Can someone explain? What is the point of making a map if you assign other people to do the terrain, data, and triggers? The editor is a limited set of tools with restrictions and limits set by the programmers who made it.
Anyone can come up with ideas that work outside the editor. The challenge is finding ways to bring the ideas into reality using the limits Blizzard set for you. The editor is designed to give as much freedom and power to the developers as possible. But you're still limited by its technical abilities. And you have a specific, limited set of methods and objects to use.
In other words, there are many more ideas than combinations of data, terrain, and triggers in the editor.
The true creativity comes from observing this set of limited tools, and finding interesting things to do with them. Like Legos.
If you're just assigning the technical tasks to others, you're really not doing anything.
Edit: To clarify my design process, whenever I add a new unit, trigger, or piece of terrain, I go through and look at every unit, trigger, and terrain brush / doodad, and think "What can I turn these pieces into?". I do this process every time I add any unit / trigger system / terrain. Just like Legos.
for example im good with triggers but im disaster with data why not make a team with someone who owns data O.o think thats how it works teams where people specialize in each part or sometimes everyone good at everything but cause its big project its faster and easier to atribute tasks to each one
Before I discovered the fun of science, it was my dream to work for Lego. Also, when I my parents stopped buying them for me, I realized how expensive they were and gave up. The same with nerf guns.
@EternalWraith: Go
Before I discovered the fun of science, it was my dream to work for Lego. Also, when I my parents stopped buying them for me, I realized how expensive they were and gave up. The same with nerf guns.
Aha;p
Ok on a more serious note then. Honestly, I think your OP is kinda a joke;p. Being totally serious. How can you not understand what team development is about ?, or the importance of it?.
High quality projects in Starcraft 2 take a great deal of time, and its nearly impossible to be an expert at data/terrain/triggers. So....we work together...get the job done faster....reap the benefits together..all from a high quality work which would otherwise not really be possible if done solo
Sure a single person can think of a very creative design and then build. Build time would be proportional to how big the project is. But a team does this all either faster or higher quality and at a larger scale.
In terms of brainstorming of ideas and creative design
Now imagine a group of people that have similar interests and each have their own ideas about how it would be like. Then everyone brainstorms and puts together all the best ideas that work well together. Now you have an even larger idea, that takes ideas from multiple creative individuals. Because maybe someone thought of something that you really liked and works well with yours, but you had not initially considered. Now your map isn't only restricted to your own creativeness, which is ultimately limited by your own experiences and personality.
Facts on division of workload and work efficiency
You believe you can do practically everything on your own. I will take your word for it.
But there's always others out there that are better than you at either terraining, data editing, triggering, galaxy scripting, layout designing, custom texture drawing, or story writing.
By dividing work efficiently, your map could reach a level of quality that you could not have achieved on your own in a realistic time frame.
Developing solo can be fast, but is more wasteful of time, because of transition times between working on different aspects individually.
Time and attention is a limitation because a single person cannot truly devote his/her whole time to map development without severe repercussions.
More hands greatly raises the amount of development hours put into your map without sacrifices in lifestyle.
I can literally keep listing more reasons and examples. But the main idea is the whole world operates most efficiently from cooperation, and this is probably because we are not omniscient nor omnipotent beings and make up for our limitations by banding together.
It's a good question about how team-based development actually works.
I guess there's roughly 3 types of team-based work I can identify.
The first is if you know the exact requirements of your map, but are unable to fulful one or more requirements yourself. For instance, I am very poor at terrain, so I would likely generate a draft of my requirements and commission someone else to do it. Once I receive my resource and am satisfied with it, I would proceed to finish the project and credit the terrainer.
I would say this form of team-work is the most likely to be successful and I've had many good partnerships following this model.
The second type is where you have a large project and many persons working on different aspects and someone is delegated as the leader to oversee its completion. These I would say are the most common type of team-based efforts and they fail more often than they succeed in my experiences (not trying to discourage you. These have the largest potential to develop truly great works). In these types of projects, you have to be ready to sacrifice your original vision for the work, as the other developers will have their own ways of developing the map (they often surpass your goals). These projects rely on having a good leader, clear goals and a dedicated team working on disjoint parts (it's really bad if two or more developers are working on resources that overlap as this requires a lot of communication to resolve conflicts).
