Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
And in general artists and writers struggle just as much to find programmers as programmers do to find artists.

Maybe because no one wants to work on their dream MMO?(this goes for both artists and programmers). I agree with you that the whole team has to want to work on the project. However there are plenty of programmers, musicians and sound effects people that do what they do for fun and give it away for free. Where are the artists that model or draw for fun? Why does game art always cost money? As a programmer I can always find all the resources I need, expect the art.

- What usually kills your projects?

Management. Or more appropriately, LACK of management.

Good management will fight hard for the developers and their QoL. Good management will utterly reject even the concept of overtime at all levels. Good management knows when to cut features, how to scope, and what is shippable.

- Would you be more willing to commit to a project if the main body of the art was already done?

No. I need to know that a design is solid and the management team is acceptable. Art is co-developed during the course of a game, and refined and iterated to improve the game.

- Would you be more willing to commit to a project if a well written design specifications document was written out with control, interface and general design already written out with any variation decided upon on or near the outset of the project?

No. I will want to commit to the project before or during the phase when they are written. If that is not possible, before volunteering for the project I will need to completely review the documents AND THEIR MOTIVATION. They must be very complete, and also absolutely flexible. They must be iterated on over the project, and the flexibility must be written in to the design.

- Does file-type for sprites (.tif, .png, etc.) make any significant difference to the end product or the difficulty programming it?

No. We will use converters and other tools to transform the general-purpose images into our final formats. Those final formats will be formatted exactly to the format used in-game so no time-consuming processing is required when they are loaded. They will just be streamed into memory and instantly used.

- Do semi or partially transparent pixels in sprites(I use photo-shop and prefer the look of the brush (at about 800X600) tool to the pencil tool) create any headaches for programmers? (I'm currently thinking of a project akin to OdinSphere)

No. They work generically with art as textures and surfaces. If it happens to have an alpha channel, it is up to the designers and artists to make it look good.

- Is there anything you want artists to know at the outset of a project or problems you typically run into you would be wary of?

They need to keep the target hardware in mind. An artist familiar with one technology (e.g. flash game sprites) will have a difficult time creating art for different technology (e.g. DS sprites). Sharing art assets between systems might work, but can also be a source of nightmares.

A skilled and experienced management team will understand those details.


- If I wanted really atmospheric discoloration in my characters, relative to their environment, would it create problems for the programmer?

That is a simple technical issue. Assuming a system with that taken into account in the design, it could be a minor thing. If it is not designed in to the game, it could be difficult.

My personal experience, after being involved in quite a few "internet based projects".. So what kills projects ?

#1: Relying/trusting on people

I'm not blaming anybody in particular, but you know, in a project where everybody is volunteer and is contributing on their free time, you can't ask them to be as motivated as the project leader, especially as time (and impatience) grows; you can't force them to meet deadlines; often they loose interest after a few months, or become busy in real life (studies, job, etc.. ).

Students, I'm sad to say, are pretty much the worst of their kind in my experience. Their motivation often fades out quickly, and when they have a lot of free time, it doesn't last long. I've had a lot more success with people who have an established and stable life, a wife and kids.

#2: Talkers are not doers.

Communication is often critical in an internet-based project. Talking is good. But there comes a point where talking must stop, and where people must do actual work. I can't count the number of people who were just standing idle in the dev team, giving advice, arguing for hours about details, but in the end never produced any actual work. It can be made worse when the project leader cannot stick to decisions, or tries to compromises for everybody's opinion. Any project that I've seen that was developped in a "democratic" way has turned to utter chaos.

As for volunteer artists, yes, they do exist. I've been on the lucky end with my project; the best I could describe it is a "snowballing" effect - the hardest part was to start, but now artists do attract other artists, and at the moment I'm writing this, my contributions forum contains 102 pages of 25 threads each, each thread being dedicated to a specific concept/model. That's a pretty insane amount of art when you think of it, and when I opened the website 4 years ago, I would have been happy with a dozen models that didn't look too bad. Today, I have the luxury to be selective and to keep only the best works..

Y.

Seem to be a few misconceptions about artists here.

First off, most artists teach themselves, so what they 'learned' in school really doesn't mean anything.

