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[HP Sauce]

I've had a problem with the last few (hobbyist) game development projects I've been involved in where:

"What's the game about?" , "Why is the game fun?", "Why are we making this game??"
Has been a quick chat over a cup of tea.. e.g: "Let's rip off: MagaMan/Call of Duty/etc"

And

"How can we tie this into Facebook, Twitter, etc"...
Becomes the key issue.

If we ever try to expand on the initial one-line idea every one wants an exact share of creative control so one of two things happen:
* "Too many cooks...": It becomes a mess of random ideas
OR
* No one agrees on which are the good ideas, and the initial idea remains undeveloped and boring.

This drives me insane because the end result is:
"Here's a totally crappy idea... How can we use social networking to tell people how crappy we are at making games?".

The key stumbling blocks (for me) seem to be:
1: The guy who thinks: X worked in a commercial game so we MUST do it. If you have an idea that's not used in a commercial game then it MUST be a bad idea ... and who are you to argue with what is known to work in commecial games because they make money.

2: The idea that 10,000 people playing your game because they want to beat a friends high-score they saw on facebook BUT who think your game is of questionable quality is better than having a 1000 people who think your game frikken rocks.

3: The guy who thinks even our s**tiest project is going to make us overnight Steam/App-store millionaires because every other indie-dev is too stupid or "indie" to bother with advertising ... and as such we should steadfastly stick by stinking ideas because WE (and only we) are the only people smart enough to market garbage as gold dust.

Am I being unreasonable?
Or a dinosaur for not jumping on the 2-month-turnaround mobile/facebook game market?
Or too much of a "lone-wolf" who wants to do his own thing to be in a team?
Or am I being to "indie" by wanting few customer who love the game over a hoard of paying/advert-clicking customers who are indifferent about the game?

Assuming it's not just me... is there anyway to "fix" a team with these toxic issues? or should I run for the hills, live in a cave and spend 5 years making an "art" game?

[AndrewFM]

It seems one of your team's main problems is they are focusing on what will make a game sell best. The only way to know that something will sell well is to do something that's already been done before, and has been proven successful. By focusing their attention on that, they are taking away all of their developmental freedoms, and putting the team in a rut.

You should focus on that issue first.

Remember, like you said... you're a hobbyist dev team...

Hobby
-noun

An activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation and not as a main occupation.

[mewse]

In my experience, you can't "fix" a team while you're inside the team.  The team will either work well together or it won't;  the only way for one of the team members to make it work "better" is for that team member to voluntarily back down and acquiesce to what the other members want to do.

In this case, it sounds like your goals are very different from the goals of the rest of the team, and you probably can't change the other peoples' goals.  I'm not going to advocate that you run away and live in a cave, but it does sound like you need to think about whether your reasons for wanting to make a game are compatible with the reasons that the rest of the team want to make a game.  If they're not compatible, then maybe you'll be happier with a different team, who share more of the same goals as you.

[HDSanctum]

I agree with the above posters. It sounds like your team wants to use their skills for quick money and/or fame, whereas you just want to have fun and make something to be proud of.

I don't think you are being unreasonable, just that you need to find a team with the same goals as you. If you think your current team is worth the trouble, then maybe you can work it out with them. Some things you could try:

• Define roles for each of the team members and stick with them strictly. Programmer, Artist, Musician, Designer/Leader, etc.. One person can take multiple roles, but it would be best if there was only one leader and/or one designer. It's like you said, everyone wants to be the designer- maybe a solution to that is to rotate the designer role for the next project the team undertakes.
• Define development phases and stick with them strictly. Planning, Prototyping, Designing, Making, Enjoying. Or whatever.

[iffi]

Seems like you guys have very different goals. If you can't convince them that you're making games as a hobby and not as a job, you're probably not going to enjoy working with conflicting interests like this, which takes away much of the point of a hobby (as defined in AndrewFM's post), so I would recommend getting a different team if they don't seem likely to change, or work by yourself. Maybe you could impress them with something you make yourself, and they'll be more willing to listen to you.

This reminds me of #6 on this article, which says "Choose good partners (or work alone as long as you can)".

[Montoli]

Yeah, I think you either need a team that all shares the same goal, is willing to let everyone make changes to the design, or is willing to let one person arbitrate what goes in.  Like iffi sez, "choose your team wisely".

Also - Any time you are thinking "geez, can't they see my change is for the good of the game and will make things much better, what are they thinking?" imagine that they are currently thinking exactly the same thing about you.

Unrelated:  Arg, Iffi - your new avatar is the boss that spent all afternoon slapping me around.  It's giving me traumatic flashbacks!  Bah!  Stupid heart-shaped missiles!