Introduce new Dev Team roles: Producer & Designer

[Rob606]

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary):
Take on more roles akin to a real-life development company. I know that this all a fan made mod and everyone is working for free but it would not be too difficult to take on people willing to undertake Producer or Designer roles to help assist the dev team in creating content for CM.

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole):
A designer will help unify the vision for the CM game overall, provide documentation for the entire process and work towards designing interesting things for CM; New modes, new objects, new maps, etc.
A producer would be vital in organizing the dev team and manage the system as a whole. This is how the video game industry operates so if you want to be professional(ish) this is a good route to go down.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc):
If people have some experience in these fields and are willing to help out, introduce them as roles as test this. Implement realistic processes to find if modelling your dev team after the VG industry works positively for the CM dev team.

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it):
'Hire' people.



Personally, I'm about to graduate with a Master's in Game Design. I've worked with some student development teams in real life and I have a fairly good idea of how this process works. If other people with similar (or better) experience can come forward and pitch some time into this project that everyone in the community loves (to hate, sometimes) then that's could really help things out.

[Feweh]

This is a pretty straight-forward development directed game. All our developers speak among each-other and communicate a basic direction to each other as is.
Our dev's and staff team have a grand understanding of where the game needs to go. There is no "Profits" so we aren't aiming to maximize money by dev work and we don't need extra people on the team doing nothing but throwing ideas around.

This is completely un-needed.

[Rob606]

It's not about maximising money, it's about co-ordinating the development as a whole.

[Feweh]

It's not about maximising money, it's about co-ordinating the development as a whole.

That's already done....?

[Rob606]

That's already done....?

I've seen comments around the forums stating that the dev team has a lack of inter-communication, with development often just devs working on personal projects. This also means that devs can't ask for assets, they have to make it themselves.

A producer would be the one to manage all this, and organise the building of assets per requests across the development team. A designer would be unifying the game vision as whole.

[Abbysynth]

This is the silliest idea I have ever seen on these forums, and actually kind of a personal insult. Apophis and I have over 40 years of professional game development experience between us. 40! Not an exaggeration number, an actual one. Our development process has literally not changed in more than a year, why are people saying stuff like this now?

[Rob606]

This is the silliest idea I have ever seen on these forums, and actually kind of a personal insult. Apophis and I have over 40 years of professional game development experience between us. 40! Not an exaggeration number, an actual one. Our development process has literally not changed in more than a year, why are people saying stuff like this now?

My intention was not to insult, merely offer a suggestion. As I said, this was based on the reading and impression I was getting from reading around the forums.

[SecretStamos (Joshuu)]

My intention was not to insult, merely offer a suggestion. As I said, this was based on the reading and impression I was getting from reading around the forums.

The concern here is that adding someone (with the final say over the project) to the team as a designer likely causes issues. I'm sure you have the best intentions, but it sounds an awful lot like an executive idea guy position to me.

To simply hand over the control and direction of the project to someone unknown would be a severe oversight. I can see where it can be insulting as well.



As far as I'm concerned, Apophis and Rahlzel fill these roles.

[Rob606]

The concern here is that adding someone (with the final say over the project) to the team as a designer likely causes issues. I'm sure you have the best intentions, but it sounds an awful lot like an executive idea guy position to me.

To simply hand over the control and direction of the project to someone unknown would be a severe oversight. I can see where it can be insulting as well.



As far as I'm concerned, Apophis and Rahlzel fill these roles.

Yes, actually, that's a far better way of doing things - I agree that bringing in an unknown is a bad idea in such a small team. I still think that steps should be made to utilise modern day production techniques in the dev cycle.

Assigning some dev members to specifically work on Design aspects would also be useful.

I'm not assuming to know anything about the dev team's current process, and I certainly didn't about Apop and Abby's combined experience (I'm genuinely interested to know what you've both worked on!), but this was a suggestion made as an observer.

[Abbysynth]

I get your point about modern techniques, but I am old enough to be most players' grandma and I still use notepad.exe.