The reason that most artists work in 2d is that its far more efficient than 3d. While you have to manually add perspective and shading, you only have to add what is needed to make people like the image. There are no 'rules' in 2d.

This is compounded by the problem of poor interfaces in 3d programs, and clunky design due to relatively (compared to 20 years from now) slow graphic rendering.

Or to put it another way, 'why would an artist want to spend time in blender? It's quite ugly in there'.


As far as professional artists volunteering, it happens all the time, but only for a short time. Between the time their work becomes professional and the time they get a paid job doing it, there's the time in which pro artists will volunteer.


As an artist and a programmer, i'll say that the same thing kills projects in both realms:

Not seeing a purpose in it. If there's no viable gain from something, then its not worth doing. Its basic human emotional survival skills. And i don't just mean money. Even the smallest things can be worthwhile to people, just a pat on the back or a new friendship, or a feeling of satisfaction. But there has to be something.

Sure, they can work on it anyway, but they'll be working against their own brain, and even if you could get an artist to do that, you probably shouldn't.



Artists, programmers, marketers, they come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and languages.

But it doesn't matter what they are, if there's no purpose in a project then there's no reason to do it. It goes without saying that many game projects probably should be laid to rest.

The question is, how do we help the ones that should succeed?

Time. Time kills all swooned.

The indie project I'm currently working on hasn't failed. But no less then a month ago it was starting to falter and deteriorate due to myself not being online for a month because of a house move.

Since then i've recovered the project and where getting on well. But here's a few issues that i've come across and still experiencing now as a volunteer based project.

1: Finding dedicated volunteers.

This is a really hard thing to find. And when hiring volunteers it's a hit and miss situation.

To list some of the volunteers who ended up more or less wasting project time:
- I had a volunteer who worked on the project for a month only to vanish from the internet.
- I had 2 volunteer concept artists who both produced nothing over a 3 month period regardless of how many design briefs I gave them. I'm currently taking on concept responsibilities on top of my management and design tasks because I can't find a dedicated, talented concept artist.
- I had 1 volunteer who offered to be a lead, only to back out a week later.

It's also hard to judge the quality of a volunteer from face value sometimes. You really need to put faith in that person, let them develop on the project for at least a month to see what they are capable of contributing. It's a long and frustrating process that sometimes garners no results.

You're dealing with a situation that comes with the environment. Volunteers are just that and they are working to make your game design happen, either for a share of profits or to improve their portfolio with an indie project. My project aims for the later objective.

2: Finding skilled volunteers.

Programmers are generally alright in this area. As long as you outline what kind of language and objectives you want done then i've found that the programmers that are on my project work to a standard I'm happy with.

Artists on the other hand. I've had some stinking luck with 2D artists. Either they don't work or they produce some sub-standard art. Some of them don't understand basic principles like colour theory or how to make effective layouts.

3D artists are a little bit better. I have a couple of good modellers on my team. The quality of some of the assets will need further revisions to get them up to snuff though. Having worked in the professional industry for 2 years I know what the standard of quality is and it's frustrating to go back a few notches in that regard.

Artists have issues getting their work done on time.

3: Communication.

I'd go so far to say that ineffective or no communication is the core killer for most projects both indie and commercial.

When a team is unable to effectively communicate tasks, issues and comments on the project things will quickly fall apart. Leads and managers need to know the progress of each individual, identify if they have an issue and then how to resolve that issue as a game development project requires everyone to work on something in order to put all assets together to create something effective.

Most people hate communication when it comes to work. They want to impress or be left to their own devices. So as a lead you need to repetitively make sure that members of the team are communicating their progress in some fashion.

We use weekly work journals, msn and e-mail communication. We're far from perfect though. Some members are great communicators and some members don't communicate half as much as they should.

As a leader I personally don't mind if a volunteer has some other responsibilities they need to fulfil. But I'd like them to tell me at least a few days in advance so I can plan for it.


However...

What must be understood at the end of the day is that volunteer work is hard work. And you get what you pay for.

A good volunteer is someone who wants to be part of a project in order to either increase their skills or to compliment their portfolio. They have a stake in it and are compelled to produce for it. They're willing to sink some serious time into the project and fulfil all obligations.

