonder how to split the money with him then. If you offer him fewer profit than to the others, he might not be too happy about it.

This should be agreed on beforehand - if at the beginning of the project you agree on even split, you should stick to it. If you want to come up with some contribution metric to base profit splits on, do it in the beginning. Everyone should know what they can expect when they start participating. You shouldn't screw a guy over by telling them at the end that by the way, you'll get less than others.

Edit: typo
« Last Edit: August 01, 2012, 04:48:27 AM by Sir Wolf » Logged

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Liosan
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« Reply #5 on: August 01, 2012, 04:41:52 AM »

Communication
I thing I found to work well are persitent chat websites - like the one integrated into Assembla projects or the one from Attlasian, called HipChat. I'm sure there's a free one somewhere. Anyways, they are good for design discussion or idle chit-chat (same as IM), but a bit better because they are visible to everyone and can be read later on by someone who logged in the next day.

Speaking of Assembla, they have a really lightweight ticket system which we used instead of a forum for discussing specific subjects. We had a forum, but it never really kicked of because we didn't need it.

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michaelplzno
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« Reply #6 on: August 01, 2012, 05:14:19 AM »


Leadership
This is a major point of argument among indie groups. This will make or break your group.

Democracy really sucks. It's slow, you have to wait for everyone to vote and not everyone logs on. It's pointless, people will just leave a group if they don't like the way it's being led.

Elect a leader, seriously. You will argue on a lot of points, the leader will settle this. Because of this, elect a leader who is the best decision maker. Quite often, this is the lead designer, because they have the best high level view of the game. Yeah, the fricking idea guy. Not a hard rule, though.

Keep in mind that the leader is not always the most skilled person in the group. (S)He's just the director. Respect him/her. If you can't respect them, choose someone who everyone does respect. There's bound to be someone better at programming/art, that's why you're in a group.

I'm thinking it should be more like a klingon rite of succession where if the leader loses interest (and this WILL happen, believe me), someone should challenge him for the leadership. The one with the most enthusiasm for the project should be designed as the leader.
But this should only be allowed if the current leader shows weakness.

Love it. They should actually have to meet up and have a boxing match to determine who remains in charge.
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Muz
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« Reply #7 on: August 01, 2012, 02:33:29 PM »

Quote
Nothing much to say here, although if there are multiple leaders managing different things, would it be more beneficial to have 1 leader managing these ones or just having these leaders be at the top?

Depends on the culture, I guess.

I prefer getting a group of people I can trust, and putting one at the top. Having some kind of full leader makes it really easy to just make consistent decisions. With a few on top, you'll have trouble splitting up the leadership fairly, and may 'concede' a decision to other fellow top level leaders out of fairness even when you shouldn't be conceding.

More often than not, some people prefer not to take leadership; they were just promoted up there because of their competence. There will usually be one guy who's more proactive/social than the rest in leadership; so having one leader will come naturally.

Then again, much of the time, the group will consist of people who don't really know each other work, even if they've been friends for years. It's normal to just start it off with everyone of equal decision-making capability, and then decide to follow one person.

Often, there is that guy who goes around saying "let's make a game together" and writes up all the design docs and project management stuff.. this guy is usually proactive enough to keep things running and usually becomes the defacto leader.

Another thing to consider is that people do consider the leader as the one taking more credit than everyone else, even though this shouldn't be so in reality. That's why people get hostile to those who appear to not have any useful skills wanting to become a leader. Some people do get power-mad at times. If you've got a lot of ego in the group, it might be necessary to split up the leadership.


Wonder how to split the money with him then. If you offer him fewer profit than to the others, he might not be too happy about it.

Splitting the money late lets you give out the money based on contribution. I think they're often fully aware about how little they contribute. They're usually just pre-game fanboys who made it on to the staff. If they insist on taking credit/money, then you can safely kick them out Tongue

Sometimes they contribute a lot, but none of their ideas click with the game design in general, so their contributions get thrown away. But aside from this, you can usually just give them like a clerk's wage or share. Depends on how you split it up.. I've never really been a fan of splitting up money equally to everyone.
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« Reply #8 on: October 25, 2013, 01:09:31 AM »

I'm digging out old threads, but it happened to show up in search and I want to keep track. Great points here!
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... but that is mostly psychological. Check my devlog!
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« Reply #9 on: October 30, 2013, 03:40:25 PM »

gruop projects fail 99% of teh time trust me i've tried to maek a game with everyone
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« Reply #10 on: October 31, 2013, 01:07:58 AM »

If everything you do fails, work on the common factor.
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... but that is mostly psychological. Check my devlog!
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