First serious blog post about a few issues concerning managing projects that’ve probably affected most of us, in some form or another. Let’s see how well I do…
I’ve been part of a handful of sizable projects over the last couple of years and I’m involved in a couple of new projects at the time of writing. Some are forum and community-based. Some have been bespoke web-app based. Some are videogame projects. Some I’m lucky enough to lead, some I co-lead. Now I’m working on the games design for Dead End and I’ve found a lot of the rules I’ve already worked by on graphic design projects that seem all too familiar:
1. Everything You Create, Change Or Cut Should Be To Benefit The Project
2. Be Experimentally Creative
3. More Than Anyone Else, You Should Want Your Project To Work
4. Delegate
1. Everything You Create, Change Or Cut Should Be To Benefit The Project
Number one rule – To have a strong project, you need strong direction. Sometimes, as the guy that directs the project, you have to cut out ideas that don’t add to the project in any significant way, even thought they’re fine ideas by their own merits – People will get upset. Fights will break out. Someone loses an eye – Rest assured, if you survive this, you’re doing your job. Most people won’t understand that if an idea is to be added to an already-formulated design, it needs to substantially support or improve the core, otherwise it’ll add up to fluff, which isn’t what you want.
Saying that, sometimes a right hook of an idea will come, which you might want to re-evaluate and modify the core of your design, to fit it in.
When starting a project, I always work in broad strokes which then get more defined and worked on in more detail, as the project develops. Working this way lets me define a strong base, which would be the over-arching details such as genre, main game mechanisms, visual style, tool sets, objectives. The all-encompassing things. Once that’s done, I look into more specific gameplay element – Enemy types, weapon lists, health systems, mechanisms for plot exposition, whether or not the player can be customised or advanced via an XP system. Then finer still, I might start to think about how the music system works, control schemes, secondary objectives, smaller touches.
Industry Tale 01 – Throughout the later development stages of one of my favourite game titles – Metal Gear Solid – the development team put in place something that I really, really love – Each weekly focus meeting they had, each person at the table had to offer up one idea, no matter how big or small, that would benefit the game. The game, for me, is crammed full of cool, beneficial gameplay elements that make the game feature-rich and feature-deep. This leads to one of the most in-depth gaming experiences I’ve played through.
Industry Tale 02 -The development of Valve’s Left4Dead was peppered with some interesting changes – At the start, they didn’t have the Hunter or the Boomer special infected designed, both being amalgams of older, less robust zombie characters put into the game at an early stage.
2. Be Experimentally Creative
Whilst it’s good to learn the particular hard and fast rules of the kinds of projects you’re working on – and whilst you need to know the rules before you can effectively break them – you can arrive at some interesting waypoints simply by trying something new, or something so far out that it redefines the goals you’re trying to reach.
I make music in various guises. My main focus in making music is to try and make something that no one’s really heard before. I like my own music and listen to it quite a bit, but that’s only because I’ve yet to hear anyone make something similar.
Most of my own personal music direction comes from trying out new things and learning new techniques via experimentation. I let my music generally write itself – I’m just the guy it travels through on its way to my computer. I hardly ever jump into starting a track with any real idea of what it’s going to end up as, but I do guide it into certain structures and arrangements that I know will work. It snakes along from tangent to tangent until I feel like there’s enough interesting elements to make the rest of the song around.
Randomness and spontineity are great mechanisms for flexing those creative muscles and to get on the way to making something genuinely original and satisfactory. The best solutions to problems are often creatively built.
Keeping notes of ideas is also a good idea. Ideas that might not make sense at one point in the projects life can make sense later on. I have a whole folder of unfinished music tracks that I dive into from time to time, because I’ve finally found parts of a song that they’d fit snugly into.
3. More Than Anyone Else, You Should Want Your Project To Work
This is where a lot of people get stuck. It usually happens when someone has a really cool idea, but doesn’t really have the maturity, experience or intuitiveness to get the ball rolling and make the neccesary decisions in managing the project.
Someone once told me about one of their project ideas; They’d built up this idea of creating a book that contained bits of art and graphic design from people going through certain things in life. It’s a cool idea and I really liked how it sounded.
A few weeks later I’d heard nothing about the project, so I asked about it. They didn’t think it’d launch, because they’d only had a small handful of entrants, much less than they’d originally anticipated.
On hearing about this, I asked of what they’d done to drum up publicity and exposure; They’d made a post on their Live-Journal (~75 contacts), and they’d asked their friend to make a post on a Tumblr account. As it stood, the efforts of the friend, uninvolved with the project, yielded more buzz than the Live-Journal post.
I did advise that they should be thinking with a wider audience in mind, trying to get word of it to catch on in the multitude of free graphic design communities, blogs, even setting up its own community-based website so that people could read about the project, submit a couple of entries, talk about it with other people and maybe even browse older books. This could all be hooked up to a shop or e-store, where people could add orders and get themselves some awesome art-in-a-book.
Other than the LJ and Tumbler posts, there was a free gmail recipient account that was created and posted up on their Live-Journal. I know that, if someone wants me to create art to put in a book, essentially for free and taking up time that I could spend on other things, I know I want to see more commitment between them and their project besides 2 free posts and a free email address.
Needless to say, the project flopped, with a total of zero submissions into what could have been a really nice project.
You should want your project to work more than anyone else wants it to work. You should pump motivation into it with feverred passion. You should be piling on the effort with both hands if you want other people to believe in your project and contribute or subscribe to it. People should be able to feel it in your words, in your presentation, in the very core of the idea itself.
Having really cool ideas, like the artbook mentioned above, is fantastic and ace. If you think that just coming up with cool ideas is all that building solid projects is about, then you’re undoubtably setting yourself up for a fall. If you can’t switch on and channel into that initiative, to do something really base and simple like sending out a handful of emails, to reach out to existing communities, you should prepare yourself for a slippery uphill struggle.
.4 Delegate
You’ve gotten your hand picked squad of awesome artists, coders and concept artists. USE them! If you’ve picked your creative force, you know that they’re up to the job.
It’s great that you’re leading from the top, but if you lack the ability of delegation and tasking, you’ll end up stifling your team and you’ll end up wasting all your dev time spreading yourself ever-more-thinly across all areas of its’ development, whilst your artists and talent sit around, twiddling their thumbs, getting demotivated and bored – It’s fine that you want the very best for your project, but you won’t acheive it by trying to do everything yourself.
In my experience, most of the problems thought of in terms of delegation, are problems with communication – “Billy didn’t this part of the art wrong”, “Billy didn’t focus on this bit enough”, “Billy only put one sugar in my coffee!”. If you need something doing specifically, be specific in your communication of the task.
What a lovely surprised. I showed it to the small dev team I’ve mustered and everyone gave it 2 thumbs up, totalling 10 thumbs in the air. Seriously need to make more progress on Dead End, tbh. As soon as the next lot of design work is done, I’ll sink teeth and more time back into it.
