How can someone lead a game project who has no game development experience?

People who want to be successful in fulfilling a vision will do whatever it takes to accomplish that. Even if it means taking on leadership when they may feel they're not quite up to it. How else would you ever grow? Certainly not through inaction and doubt

 

A little zeal is nice, sometimes. But "willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve my dreams" TM is not enough to achieve your dreams. Or anything, really. Listening to advice... seeking mastery of fundamentals... and demonatrating long term commitment in spite of setbacks/failures is more important.

I'd start with that instead of seeking the highest position of power and faking it til you make it

A buddy of mine became a marine.

He told me that the ones who couldn't survive bootcamp were the ones with the whole "I'M GOING TO BE ALL I CAN BE!" mentality. Turned out to Not be so glamorous after all. Those guys, he said, were the ones he saw crying tears and saying "this isn't worth it" and "#@$& this".

Ego is rather fragile. ;_;

 

By "starting at the top" I was referring to thinking you know everything, refusing to take advice, and trying to be "a boss" rather than a facilitator and genuine leader. Willpower is just a start, it isn't enough on its own. If you don't know what you're doing then just trying harder doesn't help. Sometimes "whatever it takes" means stopping and learning.

 

I will give you an example from MY industry (since I am just starting out in the world of game dev).

I am a music producer. I am not anyone famous but I have worked with big names. I recommend you listen to antislash and hire a project manager with Game Dev experience. I know a lot of stuff when it comes to music production and how to run the entire project on my own. Can I do it? Most likely. Would it be better working with someone? Definitely. It will yield greater results usually.

So even in MY OWN industry I wouldn't do it alone, let alone in something I haven't got much experience in. Hire a project manager who knows what he is doing. It will end up being a lot more expensive trying to wing it on your own. There are secrets of the trade in every industry. Don't be surprised if you get screwed over out of nowhere.

I highly support people who want to work on their own, but gotta stay realistic.

 

I won't claim to have any authority on the subject but in my worthless opinion leading shouldn't be thought as a combination of skills but as a skill in it's own right. It doesn't require knowledge or experience of any other skill to be a good leader.
On the other hand I've got a problem with authority and I most certainly like to mess with people.

 

Go to blizzcon and ask Jay Wilson.

 

"Leading" is simply getting more than one person working well together to achieve a common goal. A really vibrant, good manager leading a game dev team wouldn't have to have coding experience but CRAP, they at least need to be a good gamer right? I could see zero experience being an issue in communicating problems.

Manager: "This model looks like crap, it needs more detail... to be more realistic."

Artist: "We could use a higher resolution texture and make a more detailed normal map."
Modeler: We could create a model with a lot more vertices.
Coder: "One solution uses more memory, the other pushes more load on the GPU and might be a problem if we have
more than 5 or 10 in the scene at once."

Manager: What with the what what? MAKE IT HAPPEN PEOPLE.

Next week...

Manager "Why is the game running so slow?"

 

This might be a particularly messy example, but I think that this kind of thing is just part of the problem with collaborative efforts in general.

I think that it's rare that a game will have a completely smooth, flawless execution (especially so if people aren't particularly experienced). There are going to be some very rough patches, there are going to be moments when things look grim and big mistakes are made. Sometimes fixing those mistakes will mean erasing a significant amount of work which is really hard to do psychologically.

In a loose collaboration, there's very little incentive for people to see a project through the inevitable rough spots.

What's worse is: as a guy has less and less experience, it's more likely that there are more and more rough spots, which makes team collapse more and more likely.

 

*slow clap*

 

The first thing my leadership training covered is how leadership is not the same as management.

This is intentionally ironic, right?

 

But a manager can be a leader, right? Is there any conflict with those roles?

I dunno, but... I suddenly want to know... do people think playing games makes you an expert on developing games?

 

Yes, they absolutely can be the same person. But they're different roles with different skills. They aren't the same tasks. Being good at one doesn't make you good at the other.

A few times a year someone says to me "my <family member/friend/significant other> is really into video games, so I suggested that they should learn how to make them".

It's probably not specific to games. I think it might be a common misconception that there's being interested in a craft and being interested in the output of that craft are the same thing. If it worked like that most of us could probably all become skilled TV producers, authors or musicians without much trouble.

That shouldn't put people off giving it a go, of course. You've no idea if you might enjoy the craft until you have a crack at it.

 

Or ask Turbine, Inc. They replace DDO's management frequently. Usually the Executive Producer every year.

 

I disagree. Diablo 3 at release was a superb game. As a product overall, Jay did a good job, he only did not understood the expectation from Diablo fans from a true RPG game. Or maybe is not even his fault entirely, and most possible was a team decision to make it like that. Of course, he pays for all broken dishes.

 

Sure, nothing says action like 2 minute cooldowns. Sure, nothing says role playing game like having character building gutted completely and every class being almost completely homogenized. Sure, nothing says Diablo like character power coming exclusively from gear. Sure, nothing says Ancient Horadrim like being killed by a butterfly monster. And lastly, aesthetically, sure, nothing says Diablo like World of Warcraft.

Might not be completely to blame for turning the game into WoW-Arcade edition, but someone needs to be blamed for 10 years of development leading to nothing but more proof that it's better to let your intellectual property die than surrender it to another developer :/

 

@Tomnnn I am not talking about RPG features he put/removed. I am talking strictly at final quality of the product. And this is top. Everything was super good, gfx, sounds, gameplay.

 

The auction house demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of the genre.

D3 was really well built in a lot of respects, but the auction house was so destructive to the experience, that calling d3 at launch superb is beyond a stretch.

 

Exactly what @ frosted said + I'm not so sure about the game play and atmosphere.. It was dumbed down into a click and powerful pants affair.

 

Decard Cain. Never Forget. F Jay Wilson.

 

I respect and pity the opinions of people who did not have diablo 2 in their lives The graphics are look like WoW pre-update, check out "Lost Ark Online" if you want to see what companies other than blizzard can achieve visually. I think that game is running on unreal actually. The sound is ok, voice acting decent but man what a waste. "I wish I could do that", "I can't do that"... cooldowns ruin everything lol. Gameplay is great for anyone who enjoys arcade games... and slot machines.

It's ok to like the game itself, despite how unimpressive it is, I just wish they'd stop calling it diablo.

I'm glad I'm not alone in my disappointments, haha. Doesn't the 2010 gameplay trailer just kill you? The game was heading in such an interesting direction!

Just look at that sad stare. Surely they could have come up with more uses for this character.

 

The same way all those famous people seem to become talented artistic and technical polyglots by way of starting in a popular movie. They aren't really more talented but are renting out their names for money or their own mediocre work at best is being lavished with praise. You need fame, money, or preferable both.