The third type is where there is a lack of a clear leader and all members have equal input. I have rarely seen these types of project bear any fruit. There just becomes too much internal conflict and a lack of flow. Theoretically they work, but are too unpredictable in practice.
Because you get new ideas with more people, new approaches and you LEARN. That and you need a lot of good people, to produce something of high quality. You alone might be able to do it, but a team of people does it faster, more interesting and a lot higher in quality, because they're all highly specialized individuals and have a lot more views on one topic than you alone. They find flaws, you didn't see yourself. They give input, you would never have come up with on your own. That is, why people like to work in a team - because it helps them grow.
There is also the Freelancer approach, where you just hire people to do a part of your work and give them credit. But those don't add anything to the rest of your work, they're just working on what they do best, that doesn't mean it's the best they could do, if they got infos from other people.
Oh and because it increases the chance that you have something that isn't just for your tiny 2% part of the community. What the hell do you think DotA was such a success? A few million players forged it over years into what it is now. That's some teamwork, right there ;)
I was speaking from my own perspective. I don't think I could ever let go of the control.
But I still stand by my original assertion: If you call yourself"designer" and assign all the data, terrain, and triggers to others, you're not really doing anything. It's different than making a game from scratch, where you program the engine, make the models, and come up with game ideas. In full games, you create the idea, and develop models and code that suits the needs of the game.
In the editor (and Legos), you're given the models and the code, and you see what you can build with them.
What examples are there of full-scale projects on Battle.net? I haven't seen any that appear to be.or if they are, they weren't very good.
I ask this because the only way to play a map is on Battle.net, and if it's not successful there, it's basically dead.
what's to know you work as a team to get the job done. I mean surely no one would waste their time working on a project if the other parties do not do their part. I certainly wouldn't try to get people together to create my ideas... that wouldn't be very fun at all and pointless. With the team dynamic each party compensates for the others weakness in the development process. You shoot the breeze conceptualize and brainstorm and work on a consensous on how the project is going to be done. Plus 90% of us do this as a hobby and have lives and jobs, so generally working as a team will speed up the process.
Either you do the whole map solo or you work with a team? Your choice...
But I still stand by my original assertion: If you call yourself"designer" and assign all the data, terrain, and triggers to others, you're not really doing anything. It's different than making a game from scratch, where you program the engine, make the models, and come up with game ideas. In full games, you create the idea, and develop models and code that suits the needs of the game.
No, not really. You're the guy with the vision. It's the same in the Industry. A Game Designer won't run around, doing the job of a Programmer, or the job of an Artist. He is the guy that comes up with the vision, the gameplay, the grand plan. He gotta write that down, for everyone to understand what they need to do, he has to keep it updated, to advance on it and communicate it to the rest of the team. It's not any different when you work in a team on SC2. One does the Triggering, one does the Terrain, one manages the Data, one makes you shiny new Assets. The Game Designer is going around, coming up with new ideas to implement, tests around with balance (based upon what the Data guy did, just switching out numbers) and takes in the feedback from others, putting it into the project where it fits, or tells them, that it won't fit very well into the grand plan of awesome. He'll also communicate with the Artists on what they might need to change on a model, by the believe of others on the team (because there is a new tech coming up for a feature he made or something). Most of the Gameplay, UI, the way something should work & feel, and the overall vision comes from a Game Designer. Though there is also a lot of dry, boring theory behind any aspect of game development, the very basics or the core, whatever you wanna call it. You build around that, with your vision.
Example: Game Designer comes up with the idea of mod-able weapons. Like add a Silencer, that is also visible on the model. That means he needs to tell the Data guy, that he'll need to make model-attachments, that work for it later on, when they implement it. He'll need to communicate with the Triggerer on how he wants the interface to look & behave, where to place it inside the UI for this option and also tells him to make sure that the shooting he programmed for some TPS-Style-Game doesn't look weird with the new feature. He'll than tell the Artist what they've planned, so the Artist knows he need to cut up his weapons and add new attachment points to them, to make a kind of construction system. He'll not tell them how they should do this. They know best. He'll tell them what they plan, how they want to do it, and those guys will act according to it. When it's inside, he'll explain to them a new feature he's come up with for the game. That's how it works. Sure, there will be a meeting and gathering ideas, but the Game Designer will focus those ideas into a new way for the player to enjoy it.
