At 4/8/10 10:04 PM, Luis wrote:
My beef with 'game directors' is that they should know how to speak the same language as the people they direct.
This is very very true.
I tend to act as a director on most of my projects just out of nature. The programmer has control over how the game works after all, and as a result it's really hard for me to sit back and implement stuff someone else wants me to. I need to want to implement it in order to do it well. Hence, in the few times where I wasn't a director (and the great couple times where neither was a director), the ones that worked out well were partnerships with artists who knew how programmers worked. Dan Paladin, BoMToons, Edmund, and Greg have been really good in this regard.
If you really want to be a good director, you NEED to get to know the people you're directing and how they work and what their skill set is. No artists have the same skill set. BoMToons can do chunky cartoony "bomtoons-style" graphics and GUI stuff really well. You don't want to take an artist like that and tell them to draw realistic style zombies in a dark post apocalyptic world. I've made this mistake before in choosing artists and needless to say none of those games ever came out.
I don't think you can really "just form a team" and make an awesome game right off the bat. You need to get to know each other, and probably do a test game to see how people work, if there's personality conflicts, what people's strengths are, etc.
My most recent example is Tetraform. I knew Greg just a little (from internet+indiecade) before we started working on it, so I didn't quite know how he worked and he didn't quite know how I worked. We basically trashed the graphical style he came up with for the game because it would take too long to do it in the time we wanted to make the game in. Also learned in the middle of development that he's not really much of an animator (he's a graphic designer who now does games), and if you look at the final game there is almost no actual animation in it.
Also learned at gdc that apparently he "hates spaceships".
We're working on a new game now. We took a mockup he had and a prototype I had and merged them together. We're going with the graphical style he preferred this time (after discussing to find one that works with the game) (it's very "graphic-designery"). There's no game yet, but it's gonna be pretty awesome when it's done.
i forgot what i was talking about