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Impatience is up there because everybody wanted to do everything all at once so to speak. Some people wanted to just dive right in without taking the time to plan it out and flash it out a bit. Level designers wanted to build levels, programmers wanted to program, modellers wanted to model, etc... (I think you get the idea), but nobody wanted to sit down and take the time to build the full premise/storyline, decide on the weapons/powerups/items, decide on anything really or really set a basic set of guidelines. Because of this, people got too impatient to start building the world and lost interest, leaving the project.



So then this goes back to what ARussell said - it might have worked better if you started with a design. That way all these eager beavers could have jumped in ... but into something defined.

I think a staged plan might have helped then. Start first with a design team and only after the design is finished, start to add on other team members.

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Now, something that was not a failing, but did hurt us was the fact that a few people had to back out because they simply could not find the time to work on this and maintain their lives as well. Now, this did hurt us, but was, in its own way a good thing because these people realised that they couldn't do it, and let us know so that we wouldn't think we could expect any input from them.



I don't know how to do this .. but I hear you.

There must be committment to the project. Perhaps if we set some expectations upfront on how many hours we expect people to dedicate - say 20 hours a week or whatever - then they know up front.

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Now, communication was also a big factor. At this time, all we used was icq/msn/aim and the forum, when it probably would have been smarter to go ahead and use a solution such as Skype or netmeeting. We also were unable to effectively have a meeting of any real kind because we could not set a specific time when all of us could be online (Different timezones). Now, we did try our best... but our lines of communication were very spotty and unreliable at best.




This will always be a problem. I would suggest that you just choose the best time and make it a regular meetimg time. Example Friday 9:00 am EST. If it is a regular meeting - people who can't actually make it, can still email their comments to the meeting moderator before the meeting and check the minutes of the meeting afterwards to see what the discussion was.


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Now, of the things that went right, the first thing was that we tried to keep it as simple as possible, but with our own little innovations to make it "ours". We went with a basic shoot-em-up type sidescroller that would not be too hard for the level designers to build, the artists to texture, or the programmers to program. We didn't have to worry about the game concept becoming too complex for us because of the limitations of the sidescroller genre.

We Also made sure to have a means of making the files accessable to everyone on the team via ftp, which is always good because it allows for anyone to work on/with any aspect that they needed to do their Job (In my situation it was getting the main scripts from the programmers to design the level around the limitations of the camera, things like that.). This was also nice because we could work something out, then post a demo for all to download and evaluate and effectively input on.




So these things sound like keepers.