In the editor (and Legos), you're given the models and the code, and you see what you can build with them.
Wrong. You can add new models. So it's like you still only have the code, but hell, you can make your own legos that suit your needs! That's something that a team can solve, if you have a few artists ;) Sure, you can do that alone, but as soon as you have to model and animate a character, you're in for a lot of pain. That needs someone who knows that stuff and had quite some practice.
What examples are there of full-scale projects on Battle.net? I haven't seen any that appear to be.or if they are, they weren't very good.
There are quite a few, but since they're rather large-scale, they're not out yet. I played a few of them, they're promising. Most are just teams of 2 or 3 people, but it's a lot better than most of the solo-content I've seen on BNet 2.0 up to date. If you go back 1 BNet Version, you'll find a lot of those. WC3 had quite a bunch of very good and popular maps that were made by a team.
I hope this all helped you to get a better view on it. Might not fit you, but than again, there are a lot of people that don't fit the Industry either.
This is naturally not completely true for SC2, where most people know something of every aspect, but there are quite a few high-specialized people among us, that do only enjoy some part of what they do. While they have ideas, they lack the will to learn other parts. So they team up, one keeps track of all their ideas, focuses all those ideas, filters them and everyone gets a great map out of it. But usually the focus guy also does some kind of other work on the team.
What you're struggling with is the definition of a 'leader' in a project. Sure, if all you do is 'design' and come up with ideas, you're 'not doing much yourself', but this isn't necissarily bad. Problems only start to show when you do virtually nothing on a project and still want to keep full control. I could have an overarching idea for a story and get more people in to help me flesh out the idea. The line 'credit where credit is due' is golden here, as one shouldn't want to overcredit himself.
In a nutshell, what I think I'm trying to say is - there's nothing wrong with just 'directing' any type of project. If however, you assume just this role and feel the need to act like you've created the whole map - aka you feel like you didn't do enough and try to mask this by lying about it to yourself and others by telling everyone you did everything - then you're in the wrong. But that goes just as well for the terrainer, data editor and triggerer in your party as for a director. Directors just tend to be more prone to falling for this mistake because of our cultural western opinion that someone who directs is marked as a "boss" and is somehow of more value than his "underlings".
Or something like that.
Edit: And if that doesn't make sense - team-based development is simply quicker, period. It took me approximately 50 hours of work to create a 30 minute single-player map from scratch, doing all the work from story to terrain to triggers myself. I spent about 30 hours on terrain, 15 on triggers, and 5 on story. If I had simply had a storywriter/triggerer with me on this specific project, I would've saved myself 2/5th of the time and not lose out on any quality.
If I had simply had a storywriter/triggerer with me on this specific project, I would've saved myself 2/5th of the time and not lose out on any quality.
The idea of teamwork isn't that some guy is the designer and then everyone else builds the map. Some people seem to think this but I don't think they ever successfully get a team together(you have to do some of the work yourself or no one's going to work with you, it's not as if they get paid to implement your idea). With that in mind, the points everyone else has made really justify teamwork on maps.
TBQH for mapping I've found it to be more of a burden working on a team.
A) You have to find people who can produce a product as good as you want them to. Everyone can make triggers and rename units to cute shit then make a building that spams their unit 1000 times. Cool, but when I produce a map I want it to not look like shit.
B) You have to wait and rely on your teammates to get things done. Everyone works at their own pace, seeing as mapping is FREE, its not a job (at least not to most people), for me, I like to get a lot done very quickly but with as much detail as I can. I can't stand waiting 2 weeks to get 1 unit back. It drives me nuts not being able to work on my project any time I like.
C) You have to rely on teammates to not dip out halfway through the project. GOOD LUCK WITH THIS.
