Fastlane, I realize you are not trying to flame this project, i have a tendency to seem cold or serious all the time, which can be taken different ways by different people, it's just my way. I wanted to make some comments regarding your last post.


1. True, no comments

2. There arent 27 people, at least not on my list, we have 9 i believe.

3. You'd be surprised how mistaken you are on this point, military project managment can be more brutal than civilian project management, exception is that we don't directly control the budget of a project, but we can affect it. In my office there is constant bickering just between the project managers. It get's really nasty when you start trying to work with the other workcenters in our unit. Let me give you an example, I'm an E3(Airman First Class), one of the lowest ranks in the military, sometimes i'm required to task other people or units to do things for my projects, these people might be E7's(master sergeant), O3's(Captain) even all the way up to O6(Colonel). Usually these people don't like that fact that they are being told what to do by someone extremely junior in grade to them, therefore they rebel and do everything they can to not do what i ask even though they know that they are supposed to because of the aurthority granted by my title. The job requires you to learn how to sweet talk people into thinking they want to do what you want them to, as opposed to telling them they have to do it.

4. I ordered the book, thanks for the recommendation.

5. In my job i'm VERY familiar with this approach as this is how we work ALL of our projects, however i'm not really sure how to apply it to game dev as this is my first time playing the producer role for a game, but i'm sure the book will help explain this, so thanks again for the recommendation.

Anyway, at this point in time i cannot see telling the team "sorry guys, go find another project, this one's not ready for development", nor can i see telling them "sit tight for a couple of months until we get this design document completed". What i can see is getting all team members involved and working as a team to complete the design document and all necessary parts of it. This may require quite a number of online conferences, but it would allow us to weed out those who arent even willing to put forth the effort to talk in a chatroom. Plus it would allow everyone to gain a thororgh understanding of the project prior to developing it. Most importantly, they wouldnt feel like they are working on someone else game because they're putting thier own ideas into it aswell, this is actually the way many large companies do thier design, not necessarilly everyone working the design, but everyone inputs into the brainstorming. Well, i thought i had more to say, but i seem to be drawing a blank now, if i think of anything else i'll let you know.



James

In the meantime, I've found on past management projects that if everyone truely is losing interest during this critical point, have the modelers start working on some generic stuff (ie cats, dogs, cows, birds, etc.) Have the scripters start throwing together some mini-scripts (dynamic flames/lights, little particle effects, etc)

Stuff that can be done at any time, yet is standalone enough to be able to plug in to the overall code. Keeps people feeling like they really ARE moving forward.

Well, currently i've got my modellers working on concepts, which it is pretty convenient that both modellers draw thier own concepts. My programmers are working on generic scripts such as blood, particles, etc. Level designers are working concepts for the environments, and the music guy is creating samples to determine what types of music we think will fit with the project, aswell as misc sound effects. Really that's not the issue, the problem really is that without a solid design for the overall project, it will never get farther than creating small misc stuff like this, the project will collapse and the team will be looking for a new, more organized project to join. This is what Fastlane is warning us of, unfortunatly i'm not sure how easy it will be to convince our leader that what we have for a design document is insufficient, if this doesnt go well, we may well be looking for a new project, hopefully not.


James