next »

[Ajene]

OK i'm gonna get things handle, thanks for the advice. I think I found a good solution to get things working on better, its working a little so far.

[bvanevery]

Have you signed contracts about who owns the intellectual property?  Did you incorporate or form a legal partnership?  If you didn't, I'd be inclined to take whatever IP I actually did myself and go my own way.  Yours wouldn't be the first "hey, let's do a game project!" to fall apart, it's a learning curve.  There's no point working with other people if all they do is slow you down and don't actually make things get done faster.

[Derek]

I know what you should do: drop both of them immediately and start a new project without them.  I wouldn't think about it for another second - you are in a doomed relationship.  Keep your friends as your friends and leave the project immediately.  Scale back to something much, much smaller and more manageable.

Abandon any ideas from the original project - you don't want them coming back and claiming that you stole their ideas.  If you start up another partnership, don't be loosey-goosey about it - lay out explicit terms for who does what and what happens if they don't.  But try to get as far as you can on your own before asking for help.

[Alec]

Lesson:

You can't trust anyone as a working partner, especially not your friends. Your "friends" are likely to be the ones that fuck you over harder. (they know you better, and will know how to hurt you more effectively - also you usually can't give them critical feedback 'cause they're your friends)

Don't work with anyone without some kind of agreement.

The good news is the agreement doesn't have to be created by a lawyer or anything. As long its clearly stated what the expectations, responsibilities and rewards are you'll be on better ground.

Isn't it lovely to think like "hey, I could make this game with my friends and it'd be awesome"? Life never works like that.

[Derek]

 

Uhhhhhh, just to be clear, I wasn't speaking directly from my experience at Bit Blot... since we finished Aquaria and all and I thought it turned out pretty awesome.  Just sayin' in case anyone gets the wrong impression seeing us both in this thread.  (I think Alec's talking about somethin' different, too... right, dude?)

I think you can work on games with close friends and have it turn out (even big ones).  Not that it's easy, but it can be worth it.  Aside from Aquaria, I did Eternal Daughter with one of my best friends Jon Perry, I'm OK with Alec and some other internet friends, and the Game Over beat 'em up with my IRL friends Hellen and Calvin.

But then I've also worked on projects where it clearly wasn't going to work out and it was best to leave instead of trying to make the impossible possible.  Sometimes a bad situation can only be made worse by staying.  I've heard the same thing from other people.

[Snakey]

http://www.christopherhawkins.com/06-13-2005.htm#78

This is somewhat related.

[Mipe]

Don't do business with friends, lest you wake up with a severed horse head next to you. Cosa Nostra and other infamous mafia cartels started as "friend business".

Don't do business with strangers either, you can find yourself pantless sooner than you can say "Sweet Mary Poppins".

Don't do business with yourself, you'll waste all earnings on booze and women.

Wait, that excludes everyone, you say? Nope. You can always trust your pets to be there. Dog to eat your homework and cat to shred it into tiny bits. Great little helpers.

[bateleur]

In conclusion I pissed, don't know what to do

Tell the rest of the team you're thinking of leaving. Then give it a week or so and if they're not ready to sort their sh*t out to persuade you to stay, you leave.

[Snakey]

Then give it a week or so and if they're not ready to sort their sh*t out to persuade you to stay, you leave.

I wouldn't recommend this. Either leave or don't. Don't flip flop on a decision. Because more than likely, things will just slip back into the same situation again.

[Ajene]

OK, after some weeks of working on things and talking we removed the Lead designer and instead decided to go with everyone can put in designs into the design document, I feel this will be a lot better than having one person design it and everyone waiting around for him to finish.
Before we even started We made a contract, and put everything in writing.
We dropped the designer game cause its his IP and we cant use it, now we are working on another game, our Art Director is on leave cause hes trying to finish the last weeks of his schooling.

Now i'm trying to figure out how many times a week should the team meet up? cause at the moment we dont have a studio we are mostly gonna work from our own houses, I know during some weekends we will be working at my house too.

[aeiowu]

never saw the OP so I'll just respond to your current situation.

I'd REALLY recommend NOT trying to crowd-design your first game. I'm guessing everyone on the team really just wants to be a game designer but with that utopian-everyone-designs-equally-and-everyone-is-happy-now attitude you're entering into a world of pain.

It's hard enough to create something with just _one_ other person, let alone multiple people making a game! Either choose a simpler canned design with less need for experimentation or decide on a simple conceit preferably based on a prototype. You guys could all create your own simple prototypes/mockups and then pick which one everyone likes best, but have just one person in charge of the design. Otherwise on top of all the terrible challenges you'll face along the way, you'll have all these interpersonal disputes based on design decisions, creative direction and etc. etc. etc. I'm sure you'll still have those, but it's incredibly useful to have a map handy so you know you can get back on track.

