TEAMWORK SIMULATION

I would like to work with other RMN members on this site. I'll want to make my first game before I want to try a collaboration. Hopefully I can see what kind of game designer I want to be with that game.

I would love to collaborate with other new users or even work with the users here who I admire.

The only way I could see something like this working is if...
A) The individual incentives are more than just the game (eg. paying the collaborators)
B) The project lead is determined to finish, while everyone else is more of freelance donate-as-you-can.

You'd probably end up with 15 people who want to write the story.

I could see this succeeding if: any of the members could quit or fail and it wouldn't keep the game from being completed.

The Mario games we collaborated on were like this. We didn't even decide which order to put the levels in until they were all made. In an RPG, as long as you're using random battles or generic non-enemy-specific sprites for touch battles, you could do basically the same thing. You'd need all the graphics done ahead of time, so technically that puts it outside of a month, but I think almost everything else could be done concurrently. For the map creation it's easy - one person does one town or dungeon. Then get one or two people to do battle animations. Then get however many people are needed for music.

You'd need someone other than the dungeon designers to create the battles, since they need to ramp up properly over the course of the game, and that person wouldn't be allowed to drop the ball. (If they did drop the ball, you can always find someone else to volunteer - it would set the game back another month but it wouldn't spell total doom) The person doing combat/gameplay design would probably need way more than a month though, if you wanted the game to not totally suck donkey balls. Like, maybe four months. A month is reasonable for a single dungeon's worth of maps, but not for an entire game's worth of encounter design, character design, and databasing. And you really just can't split that work across multiple people, sadly - areas and music don't really matter if they feel disjointed, but the gameplay needs a single mind connecting it together or it doesn't end up playable.

If the game was extremely nonlinear, you could possibly get away with having multiple people on gameplay design. They would still need to collaborate heavily, but each one would be responsible for creating a few quests, which could later be placed in any area.

Obviously after this is all done it would take a couple months to "assemble" the game from the broken pieces. Despite everyone working concurrently for only a single month, you're still probably looking about about a six to eight month project.

I've worked with several people on several projects. To my knowledge 2 got done and 10 projects disappeared... within a month. Not including Mario games. I'm working with a team of 9 people right now on a major project. 2 writers, 2 mappers, 2 composers, 3 artists.

Oh wait its been 3 projects worked out successfully one of those projects was some game in Korea made with RPG maker. I was told that I was one of 2 mappers, there was an art house in Korea hired to do graphics and like 5 Korean composers. This seemed like there was a company that had hired me and this company churns out a few RPG maker game in Korea. I think that was maybe 10 months ago. Not sure if the game came out, but I'm very sure with how incredible the graphics and enemies looked that it came out. Plus it worked like Secret of Mana... yet it was done in RPG Maker. Not sure how that worked.


... they gave me hilariously strict guidelines like my maps would be due on this date or else they'd pay me less for that map.

author=MrChearlie

author=ShortStar
I've worked with several people on several projects. To my knowledge 2 got done and 10 projects disappeared... within a month. Not including Mario games. I'm working with a team of 9 people right now on a major project. 2 writers, 2 mappers, 2 composers, 3 artists.

I thing that I not fully understand is how you keep the team, I was in two but both dissapeared in less than a week

I think to get people to stick around you need to pay them. I've never been the leader of a project, just the mapper. But for RMN maybe just have 1 leader and find interchangable people. Like someone that can do 10 maps another person to do 10 maps when the first person disappears to do something else.

Maybe look at their RMN score to see if someone will be sticking around. Like the people with 0 score probably won't stick around.

There are some amazing tools online for collaborating work. Particularly the Google Suite of online document editing.

You assign certain people for certain tasks regarding the actual creation of the game. One person works on Skills, Enemies, Balancing and Combat. Another person works on mapping and dungeon design. Another person works on adding events and storyline interactions (on maps that are completed by the mapping guy.) and another guy works on scripting the custom features and designing the interfaces.

You then have a whole host of people (the above needs 4-5 people, you could then have 10+ more people) working on Google Doc spreadsheets and documents. A few guys would work on writing out a story and dialogue. NPC interactions, that sort of thing. Another couple of guys start designing items and skill descriptions. Monster names, all that sort of Database-y type stuff. The guy who is working on Skills/Combat balancing would then reference that sheet to determine what he needs to add, balance, tweak, etc. He could go back to the sheet and add notes like "This doesn't work, I can't do this, could you change this?" type of stuff so the content makers can adjust and work with them.

To be sure, like anything else, this is all very daunting and a large task. However organization is key. You aren't going to make a 40-60 hour epic in a month, but you could easily pump out a 5-10 hour game in a month. Particularly if you aren't focused on custom graphics in any way.

If you want to be a captain, I'll donate a bunch of RPG maps enough for a game... then you take it upon yourself to find someone to make the music, make the enemies and do the tileset to switch out the default.