A bad volenteer enters a project thinking it'll be nothing but fun and an easy ticket into the industry. A bad volenteer makes constant excuses of how real life has put them back on their work and they make no attempt to recover for lost time.

If anything working as a volunteer is harder then working in the industry. Working at a paid studio means everyone is expected to work to a standard and that produces results if nothing else.

Volunteer work is a game of chance and perseverance.

Quote: Original post by Ysaneya
But there comes a point where talking must stop, and where people must do actual work.

Just to quote the most important sentence in this thread.


I'm trying to lead a team. But deep in my guts, I'm a programmer, and it shows. I don't have the patience to run after team members for weeks and weeks, asking if maybe by chance they have done a thing this time. As a consequence, about the only people who actually contributed are the ones we recruited from our home town's university - because we have regular meetings in person, and it's always a nice evening of chattering and some coffee/beer. It's next to useless in terms of project management, but it makes people feel connected to the project, and that's what makes the difference.

There are also quite some people showing up at the meetings again and again, who never actually contribute. There's a point where you have to let them go officially, or it will spread.

Now that we had quite some success with our little promotion campaign, our team is growing again. My reaction to it is to establish a bi-weekly skype meeting for everyone (to solve our communication deadlock) and to "hire" a dedicated project manager who will hopefully take off a bit of the communication burden off me. Because... well, you know, I'm a programmer. And because of the management work I needed to do in the last months, I can count the code lines I've written with my fingers. It's an experiment for everyone in the team, but I seriously hope it turns out well.

Bye, Thomas

Thanks for all the input. It's embarrassing how much I have fallen into almost every project-killing trap mentioned above, from time constraints to over reaching to bending to divas.

In my situation I'm finding it difficult to get started at all. In my previous groups I have done basically 3 things: Art (all 2D so far), Design (mostly interface and control) and Manage (or rather I made an attempt to) and the members of these groups have been associates and friends. Each died anticlimactically (the groups... not the friends...although there were days...)

So if you have an idea for a game what can you do to get people on board and encourage people to see it through to the end? I have tried intuiting my way through it and apparently I lack some fundamental skill of knowledge to really make it work.

Having done this failed volunteer project shit for too many years, I'm rather bitter about it. That's my disclaimer. In that cynical tone, here is my theory about how to actually get to a completed game:

- Everything you can do yourself, do your goddamn self. It doesn't matter if it isn't very good; if the project ever starts paying for itself you can use the $ to buy better replacement part, if it doesn't earn money it doesn't deserve the good shit.

- Never, ever make your own game engine. Just don't go there.

- Making a game absolutely requires a programmer, an artist, and someone who can write in coherent, intelligent paragraphs. Preferably this should add up to one person. Tolerably, it should add up to two people who know each other in real life. If you have to go to 3 or more you are in trouble. Forget music, that junk is icing, you do not need it unless and until you have baked an edible cake, i.e. game. For every team member including yourself, they can't join the team unless they pass the test of doing an actual piece of work which can be used in the game.

- Contract: any ideas and work contributed to the project belong to the project. Anyone who quits the project before completion forfeits all rights to ideas and work they already contributed or future compensation for these.

- You don't gain the right to work on writing a novel worth of game story until you have created a playable tutorial level. You don't gain the right to do concept art for characters who aren't in the tutorial level until you have created working animations for the characters who are in the tutorial level. You don't gain the right to design combat that is not it the tutorial level until a playtester can kill level one blobs in the tutorial level.

- Pick an existing, fun game as close to what you want to make as possible, reverse engineer a design document for it, strip it down to bare essentials, change the details to yours, then implement that. Making a game that is a combination of two existing designs is possible, but if you are trying to combine 3 or more to make something really new you are in trouble.

Quote: Original post by Sethmonster
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So if you have an idea for a game what can you do to get people on board and encourage people to see it through to the end? I have tried intuiting my way through it and apparently I lack some fundamental skill of knowledge to really make it work.

My theory is simple, and I keep saying this; Have a working prototype which just needs artwork, sound etc. This means no interdependencies between programmers and artists, and it means people can see where their work is going with each version as you commit, an important incentive.