--
All in all even before sc2 mapping I did some indie projects and I've been in my fair share of teams. Here's the verdict on INDIE, FREE GAME DESIGN PROJECTS and teams: [b]They don't effin work[/b]. Go ahead and announce yet another "greatest map to ever grace the face of the world" post in the Project Workplace, go into the Team Recruitment forum and post your 20 job openings, then please come back in 2 weeks when the project goes Duke Nukem: Forever so I can tell you I told you so. Then join the other 100,000 people who did the same thing as you.
So as a result of teams not working for me, I've ended up forcing myself to do everything. The art, UI, terrain, triggering, data, scripting, design, balance, testing, maintenance, updating, more balancing, bug fixing all 100% myself. As a result of this necessity to do everything myself, I've sort of gained some ability to do everything myself, to some extent, but enough to put out production level quality maps.
In short, stop being lazy, learn a little bit of everything. I'm not even saying become the next da vinci, or understand how to write a graphics engine from the ground up. Learn how to use these tools to some extent and [b]become a better mapper[/b].
Mephs that is not entirely true. Almost every great indie or open source application we have has been developed by a team. It's true that people dip out half-way through, but that's just the fluid nature of design. Even in industry, not everyone is bound to a contract to stay until the project is finished. You just need to look for replacements to pick up the slack.
You have to be a smart leader and advance the project in small steps. Many times there's no structure in a team effort and people get confused or overwhelmed by the amount of work they've been assignment. Give developers small concrete jobs with soft deadlines and you will quickly see if they are competent. If they aren't look for a replacement. As a leader you have to judge the skills of your teammates and tell them exactly what you want done and by when.
For instance I find it helps to tell someone to complete 2-3 heroes with certain spells by the end of the week, rather than tell them to finish 20 heroes. I also finds it's helpful to tell someone to complete a rough draft quickly first and then give a critique so the next more refined draft fits in better with the design. It's a continuous cycle of moving in small steps, giving feedback and moving on. This is what the leaders job is: to continuously keep the pace going in little increments. What I see a lot of is "here's my vision, here is your general role, get it done!"... a long time goes by and we get "dude, this sucks! This is not at all what I wanted!".
Learning to work with a team is one of the most important skills in this industry that you can learn. You have nothing to lose trying, so I would recommend everyone to start getting used to it, because you won't learn this anywhere else (ie. you'd get fired in the real world, so try it out here).
You gather stuff and add it to stuff pile, one day you find like minded stuff gatherer and start gather stuff together to same pile, now your stuff pile rises faster.
@Vexal: Go
Tell them to grow some balls, man up and do their fucking job or leave the team. Also, you don't put them on the team without some proof of their work (assigned by yourself, if you've doubt) before you even allow them to be in it.
There naturally can be some problems, be it job, family, moving cities, etc. - you gotta work around those. Check your mates a bit.
Can someone explain? What is the point of making a map if you assign other people to do the terrain, data, and triggers? The editor is a limited set of tools with restrictions and limits set by the programmers who made it.
Anyone can come up with ideas that work outside the editor. The challenge is finding ways to bring the ideas into reality using the limits Blizzard set for you. The editor is designed to give as much freedom and power to the developers as possible. But you're still limited by its technical abilities. And you have a specific, limited set of methods and objects to use.
In other words, there are many more ideas than combinations of data, terrain, and triggers in the editor.
The true creativity comes from observing this set of limited tools, and finding interesting things to do with them. Like Legos.
If you're just assigning the technical tasks to others, you're really not doing anything.
Edit: To clarify my design process, whenever I add a new unit, trigger, or piece of terrain, I go through and look at every unit, trigger, and terrain brush / doodad, and think "What can I turn these pieces into?". I do this process every time I add any unit / trigger system / terrain. Just like Legos.
@Vexal: Go
Legos;p
for example im good with triggers but im disaster with data why not make a team with someone who owns data O.o think thats how it works teams where people specialize in each part or sometimes everyone good at everything but cause its big project its faster and easier to atribute tasks to each one
@EternalWraith: Go
Before I discovered the fun of science, it was my dream to work for Lego. Also, when I my parents stopped buying them for me, I realized how expensive they were and gave up. The same with nerf guns.
Aha;p
Ok on a more serious note then. Honestly, I think your OP is kinda a joke;p. Being totally serious. How can you not understand what team development is about ?, or the importance of it?.
