Hello All,

Firstly, Light_Mystic - Your team does awesome work, i've checked out your site, and i'm sure that when someone with no skills and plenty of money comes along, you will get some business, but please stop plugging your services in every Jobs offered thread. Some advice though, have your teams take a little time, explore some other tools, and when they're ready, start advertising your services on a more widespread level across the web. I also advise advertising a wider variety of services than just game related, that may bring plenty more business aswell.
Now, to business...looks like i'm going to be the producer of this game. I'd like to say that as a legitamate producer/project manager for the military, you guys are right, it often is difficult to keep your teams motivated, especially when you yourself need motivation, the best way to keep yourself and your team motivated is to keep things organized on all levels so that you can see when progress is being made, rather than looking at a great big jumblef**k. If you do well with this organization you can show your team that progress is being made and give them good words and encouragement, there's a saying that a happy worker is a good worker, if you do your job right as a leader, putting a good feeling into someone will do bigger wonders than just throwing money at them. This is particularly true in the case of quality of work, you can throw all the money you have at someone, but if they don't feel good for whatever reason, they're not going to put much care into the project at hand. Another way to keep people happy and motivated when you're on a budget is give small incentives, such as gift certificates or something free, it doesnt have to be much, just a way of saying thanks for the work you're putting in, do it randomly so your workers wonder when or who will get them, and take care not to FAVOR ANY WORKERS OVER OTHERS, this will cause the ones that never get rewarded to feel neglected and want to quit or put out bad work. Maybe these are things that noone has tried here before, but coming from someone trained and experienced in these matters, believe me these techniques work better than you may think. Ok, At this point, some of you are probably wondering who the h*ll i am. My name is James, i'm 24 and i'm in the united states military, i work as a Communications and Computer Systems Project Planner, which basically means i manage defense communications projects. I've managed the completion of two projects totalling over 1 Million USD and am currently managing 3 other projects, USD amounts undisclosed. I have a 100% success rate on all managed projects thus far. As far as game development, i've been studying all aspects of game development since the age of 16, i'm most proficient with photoshop however i am skilled in level editing aswell(and no, 3DGS is NOT the only engine i've worked with). I once was strictly a programmer, however it's been several years since i've writting anything worthwhile, but i still consider myself competant, at least. I've been involved with two teams, I led one of them, Creatures of Habit, started by someone who gave me a chance when i was a newbie and inspired me to get where i am now, he turned leadership over when he realized he didnt have what it took to lead, we produced some impressive content, however he didnt realize his impact on the team and when he left due to devotion to his college studies, the team fell apart slowly. Now, I'd like to tell you all why i've decided to join this project. Firstly, i read his post and determined that his words seemed intelligent enough that he is probably not some retarted 12 year old with a warez version of 3DGS. So then i did some research on him and found that he has been registed here since 2002, which tells me he's probably been laying low on the forums for some time, at this point i decided to believe his story about working on ppModeller. So then i e-mailed him and recieved some information about the game, i read through it and decided that even though i hate RPG games, this one seems to be very good and unique in many aspects. One thing that i base my opinion of a story on is whether it is closed to new ideas or if it's open to have new ideas plugged into it, and i see alot of room for expansion that can make this story even more unique. After considering all of these things, i can to the conclusion that this may be the project for me, so i joined. I remember back when it used to be relativly easy to find a team, now it seems people skim through threads and when they don't see $$$, they move on to the next one without even finding out what it's all about, it's a shame. That's all i have to say, i'm open for flaming so go ahead and get it over with.




James