It doesn't seem like it at first, but it's incredibly relieving to work on something and still be creative within your own discipline, but when there's something you're unsure about you have someone right there to say "don't worry, we'll do it this way." It's not that you can't disagree, but when it's up to a coin-flip, well then you can side-step the stress of hashing that out. Don't think of it like they're imposing their design on everyone else, but that they are guiding you in times of uncertainty.

[Ajene]

For each project I'm thinking of putting whoever came up with the idea as Project Leads if they want to. We'll have someone in charge of designs too it may end up being me since I'm Managing Director already.
But yea what I wanted was we basically got an idea for a game, we mostly wanted to design the features and technical stuff in a group, mostly the programmers could design some of the technical stuff and the artist will work on the art style. musician will be doing the music.

[synapse]

For each project I'm thinking of putting whoever came up with the idea as Project Leads if they want to. We'll have someone in charge of designs too it may end up being me since I'm Managing Director already.
But yea what I wanted was we basically got an idea for a game, we mostly wanted to design the features and technical stuff in a group, mostly the programmers could design some of the technical stuff and the artist will work on the art style. musician will be doing the music.

Focus on one project at a time - don't get ahead of yourself.  Game design is for designers, programming is for programmers, art is for artists.  Let your team excel in their own fields.  Don't let your team dictate game design as a democracy - have one person take the lead on the gameplay.

[bvanevery]

I don't know what to think about game design with other people.  I work solo on everything, that's how I get around the difficulty.  To me, most of the point of working on a game is working on the design somehow.  Otherwise a programmer could make a lot more money a lot more consistently doing fairly dry, or even not-so-dry, non-game programming jobs.  I remember that about 6 years ago, people were still fighting about whether Game Designers even existed or should exist.  A lot of programmers subscribed to the Cabal model of development, where the sum total of the programmer efforts on the "design" constituted the design.  I really can't tell you if that notion is successful or not.  I strongly dislike most mainstream industry games, and in recent years I'm insufficiently experienced with the indie offerings to know if they've really improved much over it.  I felt like I was more up on things when I was judging in the IGDA 3 years ago, and I can say, at the time the contest was starting to become a bit of a chore from a game design standpoint.

I think I would look for a power sharing arrangement where 1 person has the bulk of the authority to make design decisions, but other people have some formal stake in certain areas as well, so that they have ownership and buy-in to some aspect of the design.  Perhaps delegate some subsystems to other people and then have a "hands off" attitude about the work they produce.  I just have a great deal of trouble seeing game development as some slave drone enterprise.  I could get a real Dilbert job if I wanted that.  And, to the extent that I ever want that, I do it for high contracting dollars per hour so I don't have to put up with it very long and am well compensated for the grief.

Really, if someone's gonna be your boss why bother being indie?

Now, maybe sometimes you really do find programmers who mostly want to twiddle the program and don't have design ambitions really.  That's fine.  Harness those people if you get them.  But I think you need to recognize what the core concept of "making a game" is to a lot of people.  It means having some say about what the game is.

[Triplefox]

The most important thing I think I learned when doing design at a studio was that the design isn't controlled by the designer.

Like, ostensibly it is, but in practice, what the designer has to do is:

• Establish and defend the core concepts of the game against a variety of outside influences
• Suggest how the details of a feature should work when it's not clear how to proceed
• Apply known proven designs when no original ideas present themselves
• Reduce technical barriers and defeat intractable bugs by designing around them

The same basic problem kept appearing over and over in the licensed games I worked on, which was that the publisher didn't know what they wanted, but for the most part, they weren't willing to entrust the developer with much control either. And they weren't about to make a big investment for what was seen as a merchandising tie-in, so emphasis on look+finish was high yet the budget and schedule were always tight. Every game was another case of "play it safe so we can stay under budget," which encourages a certain kind of efficacy in the work, but also leaves the designer at a loss for ways to make a remotely interesting or innovative game Most of those games were essentially dead and buried from the pitch stage onward.

I have to admit that I enjoyed the challenge, though. The idea of being able to defeat what looked like an impossible schedule by finding some clever trick was a good drive to get up in the morning. My impression of game projects with more leniency is that they tend to get stuck in circles for long periods. Getting something running that sucks and then iterating over it and fixing problems as they come up and gradually adding in polish is essentially the way I've learned to do things.

(Of course, I'm working alone now so things are moving a lot slower than they were on a team of 6-12. But I also get to avoid all the overhead and mistakes, so it seems to work out.)