ID:35282
 
It's high time I wrote a new article for Dream Makers. Trouble is, I am completely uninspired. So give me some fun suggestions about something that might be useful to you and interesting to me.
Small game development team management is a topic I've always wanted to know more about. I've always found it hard to sub out work, so a nice guide on the standard ways it's done would be great.
Yuck, there is no such thing as a team on BYOND these days. Most likely going to get a member who quits/steals your work.
Exactly why a good guide on how to manage a team is necessary. People assume that they have to send everything to their mappers and artists. Instead you can send a stripped version of just dumby objects with real names. Even your coders you could send code and placeholder icons. If you really don't trust anyone, then nobody would have all of the game, just pieces that applied to them. But most people wouldn't think to try this.

And even if you did trust all your team members, managing them and keeping everyone motivated can be quite difficult.
Yeah- given that you're one of the members of pretty much the only successful and long term BYOND dev team you're just the man to do it!

Dan said:
Instead you can send a stripped version of just dumby objects with real names.

Yeah, I actually make a program to do that automatically but I got it 95% done before I got annoyed with some recurring bugs with the text parsing. It's slightly more complicated than it seems as there's some specific nuances and stuff you need to deal with. I might just fix up the code and release it.
Elation wrote:
Yeah- given that you're one of the members of pretty much the only successful and long term BYOND dev team you're just the man to do it!

Nope, Deadron is just the man to do it. I'm only the icon boy!

Pretty much everything DDT does is coordinated through email:

1) Ron sends me an email describing what we need.
2) I procrastinate.
3) He sends a reminder.
4) I come up with something and send it to him (or check it into the source control thingy).
5) He suggests improvements.
6) Repeat 2 through 5 until resource is complete.
7) Repeat 1 through 6 for the next resource needed.

From this I can suggest a couple general guidelines.

1) Your project's director has to be patient and persistent.
2) Your project's henchmen have to be, if not reliable, then at least capable of being shamed into finally producing something.

If you can meet those two criteria, you're home free!

I don't think that qualifies as a genuine Dream Makers article, though.
Are there any decent beginners' guides? At least something that walks people through the learning resources available to them in the same manner you see repeated almost daily somewhere on the forums? (You know, "how i Code?!?!" and then someone says, "Read Zilal's Tutorials, read [blank], read [blank], and look at [blank], then come here to ask specific questions!"

It's almost a canned response now, and warrants being slapped up permanently in a nice little walkthrough somewhere...

Though this doesn't seem like what you're looking to do...
Hmm, SSGX, that gives me an interesting idea... very interesting indeed!
Yeah, I agree. Coding is full of hard concepts to grasp for beginners. I always found myself asking people how to do things but what I really needed to learn was why. Also, until you get into the correct mode of thinking the DM ref will do no justice for you, so a good beginners guide on why would be very valuable.
ATP Development was going to write a collaborative article on making a team work but we never got around to it and our incentive was taken (no more BYONDscape payouts :[)