next »

[anonymous]

To my knowledge a game company is formed in a hierarchal structure, the top has closed door talks about design, and the bottom does the work.

I'm throwing an idea out based on the decentralized nature of the occupy movement.  One of things I loved was seeing people from different backgrounds coming together and trying to make the camp work out, while also organizing direct actions.  Different committees started popping up when the needs arose. People saw their role in making this movement successful, bringing their sets of skills to the table.  People set aside differences, and their egos, inorder to work toward a common goal.

I'm thinking about the same be done in forming an independent game development project - though it would be closer to a company.  It would seek to be decentralized, and everyone's role would be as important as another, that would be the bottom-line attitude.  It would use a consensus model for decisions that effect the whole project, like choosing a theme, or over-arching story, or a platform.  However the decision making process is not intended to limit the contributions of those participating, but serve to guide them in their work.  It would be broken down into proposed teams, such as graphics, code, writing, design, coordinating, promotion/outreach, more teams can be proposed and formed.  Absolute transparency and communication between the teams.  It would seek to be all-inclusive, but ask that newcomers read up on the current project, and see which areas they'd best be suited and where they would like to contribute.  Everyone would be working toward a common goal, which is to lift a project off the ground until it gets completed.  

How does that sound to you?  I'd like to hear people's thoughts.

[:^)]

That's a really cool idea. It definitely wouldn't work if most correspondence was online. Thats for sure.
People take advantage of their right to be idiots to each other when there's a great distance between them.

But if it were face to face and you had the qualifying bar of people actually having to care enough to get/drive/walk to/be at a place to meet up, I think you could filter out most of the people that don't get it.

I hear you talk about the occupy movement a lot, It's cool. From what I gather you've actually been in an occupy camp? in New York? sorry, don't mean to derail the thread. We can PM or something to discuss that.

Anyway, yeah, Game Designing as a Co-op. I think the biggest thing is that you have to make sure that you get people that really are humble and able to listen to other people.
Of course they should have ideas to offer as well, but to be able to do what someone else wants happily without being upset would be a very important trait.

You'd have to foster an environment with a sense of camaraderie and working together toward one goal.

I'm actually incredibly surprised at how well the occupy movement is doing that.
Everyone is together helping each other, watching each others backs. It's friggin' awesome.

oops. (I will not derail. I will not derail.)

MAKING GAMES AS A BIG OL AWESOME GROUP YO! THAT WOULD BE COOL!

[gimymblert]

Look at valve's cabal or naughty dog flat hierarchy

[baconman]

I think TIGS kinda comes close to this comeradarie - or at least segments of it - we all kinda have our own things we're working towards, but getting feedback and help/support isn't that hard to do.

Also, you guys should really check out Creative/Indie Brawl.

[anonymous]

@Gimmy thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

@baconman you bring up a good point, I'm still getting tied in to the community.  Though this would more along the lines of working a large company, but fully autonomous, people can come and go as they please but there's a common goal which is producing a single game. The main difference would be it's organization and structure. I'll take a look at indie brawl today.

[derailing] the ideas behind occupy are universal and touches everyone in some way or another, which is why it has become viral and continues to grow each day.  It's message is all inclusive, everyone has grievances, everyone's feeling the economic pinch, everyone would like something or other to change for the better but nothing's getting done.  These "something or others" are actual quite common among supporters but it's been recognized that these issues won't be addressed if politicians can be bought by those who perpetuate the issues.  The glue that holds it together is it's message of universal solidarity, across party lines, across gender, race, background differences.  I think people know that these are fictitious on a certain level and of little importance, serving only to divide "the people", and if people remain divided those in power can do as they please.  I don't know if that's intentional or part of the human condition to seek out differences and thus create division among us.  here's a great example of how proponents of the two party system divides people:





What Walsh is doing is trying paint this picture that the occupy movement is a democrat movement for obama's agenda, he's clearly using rhetoric that appeals directly to conservative republicans, in order to create a divide between Americans on the topic of Occupy.  Turning the people against eachother is what he's doing, and what this two-party system perpetuates.  Many people in the Occupy camp have highlighted the similarities between the tea party movement before it was co-opted by the republicans, many of the faces in Occupy were disillusioned tea party members after the republicans took over.  I'm digressing.

Anyways solidarity it's where it's at, it's a symbolic gesture of support, and when the Occupy is attacked or raided, its an attack on all of us that support it.  It's certainly raises this notion of interdependence.

[Dragonmaw]

This is already a common practice amongst the casual games industry. It's known as "design by committee" or "design by metrics" and is generally frowned upon, as it produces highly polished but usually very derivative or otherwise creatively snoozeworthy games.

That being said, there's a project like this in one of the secret forums right now.

[noah!]

Aside from the companies that Gimmy mentioned, Treasure also has a very similar workflow. From what I've heard, they assign roles on more-or-less a per-project basis. So if, say, one of their background artists has a game idea and everyone else approves, he then becomes the lead designer for that project.

And that happened. And the result was Ikaruga.