High quality projects in Starcraft 2 take a great deal of time, and its nearly impossible to be an expert at data/terrain/triggers. So....we work together...get the job done faster....reap the benefits together..all from a high quality work which would otherwise not really be possible if done solo
@Vexal: Go
Sure a single person can think of a very creative design and then build. Build time would be proportional to how big the project is. But a team does this all either faster or higher quality and at a larger scale.
In terms of brainstorming of ideas and creative design
Now imagine a group of people that have similar interests and each have their own ideas about how it would be like. Then everyone brainstorms and puts together all the best ideas that work well together. Now you have an even larger idea, that takes ideas from multiple creative individuals. Because maybe someone thought of something that you really liked and works well with yours, but you had not initially considered. Now your map isn't only restricted to your own creativeness, which is ultimately limited by your own experiences and personality.
Facts on division of workload and work efficiency
It's a good question about how team-based development actually works.
I guess there's roughly 3 types of team-based work I can identify.
The first is if you know the exact requirements of your map, but are unable to fulful one or more requirements yourself. For instance, I am very poor at terrain, so I would likely generate a draft of my requirements and commission someone else to do it. Once I receive my resource and am satisfied with it, I would proceed to finish the project and credit the terrainer.
I would say this form of team-work is the most likely to be successful and I've had many good partnerships following this model.
The second type is where you have a large project and many persons working on different aspects and someone is delegated as the leader to oversee its completion. These I would say are the most common type of team-based efforts and they fail more often than they succeed in my experiences (not trying to discourage you. These have the largest potential to develop truly great works). In these types of projects, you have to be ready to sacrifice your original vision for the work, as the other developers will have their own ways of developing the map (they often surpass your goals). These projects rely on having a good leader, clear goals and a dedicated team working on disjoint parts (it's really bad if two or more developers are working on resources that overlap as this requires a lot of communication to resolve conflicts).
The third type is where there is a lack of a clear leader and all members have equal input. I have rarely seen these types of project bear any fruit. There just becomes too much internal conflict and a lack of flow. Theoretically they work, but are too unpredictable in practice.
Because you get new ideas with more people, new approaches and you LEARN. That and you need a lot of good people, to produce something of high quality. You alone might be able to do it, but a team of people does it faster, more interesting and a lot higher in quality, because they're all highly specialized individuals and have a lot more views on one topic than you alone. They find flaws, you didn't see yourself. They give input, you would never have come up with on your own. That is, why people like to work in a team - because it helps them grow.
There is also the Freelancer approach, where you just hire people to do a part of your work and give them credit. But those don't add anything to the rest of your work, they're just working on what they do best, that doesn't mean it's the best they could do, if they got infos from other people.
Oh and because it increases the chance that you have something that isn't just for your tiny 2% part of the community. What the hell do you think DotA was such a success? A few million players forged it over years into what it is now. That's some teamwork, right there ;)
I was speaking from my own perspective. I don't think I could ever let go of the control.
But I still stand by my original assertion: If you call yourself"designer" and assign all the data, terrain, and triggers to others, you're not really doing anything. It's different than making a game from scratch, where you program the engine, make the models, and come up with game ideas. In full games, you create the idea, and develop models and code that suits the needs of the game.
In the editor (and Legos), you're given the models and the code, and you see what you can build with them.
What examples are there of full-scale projects on Battle.net? I haven't seen any that appear to be.or if they are, they weren't very good.
I ask this because the only way to play a map is on Battle.net, and if it's not successful there, it's basically dead.
what's to know you work as a team to get the job done. I mean surely no one would waste their time working on a project if the other parties do not do their part. I certainly wouldn't try to get people together to create my ideas... that wouldn't be very fun at all and pointless. With the team dynamic each party compensates for the others weakness in the development process. You shoot the breeze conceptualize and brainstorm and work on a consensous on how the project is going to be done. Plus 90% of us do this as a hobby and have lives and jobs, so generally working as a team will speed up the process.
Either you do the whole map solo or you work with a team? Your choice...
