Middle of Week 18

You know those Facebook reminders when your friend has a birthday?  I must be getting old.  One of my friends wished me a happy birthday and I thought, "Huh, I'm pretty sure my birthday is next week," but he was right.  That's the first time I forgot my own birthday.  Anyway...

So now that we have some concepts ready to model, I'm finding it more and more difficult to communicate with each person on the team to make sure they're where they need to be.  We have 20 people on the team, and we're about to massively increase that as we add a 3D team: modelers, texture artists, and animators.  Imagine if the team doubled in size.  Trying to make sure 40 people have what they need, have clear tasks catered to their strengths, and are collaborating to make a cohesive effort rather than a jumbled mess--it's a lot harder than you would think.  It's not like I had an idea for a game and got together a bunch of people and said, "Behold the plan I have constructed!  Now carry forth!" and it just comes together.  Yeah, not even close.  And really, I wouldn't want it to work that way anyways.  I like that everyone adds their little twist and that we work as a team.  Still, having all decisions run through me is going to slow the project down a lot.

There's one programmer on the team that long passed me up in learning the engine code wise.  I'm always asking him which tasks I think who can handle, how long things should take, his advice on how we should tackle certain systems.  It just made more sense for him to coordinate all that and keep me in the loop.

Our two technical artists have been doing really well.  One of them is more focused on environments and the other on characters, so I split them up and made them in charge of ensuring a smooth pipeline for their area.  Technical artists are a good fit for this since they understand a little bit of every part of the pipeline.

I think this will work out well.  I know one of our technical artists wants to open up his own animation studio, so this is a good opportunity for him to organize an art team.