The goal of this post is to construct an article, where every sentence is worth your time. Its primarily aimed at creative driven potential game-makers at the right maturity, with the right experience to give a serious project a go. First off, consider the lifespan of the project - up to well after its release - will you have the time to dedicate between now and then? Will there be any major obstacles exterior to the project that might get in the way? If so, you should consider lowering your ambitions. A major time-break in a project will blunt your momentum and almost certainly kill the project. Are you prepared to put equal or more time into the project than any other member of your team that you are about to create? Leading by example is the biggest factor in successfully completing a project, and also in maximizing the quality of the final product. This includes putting the right number of hours in, doing jobs that aren't glamorous, taking on difficult jobs, compromising where there is no perfect solution. Is the core idea of the game, and the design built around that, right? Some people like to make games to increase their skills, others do it because it has always been an ambition, others do it for fun. Generally speaking, though not always, those people don't make the best indie team members - you have to find people like you who are driven to do it through some creative compulsion and the excitement to see the reaction to your game when it is finished. These people, while rare, are worth 5 non driven members - in what they will contribute to the group, to the project, to everyone's enjoyment of the project. Its especially difficult to find these people as they will often have other commitments, or might already be running their own projects! I'm fortunate enough to have found a small team's worth of and am still looking. To attract these people you need an exceptional idea and an exceptional design (not perfect but captures their imagination and would be a game better than most games out there). This will also keep you going when it might get difficult as it inevitably will at stages in the project. There are going to be numerous difficult stages in the project - the inital stage of actually getting going and trying to gather momentum (requires an enormous effort and management skills), problems with outside commitments, difficulties in getting new members, technical problems, design disagreements in the team. I can assure you, you can get through all of them, it just requires patience, perseverence, and a few other things you'll find out as you go along. This is one of the reasons why managing an indie game project should not be attempted if you are inexperienced and or immature because quite simply you will not be able to without a minimum, quite high level of each. Always remember its not just your baby, its the baby of everyone in the team, everyone will have some exclelent contributions to the design, particularly if you can communicate the overall vision well to them. A few practical tips: The ideal team size is between 4 and 8. So recruit that many before you start, and try to maintain that size. Design the project to reflect the resources you will have and the time available. Find out at least the essentials about every part of the project. You should be putting at least 5, up to 30 hours a week, average 15 if you want to achieve something very good. Spend a lot of time communicating with the rest of the team and encourage communicating throughout the team. If you are worried you are too young then you probably are - if you are looking to gain the experience, maturity before starting your own project or even joining a promising one then read this article: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/Game%20Design/The_Education_of_a_Game_Designer.html Others will advise you to take a more practical route such as learning a trade, you'll be able to determine for yourself which route would best prepare you. Finally, don't tell me I'm wrong about these things, you can take the advice or leave it. This is just my experience (so far). Any questions, send me a PM. Pete

What an incredibly nebulous bit of advice. Sounds allot more like faith in religion or positive affirmation and cheer leading than concrete advise if you ask me.

You suggest that your advice is intended for people with the "right maturity" and the "right experience" and I would argue that such people won't find your advice to be very sound.


"You can achieve your dream. I'm living proof. BEEFCAKE!"
"Just do it!"
"Yes we can!"

Positive thinking, big dreams, hope and optimism and a can do attitude are certainly great things to have, but it's not enough. It might even be dangerous and destructive if it leads you down a path with very little chance to succeed. What I mean is, I don't advise people to play the lottery just because there's some small chance to win a million dollars and I think people heeding your advice would be traveling down such a path.

If you want to maximize your chance at being a successful producer of games, learn to program games or learn to model/animate, texture, create concept art, etc. That way you'll have a real chance that less resembles a pipe dream.

Tom Sloper's site has some good advice.
http://www.sloperama.com/advice.html

Well thats lovely, I nearly allowed myself to think that I wouldn't get a comment like that, but there it is.
Hypnotron, if you need some help reading I can recommend some good sites, otherwise just have some common courtesy to actually make sure you understand an article before commenting negatively on it.
What exactly about the advice is like faith in religion?
It is a breakdown of the most important factors for taking a team successfully through to the end of a project, the only relevance of positive thinking is to stay positive and persevere when it gets difficult to keep putting the effort in as it will inevitably do at times on a large project.

Finally there is one valuable point in your comment - of course learning one or many skills involved in game development is an absolute must, you shouldn't even be thinking about leading an indie team if you are not going to be one of the major contributors, be that programming/3D modelling or something else major.

Just to be clear, I did understand your comments and my reply was in response to those comments. However I also read the guys advice from the web page you recommended. I actually liked _his_ advice. I'll quote a line that sums up his view nicely.

"Once you've gotten six or ten games built, you might want to think about putting together a substantial project, but still on your own."

