I thought that everyone here should have a look at this. It seemed to be pretty damn well written, and is very applicible to almost everyone here.

Enjoy: One Dev, One Game

-Flecko

Mmm ... Zaphos like article. Article good. Zaphos wishes he read article long time ago, though, would have helped more, then.

The part about finding team members made me laugh:

I'm just curious but has anyone here ever successfully formed a team and actually finished a game (besides set us up the bomb, is that even finished)? They're out there, I know they exist, but a real live team has got to be the RAREST thing in indie gamedev.

All in all, a good read though.

Two bytes up! Waaay up! It was a good read. The part about designing a game for two levels gave me the impression that whoever wrote this may not have really known what he was doing.. I mean, why would your code double in size from adding one level? That's content, for crying out loud!

But, anyways, yeah. The rest was good. Whee.

Erm, if you look again, I believe he was referring to code he wrote when he was just starting out ... ie when he didn't know what he was doing. It can hardly be taken to indicate him as an incompetent now. And it's good advice; I know I've done poor, non-expandable designs many times ... especially in the first few projects (gets better each try, methinks)

I joined a team once from a GameDev post looking for a mapper 2 months ago. Took the main guy an hour of looking through his own code to tell me how big the player is and what scale I needed to map to, and the rest of the team didn't even know what their jobs were. So I quit.. Are all indy teams that disorganized? I'm dumb!

I guess its all proof that the only person you can rely on is yourself. Although...in my case, I really shouldn't trust anyone.;D

-Flecko

Heh, I have a "team" that sortof worked; huge interest in the beginning, and there are still several people doing different tasks. But towards the end it's really just been one person doing all the work ... (I'm not touching it because it's ASP and rather complex and I don't know any ASP ... and know that when I'm learning a language I make bugs appear like none other ...)

There was an Electronic Gaming Monthly article on indie devers, and some of them were teams working in their spare time. Apparently there was some contest in California for who could make the best game, and the results were more professional than you normally see in SpeedHack I mean, really good. So I guess some people can do it, but I imagine you'd have to have done it profesionally first, like being on a team project at work or something ....

I agree with most - was a good read

It got me to thinking - almost every single game that I make is content heavy.. because I don't like making most types of puzzle games, which is one of the only game categories that require little to no graphical/data content. I think that's why most of my projects fail....

I'm in a working two person team (so far, at least, the game is still far from finished) making an adventure game. The best thing about it is that you get motivated when you get the work the other person has done. Another pro is of course that you don't have to do everything yourself.

A two man team can work... at least if one is 100% programmer and the other one is 100% gfx artist

[EDIT]
Hey, this reminds me - I'm supposed to be in a FS2 total conversion mod team right now. Better take a look at that source code soon

23: Any link to the contest? Me bets that they didn't have all the restrictions of speedhack either ...
Was it a teamhack? Or just a compo that lots of people used teams for ...

maybe i have been coding too long, but the article seemed a little lacking in advice. it reminds me of how john madden comments on football games: "Now what this team is gonna want to do is get out there and win the football game. It wont be easy, but they should try to manage good plays and eventually come out with the win". oh really. thanks madden for years of wisdom.

I thought it was very well written. Of course, if you've been down that alley and have had your hand at actually making games, you know about all of this stuff, because you've encountered it.

This is a great thing for a newbie. It kind of gets them prepped - which is what I think it's geared towards. A good bit of advise. He's being very general about it, not trying to get too into depth into any of the aspects he talks about.

Really good, especially for a newbie.

That's a good way of dividing the work, but in our project, I'm actually both the programmer, the musician and the artist (but we use the adventure game engine Sludge, so I don't have to begin coding from scratch) while my team mate is responsible for main design, plot, puzzles and dialogue. An arrangement that obviously wouldn't work for a simple game, but for an adventure game it works. The only important thing is that you have clear areas of responsibility.

it didn't teach me anything really....but it does give me memories of when I tried to program an RPG in mode 13h. It used getch() for movement, and the map was hardcoded. If I wanted to add a level, it would've almost double the size of my executable. man, I was hoping I'd never remember those days again:'(

I somewhat agree - however, you must take into consideration that it's intent is more for a newbie than an expert

The only piece of advice that I truly got out of it, is to knock off as much data content as possible when working as a one man programmer. I didn't really pay attention to it as much before... but it's really a big slowdown while programming The games I make usually require many graphics.. some of which my artist friend does make, but he doesn't have the internet.. and he lives out of town.. so it's tough sometimes

> I mean, why would your code double in size from
> adding one level?

I remember looking at the source for Jou ...
Adding a second level would have double the code size.
That said, they finished their games. More than one. More than I can say for myself

Zaphos: Oh yeah?!?!?!?!?! I should "look again," should I? Okay then, I will!

. . .

Oh.

If you design the game for THE one level, instead of A level it could make the source huge, because you would have to copy code over again for the new level and crap. I remember that 13h RPG I talked about b4. I had an array hardcoded in for every blocking tile, and warp points. The tiles were hard coded as well. It was horrible. I am a LOT better now.

Zaphos: The competition was a yearly contest of teams, most working in their spare time. I don't have a url; just the issue (and I'm not sure which one).

Anyway, I'm semi-reviving this because I just picked up issue 162 of EGM (Metroid Prime got straight 10's, aw yeah) and apparently this is a series or something, because there's a four page article on game design with lots of resources in the form of books, urls and even schools. Aimed at total newbies, of course, but pretty cool.

Bonus points: the only game library mentioned in the article is Allegro Unfortunately it's only mentioned in conjunction with DJGPP, which the EGM crew is about to recieve an e-mail about unless someone more important wants to do it ....

Yes, send e-mail! Everyone can send email!

Erm, anyway, the compo & series sounds cool; I'll have to go see if my school library still carries egm ...

Yeah yeah... Solo-Allegator...

I wish my library had any magazines besides Motorcyle and car mags

You can thank Damon Brown and myself (at least partially) for that bit. He's the author of the Flying Solo articles over at Madmonkey, and we corresponded somewhat frequently while he was doing Allegro dev'n, so when he asked for some input on the article I made sure to plug Allegro ad infinitum.

It's a shame the articles didn't get more space.

Hmm; why did he mention the talula site and not SourceForge's? Isn't that just a mirror now or something?

No I haven't e-mailed them yet; I was in procrastination mode this week ....