Hey guys.. It''s that time of the month for another of my Crazy ideas.
The idea is to have a coder''s guild, structured similarly to Balamb garden from FF8. In FF8, you have a school of talented fighters who learn the basics of battle. Once they get really good, they take an examination to be part of the "elite" group called SeeD. The SeeD are basically mercenaries- they are contracted to perform various jobs.
So, basically the idea is to get a bunch of good, smart people together and form a similar structure. The goals of the group would be:
1) Retain good people. Often, a project will last for a few months to 2-3 years, and then at the end everyone goes away so all the work you put into finding talented, motivated people is gone, and the friendship and trust everyone developed is gone.
2) Focus. Here, our only concern would be on programming. No worrying about recruiting artists, musicians, and things like that.
3) Establishing an identity on the net. The public would know the group and be willing to pay for the services provided. This kind of prestiege would be really useful for landing jobs that would be difficult to get as a lone programmer. Also, 80% of the pay received would go back to the people who worked on the job. The other 20% goes to the group to pay for whatever advertising, web design contracting, and other things which are necessary for normal operation of the group.
4) Encourage continual improvement of the members. This would be partially through the ranking system, and also through a tradition of teaching and discussion.
5) Provide benefits to members. These may be monetary, tangible things, such as a pass to go to GDC, or commisions as previously mentioned. They may be less tangible benefits like teaching and resources provided through the group.
6) Allow really good people to get to know each other and form valuable contacts.
7) Have fun
There would actually be some entity (a person or a group) whose sole purpose would be to organize events and generally try to keep things "fun". This is actually important, since a boring group would quickly lose all its best members.
8) Build up a strong base of tools + experience. The tools used in one job might be useful to solve a problem on the next job. By forming a group which doesn''t just last for the lifetime of one game, a lot of things would become possible which weren''t possible before.
9) Once the group was *really* well known, what would be really cool is if a publisher or an already existing game development group hired "SeeD" to program a game and they provide all the art or something like that. Although this might sound unrealistic, a lot of things these days work based on contracted work so it might be possible.
Some details:
-Only people in "SeeD" will be able to participate in jobs. These jobs are what will bring in money for the group.
-People who aren''t in "SeeD" must study to raise their rank. A monthly examination will be given where people can raise their ranks.
-Part of the exams to get in "SeeD" will be to perform actual real-world jobs for our "clients". These will be non-paid jobs though, since those jobs are reserved for the "SeeD". Having newer members do jobs has the advantage of providing them with real experience which can go on their resume, as well as helping the group to get more work done.
-To be in "SeeD" or even the larger group, the process of getting in would be rigorous. There would also be strong ethical and professional standards for working. To quote a job advertisement I once saw, "no slackers and no rockstars". Although some people who have huge egos are really good programmers, they often do more damage to the team than good.
Some obstacles:
-It is REALLY hard to retain good people when there''s no fixed salary (which there isn''t in this case). Basically the idea would be to try to do what Microsoft did... Start out with a couple of really good people, since good people tend to attract more good people.
-Managing this group would be a collossal task, something that would take extremely good organizational, communication, and leadership skills. Free time to devote too, of course
-The group would be virtual (i.e. over the net). This comes with your usual disadvantages, namely very little funding, inexperienced members, and less benefits that a real company could provide. So, although hopefully the group could retain good people throughout their high school and college years, eventually they''re going to leave in favor of seeking a "real job" in the industry. So, ongoing effort would have to be made to find new talent.
-It would be difficult to maintain focus if everyone comes from a different background and has different interests. Being in the group would basically mean that whatever direction the group chooses to take, you are stuck with that. So, if the group decides to accept a job writing tools for a company, but you prefer writing graphics code, then you''ll probably either not work on that job, or even worse, quit the group altogether in favor of seeking something that fits your interests more closely.
I''m not even sure how feasible something like this is. This is basically what I tried to do in high school, except then I was a lot more stupid
See, the game industry is based on this "form a team, make a game, dissable team" model, and I wonder if that''s because the nature of the industry lends itself intrinsically to that model, or maybe there''s a better way to do things.
My understanding is that some companies try what I am suggesting but in a very scaled down fashion. Like, they have "satellite" companies so there are individual self-operated companies, but they''re all part of one larger organization. They share a lot of their code and tools, so basically they achieve really good economy of scale. I haven''t seen this happen much with "virtual teams" but I have seen it in some limited forms, and the people who did it seem pretty successful.
Well, that''s it for now heheh. Any comments or ideas?
Raj