No, not really. You're the guy with the vision. It's the same in the Industry. A Game Designer won't run around, doing the job of a Programmer, or the job of an Artist. He is the guy that comes up with the vision, the gameplay, the grand plan. He gotta write that down, for everyone to understand what they need to do, he has to keep it updated, to advance on it and communicate it to the rest of the team. It's not any different when you work in a team on SC2. One does the Triggering, one does the Terrain, one manages the Data, one makes you shiny new Assets. The Game Designer is going around, coming up with new ideas to implement, tests around with balance (based upon what the Data guy did, just switching out numbers) and takes in the feedback from others, putting it into the project where it fits, or tells them, that it won't fit very well into the grand plan of awesome. He'll also communicate with the Artists on what they might need to change on a model, by the believe of others on the team (because there is a new tech coming up for a feature he made or something). Most of the Gameplay, UI, the way something should work & feel, and the overall vision comes from a Game Designer. Though there is also a lot of dry, boring theory behind any aspect of game development, the very basics or the core, whatever you wanna call it. You build around that, with your vision.
Example: Game Designer comes up with the idea of mod-able weapons. Like add a Silencer, that is also visible on the model. That means he needs to tell the Data guy, that he'll need to make model-attachments, that work for it later on, when they implement it. He'll need to communicate with the Triggerer on how he wants the interface to look & behave, where to place it inside the UI for this option and also tells him to make sure that the shooting he programmed for some TPS-Style-Game doesn't look weird with the new feature. He'll than tell the Artist what they've planned, so the Artist knows he need to cut up his weapons and add new attachment points to them, to make a kind of construction system. He'll not tell them how they should do this. They know best. He'll tell them what they plan, how they want to do it, and those guys will act according to it. When it's inside, he'll explain to them a new feature he's come up with for the game. That's how it works. Sure, there will be a meeting and gathering ideas, but the Game Designer will focus those ideas into a new way for the player to enjoy it.
Wrong. You can add new models. So it's like you still only have the code, but hell, you can make your own legos that suit your needs! That's something that a team can solve, if you have a few artists ;) Sure, you can do that alone, but as soon as you have to model and animate a character, you're in for a lot of pain. That needs someone who knows that stuff and had quite some practice.
There are quite a few, but since they're rather large-scale, they're not out yet. I played a few of them, they're promising. Most are just teams of 2 or 3 people, but it's a lot better than most of the solo-content I've seen on BNet 2.0 up to date. If you go back 1 BNet Version, you'll find a lot of those. WC3 had quite a bunch of very good and popular maps that were made by a team.
I hope this all helped you to get a better view on it. Might not fit you, but than again, there are a lot of people that don't fit the Industry either.
This is naturally not completely true for SC2, where most people know something of every aspect, but there are quite a few high-specialized people among us, that do only enjoy some part of what they do. While they have ideas, they lack the will to learn other parts. So they team up, one keeps track of all their ideas, focuses all those ideas, filters them and everyone gets a great map out of it. But usually the focus guy also does some kind of other work on the team.
What you're struggling with is the definition of a 'leader' in a project. Sure, if all you do is 'design' and come up with ideas, you're 'not doing much yourself', but this isn't necissarily bad. Problems only start to show when you do virtually nothing on a project and still want to keep full control. I could have an overarching idea for a story and get more people in to help me flesh out the idea. The line 'credit where credit is due' is golden here, as one shouldn't want to overcredit himself.
In a nutshell, what I think I'm trying to say is - there's nothing wrong with just 'directing' any type of project. If however, you assume just this role and feel the need to act like you've created the whole map - aka you feel like you didn't do enough and try to mask this by lying about it to yourself and others by telling everyone you did everything - then you're in the wrong. But that goes just as well for the terrainer, data editor and triggerer in your party as for a director. Directors just tend to be more prone to falling for this mistake because of our cultural western opinion that someone who directs is marked as a "boss" and is somehow of more value than his "underlings".
Or something like that.
Edit: And if that doesn't make sense - team-based development is simply quicker, period. It took me approximately 50 hours of work to create a 30 minute single-player map from scratch, doing all the work from story to terrain to triggers myself. I spent about 30 hours on terrain, 15 on triggers, and 5 on story. If I had simply had a storywriter/triggerer with me on this specific project, I would've saved myself 2/5th of the time and not lose out on any quality.
