{"id":648,"date":"2009-08-13T18:33:53","date_gmt":"2009-08-13T17:33:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=648"},"modified":"2009-08-13T18:33:53","modified_gmt":"2009-08-13T17:33:53","slug":"volunteer-project-a-simple-rpg-for-iphone-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2009\/08\/13\/volunteer-project-a-simple-rpg-for-iphone-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Volunteer project: a simple RPG for iPhone &#8211; UPDATE"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A lot of people asked me to blog as <a href=\"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/index.php\/2009\/06\/28\/want-to-help-write-a-simple-rpg-for-iphone\/\">this volunteer project<\/a> progressed, share some insight into how things were going. I&#8217;ve not had enough time until just now, and it&#8217;s a mix: Some good news, some bad news.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nGood news:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s a friendly group of people, and we seem to get along well\n<li>Alex Crouzen picked up Objective C and OpenGL, and Shi Daniels threw together some wall and floor textures. That gave us a very basic &#8220;here&#8217;s some walls and floors, running in OpenGL, on an iPhone&#8221;, but no walking, no movable camera, no interaction, etc. It actually worked! :)\n<li>Brian Green and Wendy Despain (both games industry pros) joined up and did loads of great game-design and plot work. As a group, lead by them, we generated lots of pages of good design &#8211; although (my fault) the remit probably wasn&#8217;t as well constrained as it should have been\n<li>Lots of good ideas and commentary from the other people in the group\n<li>We setup a private wiki, a 24-hour skype group-chat, and a private google group, and had some pretty good communications going between the active contributors\n<li>I picked up Alex&#8217;s code and rewrote the underlying OpenGL stuff (I&#8217;m very rusty; haven&#8217;t done any OpenGL for > 4 years), but got it integrated with iPhone GUI stuff, so you could use drag gestures to move around the map in 3D, and added some programmatic map generation\n<\/ul>\n<p>Bad news:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A lot of people (I think more than half, in the end!) had to step back &#8211; or even drop out &#8211; due to time constraints \/ external commitments (work, life, etc). Ultimately, through no fault of any individual &#8230; our team was somewhat gutted before we&#8217;d got beyond the first milestone :(\n<li>&#8230;as a result of that, and some mistakes I personally made on the project leadership side, we stagnated, and the project has ground to a halt with too few active coders\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s not clear where we&#8217;ll go from here, but I&#8217;m now looking at whether I can take some of the lessons learnt from this and start it all over again, do it better, more simply, and more clearly directed, as a commercial project.<\/p>\n<p>One of the biggest mistakes I made personally is that I tried to do this as a volunteer project &#8211; but simultaneously tried to do it unmanaged, Scrum-style. You could fairly argue that this was foolish, given that I&#8217;ve run a lot of volunteer projects before, and they have *always* needed huge amounts of vicious, aggressive project management. Not because people are lazy or dumb, but merely because volunteer projects are always the lowest item on people&#8217;s list of priorities (way below &#8220;day job&#8221; and &#8220;family&#8221;, for instance &#8211; which is fair enough).<\/p>\n<p>But I&#8217;ve got so used to working this way now (team-based, distributed responsibility, etc) that I ignored my  previous experience and actively avoided aggressive PM.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m putting together a detailed project plan now &#8211; as if I were doing this commercially. i.e. working it out based on me personally paying other people to work on it &#8211; it may not be viable \/ possible, but if nothing else it&#8217;s a good practice to plan to that level of diligence. It&#8217;s just a theoretical exercise right now, although I&#8217;m sharing it with some industry colleagues and some professional coders and artists, seeing if it&#8217;s convincing enough for any of them to want to try it.<\/p>\n<p>One of the interesting things I&#8217;ve noticed already while writing it up that way is that &#8211; if I have to pay people &#8211; I&#8217;d start with a much smaller team, almost entirely coders, and only bring on other people once we have (*if* we have&#8230;) a substantial working prototype. Which is the opposite of how I was taught to make games originally. But it&#8217;s exactly how I was taught to do commercial startups. This could be interesting&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>PS: here&#8217;s a screenshot of one of the first renders:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/t-machine.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/picture-11.png\" alt=\"picture-11\" title=\"picture-11\" width=\"414\" height=\"770\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-626\" style=\"float: left\" srcset=\"https:\/\/t-machine.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/picture-11.png 414w, https:\/\/t-machine.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/picture-11-80x150.png 80w, https:\/\/t-machine.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/picture-11-161x300.png 161w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 414px) 100vw, 414px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lot of people asked me to blog as this volunteer project progressed, share some insight into how things were going. I&#8217;ve not had enough time until just now, and it&#8217;s a mix: Some good news, some bad news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,50,9,51,46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}