crumas2 said:
Sounds like a good plan (I manage a software development team for a living) except for one thing... I recommend staying away from decision by committee. It's the bane of the software development world. You would likely want to be the "tech lead", gather input from all parties, then make a decision. If everyone agrees, great. If not, then you have to make the call to decide direction.
Having a good 50,000-foot plan that everyone can agree on will help you build your team, but the devil's in the details and you really need a team-lead to make the calls when it comes time to execute.
Just my $.02. |
%100 agree (completely missed that the first read through).
I know people will hate it, but there absolutely must be a chain of command in who has creative say in what. There will be arguments and there must be someone who has the final say.
Since this wouldn't be a company you can't really do a traditional ladder, but I imagine it would go something like this for a project like this:
- Lowest say
- designers (level, game)
- artists
- programmers
- sound
- Next up
- lead designers (level)
- lead artist
- lead programmer
- Next Up
- producer (would mainly keep people on schedule here, more of a project manager)
- creative director
- Highest
- game designer
This is a bit formal for a for fun project but whatever the case, it's best to think this through and decide who has what say, who reports to who, and who has final say. This should all be figured out before anything is done on the actual game.
Also, there's lots of way to make the priority ladder here, this was just off the top of my head.
Oh, and one more thing and I'll shutup for a while. When in the early stages of the game DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. The planning stage is by far the most important and make sure you plan every level, every mechanic, art style, everything.
There should be documents
- High Concept Document
- Just a very high level description of the game. What's the base story, what's the theme, who is it for, what type of gameplay, ect. Everything here is very high level and light on details.
- Make this document before any others.
- Game Design Document (GDD)
- contains the level design documents for each level (or map I suppose in an RPG's case)
- contains the story (might want to make this a seperate document too and then include it in the GDD) .
- Contains all the gameplay
- Contains high level descriptions of the game
- Assett and Development Plan
- Complete list of all art assetts for the game
- Complete list of all sound assetts for the game
- Complete list of all animations needed
- Technical Design Document (TDD)
- contains a writeup for all the systems of the game
- Level Design Document (LDD)
- Each level gets its own document
- Contains all events, battles, conversations, maps, everything that goes on in that particular level
- Should be able to give this to anyone and they should know how to build the level (assuming they're competent with the tools).