In fact, you'd have probably gained some quality.
The idea of teamwork isn't that some guy is the designer and then everyone else builds the map. Some people seem to think this but I don't think they ever successfully get a team together(you have to do some of the work yourself or no one's going to work with you, it's not as if they get paid to implement your idea). With that in mind, the points everyone else has made really justify teamwork on maps.
I give up trying to understand. I can logically piece together your points and reasonings, but I don't comprehend them.
TBQH for mapping I've found it to be more of a burden working on a team.
A) You have to find people who can produce a product as good as you want them to. Everyone can make triggers and rename units to cute shit then make a building that spams their unit 1000 times. Cool, but when I produce a map I want it to not look like shit.
B) You have to wait and rely on your teammates to get things done. Everyone works at their own pace, seeing as mapping is FREE, its not a job (at least not to most people), for me, I like to get a lot done very quickly but with as much detail as I can. I can't stand waiting 2 weeks to get 1 unit back. It drives me nuts not being able to work on my project any time I like.
C) You have to rely on teammates to not dip out halfway through the project. GOOD LUCK WITH THIS.
--All in all even before sc2 mapping I did some indie projects and I've been in my fair share of teams. Here's the verdict on INDIE, FREE GAME DESIGN PROJECTS and teams: [b]They don't effin work[/b]. Go ahead and announce yet another "greatest map to ever grace the face of the world" post in the Project Workplace, go into the Team Recruitment forum and post your 20 job openings, then please come back in 2 weeks when the project goes Duke Nukem: Forever so I can tell you I told you so. Then join the other 100,000 people who did the same thing as you.
So as a result of teams not working for me, I've ended up forcing myself to do everything. The art, UI, terrain, triggering, data, scripting, design, balance, testing, maintenance, updating, more balancing, bug fixing all 100% myself. As a result of this necessity to do everything myself, I've sort of gained some ability to do everything myself, to some extent, but enough to put out production level quality maps.
In short, stop being lazy, learn a little bit of everything. I'm not even saying become the next da vinci, or understand how to write a graphics engine from the ground up. Learn how to use these tools to some extent and [b]become a better mapper[/b].
Rant off.
@Mephs: Go
Mephs that is not entirely true. Almost every great indie or open source application we have has been developed by a team. It's true that people dip out half-way through, but that's just the fluid nature of design. Even in industry, not everyone is bound to a contract to stay until the project is finished. You just need to look for replacements to pick up the slack.
You have to be a smart leader and advance the project in small steps. Many times there's no structure in a team effort and people get confused or overwhelmed by the amount of work they've been assignment. Give developers small concrete jobs with soft deadlines and you will quickly see if they are competent. If they aren't look for a replacement. As a leader you have to judge the skills of your teammates and tell them exactly what you want done and by when.
For instance I find it helps to tell someone to complete 2-3 heroes with certain spells by the end of the week, rather than tell them to finish 20 heroes. I also finds it's helpful to tell someone to complete a rough draft quickly first and then give a critique so the next more refined draft fits in better with the design. It's a continuous cycle of moving in small steps, giving feedback and moving on. This is what the leaders job is: to continuously keep the pace going in little increments. What I see a lot of is "here's my vision, here is your general role, get it done!"... a long time goes by and we get "dude, this sucks! This is not at all what I wanted!".
Learning to work with a team is one of the most important skills in this industry that you can learn. You have nothing to lose trying, so I would recommend everyone to start getting used to it, because you won't learn this anywhere else (ie. you'd get fired in the real world, so try it out here).
What do you do if a member's work is not what you expected? Do you tell them to do it better? Isn't that awkward?
You gather stuff and add it to stuff pile, one day you find like minded stuff gatherer and start gather stuff together to same pile, now your stuff pile rises faster.
@Vexal: Go Tell them to grow some balls, man up and do their fucking job or leave the team. Also, you don't put them on the team without some proof of their work (assigned by yourself, if you've doubt) before you even allow them to be in it.
There naturally can be some problems, be it job, family, moving cities, etc. - you gotta work around those. Check your mates a bit.