Granted, that model only works because Treasure is a very small company (fewer than 20 people), all of their members are insanely talented, and each member usually handles multiple roles. Compare that to your preferred cross-section of the indie community. Here, we've got IGF winners conversing with people who have never made a game in their life; we've got people who measure development time in hours working alongside those who measure it in years. We've got lots of people, each with their own different ideas about what a game should be.

And that's great! Diversity is great.

However, trying to force homogeneity out of diversity usually leads to disaster. Even going into a project like this, you have to make some firm (and alienating) decisions, such as the engine you're gonna use, and the minimum level of asset quality. There's also the problem of idea overload. Since everyone has a slightly different vision, you're gonna get a lot of conflicting ideas. You could solve this problem by requiring that everyone who proposes an idea to also provide its implementation, but you're still alienating a lot of "idea guys" there (who might have some genuinely interesting things to say).

But I don't know. It could work. Come to think of it, Four Leaf Studios sounds like they're doing something along the lines of what you're talking about. While they do have a core group of members, allegedly anyone can join that core group, as long as they have the drive and talent and willingness to actually work. And those on the outside can still make suggestions and stuff, and the core group is open and responsive to that because they themselves were once on the outside too.

[anonymous]

I've since thought about this a lot. 

The initial idea was more about community outreach, get people involved who normally wouldn't get involved, to learn the ins and outs of working in a game dev company [myself included] and also working with eachother.  And also to experiment with building something out of nothing, when needs arose individuals would rise to the task and form teams themselves.  I like the idea taken from Valve, that everyone is a game designer, indeed everyone has great ideas about how a game should turn out.

@Noah, you raised a lot of valid points but I'm too lazy to directly respond right now : )

[gimymblert]

To complete what have been said (especially dragonmaw)

Design by committee does not work at all if the goal or direction is decide together. Or it work for safe direction with lowest common denominator. You better have a good team with diverse taste and appreciation to make something different and risky.

What work is when a strong and clear but difficult goal is given. The goal became the metric to which progress are measure to. But you must have a dedicate team to do that, in game most people don't like going outside their comfort zone, they want to do something they "like", so they may drop. Group are good at solving problem with a flat hierarchy only if a the goal is strong and clear enough to derive merit.

Actually game with name attach to them are rarely the product of that person solely, that person is more the goal keeper. Now we have access to post mortem, myth like miyamoto are largely debunked, most idea come from his team and he only give the appreciation by reminding the goal. So there is no prima donna.

The difficulty became to make people agree on the goal and let them own it.

[xrabohrok]

With my school game group in particular, when we tried this, we had the problem of nothing ever getting done.  We had people who would contribute ideas, and others that would contribute other ideas, and others still that would snipe both of them dead, leaving a gridlock. 

Someone with vision has to lead the charge.  Others should be allowed to pitch ideas to this person, but that person should be the ultimate arbiter of what ultimately gets put into the game.  Just poking around this forum should illustrate the fact that there are many who talk but few who do.  Don't let the priorities get skewed.     

[:^)]

^Wurds of Wisdom^

[1982]

Someone with vision has to lead the charge.  Others should be allowed to pitch ideas to this person, but that person should be the ultimate arbiter of what ultimately gets put into the game.  Just poking around this forum should illustrate the fact that there are many who talk but few who do.  Don't let the priorities get skewed.     

I was coming to this thread presenting this idea, but thanks for saving my time typing all that 

Communism is ideology, dictatorship is practical solution.

[randomnine]

Damn. Somebody tell Valve they've been doing it all wrong.

The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process For Creating Half-Life

Student projects tend to hit serious problems no matter how they're run. They're not good places to assess whether given methodologies have merit. No approach to something as complex as design or production is a silver bullet, and you'll always hit problems to start with.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

It also helps that valve hires VERY talented people.

I think more often than not it doesnt work. You really have to have a dream team. The bigger the team, the harder it is to do that.

[anonymous]

good point. I think inorder for this to work there needs to be a history of working together and doing that well.

[:^)]

build yer teams now, folks.

[xrabohrok]

It works for Valve, because everyone in those meetings are pitching ideas in the areas they are capable of and willing to do ("I'm the artist and I think it would both look cool and be visually coherent if everyone had cartoony Silhouette! I can totally do that!").  Even then, the project lead still needs to sign off on it...and are often the only ones at the meeting anyway:

The initial Cabal group consisted of three engineers, a level designer, a writer, and an animator. This represented all the major groups at Valve and all aspects of the project and was initially weighted towards people with the most product experience (though not necessarily game experience). The Cabal consisted only of people that had actual shipping components in the game; there were no dedicated designers. Every member of the Cabal was someone with the responsibility of actually doing the work that their design specified, or at least had the ability to do it if need be.

...

Internally, once the success of the Cabal process was obvious, mini-Cabals were formed to come up with answers to a variety of design problems. These mini-Cabals would typically include people most effected by the decision, as well as try to include people completely outside the problem being addressed in order to keep a fresh perspective on things. We also kept membership in the initial Cabal somewhat flexible and we quickly started to rotate people through the process every month or so, always including a few people from the last time, and always making sure we had a cross section of the company.

The key words here are "responsibility".  Those people with it always get the last say.