The following article really helped me to figure out how to take a more professional approach to my projects which led to many more of them actually being completed. A good, inspiring read I thought:
Shareware amateurs vs shareware professionals
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GAME DEVELOPMENT ISN'T EASY!
If you are a producer/director;
The first step is to write solid design documentation. Without having this first work 100% completed it won’t be possible for you to proceed in the good path. Your team will need to feel the mood of your creation from the word go. It is a necessity. I suggest you to read these articles;
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19970912/design_doc.htm
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991019/ryan_01.htm
You need to prepare good schedules with a list of tasks to do for everyone. It will be important to keep the motivation of the team with regular progress. This article could help;
http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2003/features/20030306/oglesby_01.htm
Then it requires a lot of psychology. You have to deal with your team which isn’t always a piece of cake. Everyone conduct themselves in a different way and it will be your role to manage them without causing fatal disasters. As a lead you must at all cost act in a neutral way and try to solve these issues in the most positive way you can. I didn’t find good articles about this subject, but there seems to be good ones in the previous posts.
I hope I was helpful (sorry for my English)
Elder Prince,
www.blossomsoft.com
Some news.
As seen on Flipcode, a guy spent some time tracking all the "help wanted" projects posted there, and posted a huge list of results. It is.. very interesting.. to say the least. But not really surprizing..
I'll quote the post:
I thought it would be a nice addition to this thread, instead of starting a new one.
Y.
As seen on Flipcode, a guy spent some time tracking all the "help wanted" projects posted there, and posted a huge list of results. It is.. very interesting.. to say the least. But not really surprizing..
I'll quote the post:
Quote:
Results: Out of 107 volunteer projects announced here between April of 2000 and December of 2002, 104 of them collapsed prior to completion (most within a few months, apparently). Only three are still around and show recent activity, however two of those are still in "concept sketch" phase, and the other is still not finished but does appear to be getting close.
I thought it would be a nice addition to this thread, instead of starting a new one.
Y.
Quote: Original post by BlossomSoft
If you are a producer/director;
The first step is to write solid design documentation. Without having this first work 100% completed it won’t be possible for you to proceed in the good path. Your team will need to feel the mood of your creation from the word go. It is a necessity.
I agree and I disagree. [smile] I think that putting together such a guide is useful, yes, but I think you also need to be willing to be dynamic. You shouldn't honor your design doc as if it was the say-all end-all guide to making your game. Maybe sometime down the road you realize a certain feature is not very useful, or maybe you figure out that implementing something is much much more difficult then you thought when writing the doc.
For my project, I never wrote a design doc. I wrote a short story about the game's world, it's characters, and the events. I think it's turned out to be a pretty successful "guiding light". Implemented ideas for the game have come from myself, my staff, and outsiders who gave suggestions. This thread in my forums is where we discussed ideas, filtered them out, and later in an IRC chat came to a decision on what to finally implement.
So yeah, I just wanted to point out that there is no single "winning solution" in terms of how to go about starting off a new game dev project. Then again, maybe I should talk after we've released a playable version for our game. [lol]
As a coder of a MMORPG, id just like to say, I have been working on it on and off now for about 3 years now, 2 of those years nobody would even consider helping as the project just was not far enough along. Not saying it will take everyone that long to get help on there project, but expect to be codeing for a good year before people will take your project seriously if its of massive scope.
I vote this thread title be changed to "99% of MMORPGs Crash and Burn -- Yours Will, Unless You Do This".
We trick them in, and then hit them with the sucker punch.
The thing that most people forget is that it's not just the code -- you have to maintain a server (which means paying for bandwidth, server space, electricity, replacement components, OS licenses) and a community (which means answering to barely-literate, slavering morons who want to know why their level 2 billion wizard just got killed by a bug in your system and won't be happy until you point out that it wasn't a bug but that they pressed the suicide key).
We trick them in, and then hit them with the sucker punch.
The thing that most people forget is that it's not just the code -- you have to maintain a server (which means paying for bandwidth, server space, electricity, replacement components, OS licenses) and a community (which means answering to barely-literate, slavering morons who want to know why their level 2 billion wizard just got killed by a bug in your system and won't be happy until you point out that it wasn't a bug but that they pressed the suicide key).
Quote: Original post by mlambert
What I want is people to post articles/blogs/webpages that refer specifically to start-up teams/mmorpgs/development times and costs (amatuer of course), or general thoughts and ideas. I will then either:
I don't know if you'll find it interesting and useful mlambert, but my team and I are maintaining a blog with daily information relating to our development at;
Western Lords' Journal
maybe you could add it.
This topic is closed to new replies.
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