The basic rules of indie gamedev. Part 2

With you again, Uncle Doc! Last time we considered where to start, and I promised that in this part we will discuss what the team of enthusiasts is and what they eat (and whether they eat at all). So ... enjoy!

After you have finally finished writing and making "minor" changes to your concept dock, a very scary thought comes that you will not realize this alone in the next decade (Although some are deeply violet, and they are ready to spend half their lives creating one games, but this is not our way). Do not despair, in the gaming industry there are a great many people working for the idea (or food), but because real programmers or artists do not shine for us, let's open our heart for enthusiasts!

When I first started to get to know myself as a gamediz, I made a huge number of mistakes to trusted enthusiasts, and although now I have a trusted team, I’ve met a whole bunch of people who could have killed more than a dozen projects with their presence. In general, the main difficulty with enthusiasts is that if you have not spent at least 3-4 years of your life working with them, you will most likely not be able to find out at first glance who of them can complement the project and who will kill it. But I still try to tell you the key features of working with them:

First , you should decide on the recruitment of personnel for the project, take, say, an ordinary platformer in the Mario style. To implement it, we need one programmer and a basic pixel-art artist. And this will be, is the main set for creating the game, i.e. what is vital. A nice addition is the sound and an additional artist for backgrounds. What they do is mostly aimed at speeding up the creation or improving the final quality.

What's in the yellow book? Those who we never need, but to whom we will promise to call back ...

Secondly , immediately forget about close friends. Yes, they may seem like a good option, sometimes even the best possible, but only in 5-10% of cases they can be really useful. I will not list HOW MUCH projects I have lost due to the trust in developing friends, and I’ll just say that you can take a risk, of course, all people are different, but I wouldn’t recommend doing so.

Thirdly , try to recruit people with whom you can have constant contact, enthusiasts have a very unpleasant feature, they burn out like matches. The more efficiently they work, the faster they get bored. And no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to prevent the complete withering of interest, you just need to extend the time of its work to fulfill its part of the duties.

// By the way, I strongly recommend dividing the process of work into small pieces not related to each other, so that the care of one specialist does not interfere with the overall development process. For example, the development of gameplay can be divided into: The development of inventory, the movement of the character, the behavior of AI, etc. //

You can prolong your interest in the project by constantly adding new tasks or working very closely with specialists, i.e. to constantly find out how the project is progressing with him, what he did, how he did it, etc. There is a very thin line between annoyance and attention, unfortunately I can’t tell you how not to cross it, because it is different for each person, I hope only for your intuition. As soon as you forget about him, even if only for a couple of days, he begins to lose interest and soon begins to bring more problems than solutions. In this case, you should not hold on to the person, but immediately look for a replacement.

Sorry, we no longer need your services ...

Fourth , the creation of the game, it's like a jungle, the strongest wins. When you recruit people into a team, you should be especially careful with the writers, for the most part these are creative people who have their own vision of the project in mind, and a set of their own. If you took the risk and took such a person in yourself to the team, your attention to the team should be much more than before, because you hardly turn away or lose a couple of days, when you return, you will find a completely different project that your reliable scriptwriter “finished” for improving the "quality of the universe." You can not try to explain to him that pakman is obliged to eat exactly the yellow dots and not the Klingonians, and replacing them will change the very structure of the game universe. He thinks in a completely different way, for him your project is just a playground for the game, which he can distort as he pleases. And when everything collapses, declare that it is you who are to blame for the project’s lack of viability and, together with the rest of the team, go to do one of your own "interplanetary shooters, with a solar-powered supercomputer fighting against diablo with his hordes of cosmic molluscs."

Calm We just added a new character!

Fifth , remember, your moral level affects your entire team, if you show that you are tired of the project, it will just as quickly get you tired of your team. From the moment people are recruited, you are the person of the project for them, they see it only through you. And although for the most part at the time of writing dizdok your job is only to control the team, you never show that you have nothing to do, because equal rights are very important for enthusiasts, and they hardly feel that you “unfairly” distribute duties, they will either leave or their efficiency will drop to zero.

And last but not least, “Trust, but verify.” It may seem a bit contradictory to the previous points, but when you start working, you will understand that your team is all a single mechanism, and its overall effectiveness depends on how each gear is embedded in the system. Each of its elements, it is a potential contributor to the beautiful "features" or ideas, you should not discard them just barely hearing. But you shouldn’t add everything you were told without checking how it all affects the gameplay. Do not forget the full picture of the project, only you see! And it is possible for a programmer to seem like a smart idea to add police or skids to tetris races, but it is up to you to decide how it will affect the overall gameplay and how it fits with the overall concept of the game. Do not be afraid to refuse ...

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Thank you for reading, I tried to express, if not all, but the most important aspects of working with a team of enthusiasts, in the future we will look at more detailed aspects of the development and management of the team. Do not forget that I am still very far from Vanga, and the only way I can understand what you want is your comments ... thank you again for reading.



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