Organising a team
To be the leader of a game development/mod team is a very hard job. A talented team does not automatically mean that the mod will be a success. Much depends on the leader, he is responsible for the whole project itself.
As a leader, you have the following main jobs:
- create a game design document
- structure your team
- organise everything
- control the work
- motivate everyone
1. Create a design document:
For every professional game designer a game design document is a must-have before starting the real development of the game.
In a design document, every single detail planned for the game is written down – which game modes are planned, what kind of maps will be included, which key's will be used for what actions, how will the menu look like – some teams spend 2-3 weeks on the game design document before doing anything else.
There are 2 reasons why this document is so important:
- It prevents the need of rewriting much code when a decision is changed at the end of the development – it saves much work
- You have the full overview over the project and know how long it takes to finish your project – and you can exactly plan when something has to be done. Also, the whole team knows it, and the list of points can be finalised step by step.
2.Structure your team:
To be productive you have to keep the organisation and the communication as easy as possible. In order to achieve that, you have to structure your team. Everyone has to have a specific job and must know what he is responsible for. The smaller your team is, the easier it can be organised, so don't get unusefull members and keep the team as small as possible.
Talking to everyone personally and tell him every time what to do might work when your team consists of 5 members. But when the team gets bigger, this does not work anymore.
Set in leading persons for every area of game design. These are for example: level design, models, skins, code and scripting. Those persons must have knowledge of their area.
The lead level designer for example gets his orders about maps from the leader and then he has to handle them like this:
He redistributes the work to all mappers and everyone starts working. The lead level designer controls all the work and takes care of everything concerning the maps. He reports regularly to the leader about what's going on in his project area (maps) so the leader knows what to do and can give more/new commands.
3.organise everything:
One of the most important things in a development team is the communication. The better the communication is, the more productive you are . Instant messenger talks are the worst thing you can do. There are 2 good ways to communicate:
- IRC Chat rooms where every team member is idleing all the time he is online
- Voice communication(the best way) like Skype or Teamspeak
I advise you absolutely to have regular meetings with the whole team. And you should do these meetings from the beginning! Once established, communication won't be a problem anymore. If you dont introduce this way of communication from the beginning, you might have problems to let it work like you want, because the devs then are'nt used to work like this...
The good thing about IRC is that everything can be discussed at once and everybody can read the stuff you are writing and add own stuff, even if he was away he can follow the discussion.
The good thing about voice communication is that you are faster, because most people can speak faster than they can write.
My tip: Always be in IRC and use voice communication for meetings!
4.control the work:
As a leader, your job is to supervise the work that is being done and direct it into the wished direction. You have to know what's going on so let the area managers regularly report about the status. Like this, unnecessary work won't be done.
5.motivate everyone:
It is very important to have a well motivated team. The more motivated the members are, the more they work. Also the quality of their work is then better. At the beginning, everyone might be motivated, but with the time, this might change.
To keep the team as productive as possible, you should do 2 things:
- The progress that was made should be shown so everyone sees what he is working for. A cool screen of your mod can motivate very much! Put the work together regularly and release some kind of internal updates, showing the newest stuff. This will motivate the team and let them be more productive.
- As a game developer, it is very important to play your game/mod. Having fun playing the own game is quite motivating too, even more than the first method!
If you take care of all the things being mentioned in this tutorial, your development should be a success! Good luck!
