Teamwork... does it work?

[AWSalmon]

In addition to what Golden Fleece said, there are a lot of things you can do to create a strong development team, which will lead to a good game. I'm new at this development business, and going in more or less blind to these concepts set our project itself back months.

Choosing your teammates is important. Don't just judge them by the quality of their work. You need to know how easily they can self-motivate, how well they can work in a group, their organizational skills, their professionalism or tendency to go off-topic, their people skills and ability to handle criticism are all vital aspects of team building. You would be surprised at how severely things can be derailed by one person who puts trying to become friends with everyone above getting things done. Everyone should keep in mind the reason why they've joined together on a project.

Organize your project. A disorganized or loosely organized project might give everyone the freedom to do what they want to help project development, but it can quickly lead to disorder and a loss of motivation. Everyone can be throwing around their own ideas for how this or that should be done, rewriting this or going over that part of the story again, and eventually people will just run out of steam because no real progress is being made. This leaves you deciding everything with zero input from others, which will even further demotivate people.

Don't be afraid of revisions, especially if you're new to the development process. It's hard to come up with a good foundation and structure for a visual novel if you've never done it before. This means your first attempts might be shoddy. So might your second, or third or fourth attempts. Don't avoid revising everything for the sake of getting things done sooner. Look at what you've done already and see how it could be done better. This doesn't just apply to the writing, but story structure, organization, members, absolutely everything can be analyzed for potential flaws to see what can be done to deliver the best game your team can create.