Making Mods/My Team Your Team

My Team or Your Team (a disclaimer)

Before you start reading this whole Making Mods section and get turned off but what seems to be a heavy emphasis on having a team leader, remember it doesn't have to be like that for every type of project. The apparent emphasis on a team owner like this simply made the section easier to write.

Having a team leader or lead coder/mapper/whatever isn't mandatory. In other words, don't waste more time building an intricate team structure than that structure would help to save. In fact it is problably better to avoid having a heavy team structure if at all possible. This gives all participants in the creation of the mod a sense of equal ownership.

Some mod teams work fine as an "autonomous collective" (shades of Monty Python). Sometimes the older members (or sometimes just one) will be accepted as unofficial leaders, simply because in the event of disagreements members will respect their opinion.

Nevertheless, for larger projects such as total conversions, or complex gametypes, it might be wise for the founders of the mod to think about the development plan for the game, and setup a team hierarchy where the more experienced developers are guiding the less experienced ones, and one person is in charge of organizing the team, setting up file servers, organizing meetings, making sure the design specs are kept up to date, etc.

However your team fits itself together (and no two teams are alike) the following are essential.

• A fair and consistent way of handling disputes and disagreements.
• A single, bang up to date, specification for your mod that's available to everyone. A private wiki works great for that.
• At least one communication-platform where everyone can speak to the rest: one or several of an IRC channel, a forum, etc.
• Some sort of version management system like CVS For larger projects like total conversions and complicated gametypes with lots of files, or frequent updates.

Spoon: I agree with this. I think you need someone to get the ball rolling, aka a project leader, after that let the individual's skill, creativity, and experience take over. Don't micro manage your team. Come up with a goal and let them communicate between each other to get it done. As a project leader, your goal is to work on a kick ass website

Lilguy:I hate to say it, but I strongly disagree with just about everything on this page. The first paragraph is just plain confusing, and there are a lot of claims in here without any sort of evidence or credibility. If there are any mods out there which have been completed without a team leader (and no, web designer doesn't = team leader) I bet you could count them on one hand. To expect a group of amauture developers to get together, organize a unified design, and create a game over a period of months or years, is very naive in my opinion. I've found that simply organizing people's work and keeping the specs up to date is just about a full-time job in itself.

T1: Fraghouse doesn't have a team leader and look at all the mods they've made. The Fraghouse Invasion Community Pack (which confusingly enough, was not made by Fraghouse) didn't have a team leader either. If I paid more attention to the mods out there, I'd probably know about more.

EntropicLqd: This section was primarily about adding a bit of balance. Most of the rest of the Making Mods section assumes some kind of team-leader/project manager type person is in place and/or a relatively rigid team structure. At the end of the day a team should select an organisational structure that suits them and the way they want to work. The last paragraph states that pretty nicely I think.

Tarquin: should we add CVS to the list of essentials above?

Lilguy: Done. I also fixed (somewhat) the first paragraph, although the grammar in the rest of the article is still pretty confusing. \

I guess when I made the comment above, I was thinking mostly in terms of larger projects such as total conversions. For the kinda stuff that Fraghouse does (map packs, mutators, gametypes) indeed not a lot of structure is neccessary, since these are typically short-term projects, with an evolutionary-type development cycle where adding little ideas and changing things around without a plan is acceptable. In many cases though, the intention is to make a complete game, or make major modifications to the original. These projects really require a lot of thought, planning, and organization. Encouraging startup developers to "avoid having a heavy team structure if at all possible" is exactly what many people who've been members of failed mods would tell you was the problem, along with a lack of communication.