His advice stands in stark contrast to your own. He starts off attempting to discourage people from choosing game development and design as a career, and only after that does he advise a very methodical, rational, realistic approach to becoming a designer/developer for those who insist on following that path. He emphasizes the need to spend time learning the craft and gaining experience on your own because he knows that once you can accomplish that, the rest will follow.

Frankly, his advice is very practical and concrete. You're advice is essentially non actionable and at it's core says little more than "Game design/development is hard but you can do it if you have the proper experience, dedication, fortitude and ideas." You just gave a pep talk and as I said there's nothing wrong with motivating and encouraging people but there was so much you failed to address (or addressed inadequately) in your post that newcomers reading it could walk away with a horribly incomplete picture of what would be required of them to succeed.

Its aimed at the person that has the game development knowledge, skills and maturity to design and lead a project, but has no experience of doing so, and is seriously considering starting. I'd say that everything that isn't covered above is either obvious or will be too specific to explain in the scope of an article like that, and would probably be best learnt first hand rather than try to assimilate someone else's experience of it.

But anyway, I hope its useful to a few people...

Why does everyone see to think that it's SOOOO hard to be a Game Designer, and that it's the same for every single company?

During my QA-test period for Massive Entertainment (developers of Ground Control and World in Conflict), I got to talk with some of the game designers, and one of them - he was quite young - had done 2 years in university (programming) and then applied as a Game Designer. That had been enough. We sat down and he told me a bit about how you could get in, and what tasks a game designer has as well as what they need to be good at/what they must know, etc.

At no time during that conversation was there talk about majoring in game design being bad, nor did he even as much as hint that you need to work for years and years before you can be a game designer. The title means different things to different companies, and isn't always the #1 job in the industry. For instance, one of the guys handled a lot of the balancing, and he was a game designer. What was important was that they were several designers working as a team.

I think thelovegoose's topic is a prtty good one, and the link he provided gives a different insight, so in overall, I think it was all good.


EDIT: That's not to say 2 years in university is enough, a good portfolio and resumé was equally (if not more) important. And of course, it will most likely take several years before you start working with your own ideas, but in my opinion, it's equally fun to be handed ideas and let cretivity take over: how creative can you be? How well can you handle, implement and execute this idea? That kind of creative work, as well as shaping the entire game as the team does, is very appealing, and I hope aspiring game designers think so as well, bcause chances are close to none that you'll get to work with your own stuff right off the bat.

Quote:

Original post by thelovegoose The ideal team size is between 4 and 8. So recruit that many before you start, and try to maintain that size.

I'm interested in why you've found this to be the best team size. My experiences say it'd depend a lot on the project, but a team of 4 to 8 would be for a relatively complex indie game.

There's a lot of benefit to having a team of two; the programmer and the artist. During the creation stage it's easy to split the project up into code and art, and each team member wouldn't be treading on the other's toes.

Well, you'd need to have people working with these things:

Programming
Graphics
Game Design
Soundtrack

Depending on the size of the project, and what kind of game you're making, it could range from those 4 to more than 8 persons.

I'm working with GML to make a game, and I do the programming and designing and I will also take care of level design and story design (as a project leader, I'm also sort of a director). I know someone who's going to be the character designer and concept artist. After that, I'll only need one or two to take care of graphics and someone to take of all things related to audio.

That is a very complicated issue - which is why I thought I'd wait for someone to ask about that :)

For me it has been to do with maintaining momentum, sharing knowledge, code/production review, formalizing processes, getting multiple perspectives on design, increased productivity, greater volume of skills, maintaining communication, ownership, unity.

maintaining momentum
The more people you have, if well managed, the less time is spent idle, something is always being done - which inspires you and the rest of your team to get more done. Also losing momentum can be critically bad for a project!

sharing knowledge
The more people involved the more they can teach you

code production review
Having someone look over what you've done or vice versa leads to better code/ better art/music etc, so multiple people in one area (like programming) helps considerably

formalizing processes
Having other people involed forces you to formalize everything so that its easy for other people to join and work with the project. This is only a good thing as the project progresses and increasees in complexity and prevents you from tying yourself in knots at an early stage to come back to haunt you later!

Getting multiple perspectives on design
From the gameplay design to the character design, to the design of your classes, it helps a lot to get many perspectives on it

increased productivity
If well managed, more people equals more work done

greater volume of skills
The more people you have the more skills are available - from web administration to logo graphic design

maintaining communication
If you don't have a lot of members, there will be times when there is not a lot of communication, equally though - if you have too many ,memebers it may be difficult to keep in contact with everyone, and some members could become isolated

ownership
Have too many members and people will feel like they own it less, and that they have less of an influence on the game

unity
Have too many members and there will generally be more disagreements in the group, and its harder to keep everyone on the same page with the vision for the game

If you put a lot of time in, you can deal with the issues that come with having a big group. You will also need to be a good leader, 95% of which is leading by example.