Ask for opinion about team working on VN ?

[ziaziany]

I don't know if I put this topic on the right place or not , you can move it to the proper place.
sorry about my English isn't very well.

A lot of things bothering me lately,

I have a question about how you all working in Visual Novel , especially when you have creator team.

I want to know how you manage work to each team member, things like that.
I really want to know details how you work , as much as you can tell me.
I'm lack of experience so I want to get better while working , but I don't know how people really work on developing VN , if you can't tell your business secret it's ok , I really want to hear your opinion as much as you can tell.

When working on VN you should have

- writer
- artist
- programmer
- composer
- proofreader

when you make a game , you can work separately but finally you have to put things together
I wonder how you do this.
For example , artist works for sprites and writers works in story , when you have to put this together settings the scene who will work for this part , the story belongs to writer , so the writer may be the one who do setting the scene , but artist is the one who draw all sprites , so artist may have opinion or imagination of the scenes as well.
I really have no idea about this. ;____;
or when working on interface , it's good to have artist done good pics for it , and even better if you have the programmer work on coding , then who really should do this.

I thinks people have different ways to handle this , but I really want to hears from you all.

And somethings about art , should artist draw as he/she want , or should draw as writer want , or should tune the writer's opinion and artist's opinion up together?

I really have lots of things to ask. sorry if I asking too much , and thank you very much in advance for all you reply.

[Mirage]

Well, I'm the writer, artist, and programmer of my team. I usually decide everything on my own, but I do ask my teammate's opinions and see if I can incorporate it to the final product. Occasionally, we have conflicts in what we want. If that happens I do try my best to improvise the game until both of us are satisfied.

[SilverxBlue]

When it comes to art I think both your and the writer's opinions should be put on the matter... Like the writer could tell you the concept of the whole story or describe the characters in full detail then you, the artist, could let your imagination unfold and make something... Then you could actually show your finished work to the writer then wait for her to reply and comment on your work. That's actually how me and my artist work.

In my team, I am the writer and the programmer although our project is put on hold since the sprite artist is currently on a hiatus so... I can't work on anything at the moment... -_-

[papillon]

For starters, have a peek at this discussion about "project management" when it comes to indie games.
http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=2256

A lot of newbies starting out think their project won't be taken seriously unless they have a big team with someone responsible for each individual role. In reality, that's one of the fastest ways to doom your newbie project. Managing a group is hard. Volunteers are unreliable. Having even one person working for you for free brings up a huge chance of that person becoming too busy to work for long stretches of time, quitting, or disappearing off the face of the internet. (Not that this never happens with paid contractors, but it's vastly more common with freebies.)

Having multiple people working for free makes it more like 100% chance of the whole thing falling apart around you, unless you know them all really well and are willing to spend a lot of your time and energy keeping them motivated and on track, as well as dealing with all their competing desires. Especially since if you don't give all your volunteers creative input, they're, again, almost certain to get bored with the project and drop it. But trying to give everyone creative input means a huge mishmash of competing desires. Again - management is hard.

[Deji]

For characters, I often ask for descriptions AND references/rough sketches from the writer. Sometimes I work only with descriptions and I show them whatever I come up with. They're usually happy with whatever I do, unless I express some concern and ask them for indications.
For scenes, I'm given the script and it's usually up to me to figure out the best way to put it into an image; at best I'm told what should be seen on the scene and from where. Sometimes I'm not satisfied or I'm lost and I ask for feedback on that, but I try not to ask for specific directions much, because then the writer may end up treating you like a human printer and nag you until you print exactly what's in their head (which is hard because the connection is rather faulty, without being able to read minds and all).

About the Interface, I hate doing that, but I'm often asked to xD I ask for directions and ideas from the programmer, and I usually make a mock up screenshot and they program something with placeholders to see of things work. Then it's just a matter of finishing the visual part and the programmer can replace the placeholders.

Team-wise, I've volunteered as colorist and general assistant artist with a team for a few years. We work with SVN so everybody has everything, and we have weekly group IM meetings to assign tasks and such. We have a project manager that makes sure everybody knows what they are supposed to be doing (and also listen to our complains and rants and whatever xD).
Other than that, I'm usually part of smaller teams or just get commissioned on the side, and I'm given bits of the script and stuff to work with; I work emailing stuff back and forth in those cases.

[kinougames]

Serious answer for someone who wants to run a team:

First, even if you pay them, running a team is hard. Most people who would have the free time and art skill to sit around and do a project will expect a full time salary from you, and assuming you aren't giving them that, be heavily prepared for drama of all kinds. Paid people will also drop projects on a dime for no reason, though they'll usually at least try to make it up to you somehow. Oftentimes, it's not enough for the headache.

As far as timing:

If you're the designer and writer of the project, the first thing that should be done is getting your ducks in a row. The design and ideas for the layout and game over all should be done before even trying to get an artist, or the artist will be severely delayed waiting on you. The programmer should also start pretty much right after your design is done because testing should take as much time as you can give to it.

For me, I usually figure out how much my artist can do in a week and set up X pictures per week. For my programmer, since I don't know programming that well, I kind of let them self-manage but keep strict tabs on what they say they can do and when they get it in by. The music is usually one of the last things you really need to plug in, so I usually give my musician an "all music must be done by X date" sort of deal. Proofreader should work at the same time as the programmer and main artist.

Serious answer for someone who plans to run a team of volunteers:

Everything papillon said. With every free volunteer, take their ratio to paid people plus yourself and assume that as X% chance that your project will fail. The saying "if you want something done, you have to do it yourself" applies really heavily here.

That said, volunteer work is not an impossible thing, it's just extremely hard. For one, most people are okay to volunteer if it's just for a few small things. People are even more happy to volunteer if they see a bunch of amazing stuff already up. There are certainly ways to get yourselves the better volunteers, but even they can and will flippantly drop.

[ziaziany]

Thank you very much for all you reply,
I'm really appreciate it.
Each opinion really help me a lot.
So thank you very much. >_____<,, ,really.

And if anyone have more things to say here, I still really want to hear.

[pondrthis]

Your skill as a leader is critical to holding volunteers.

If you make yourself endearing, your volunteers will put up with more of the harassment inherent in being told to get stuff done. If you're female, use the tsundere effect to your advantage: use a cold, commanding tone when nagging someone, but be personable, sweet, and flirtatious when everything is going well. It's positive and negative reinforcement at once. This works with a good amount of people (especially the opposite sex), but not everyone. Some people can't handle conflict at all. For these people, a change in plan is in order.

When I led a project with same-sex members (after our female project lead which I based the above comments on disappeared into oblivion), I just did my best to make everyone feel like it was an inverted-pyramid structure rather than pyramid structure. If you're not familiar with the inverted-pyramid, it basically just means that the leaders work for their underlings rather than the other way around. Give your members artistic/design liberties and fuel their egos. Use publicity outlets not just to praise your game, but to praise your team members. Talk them up to the public. Be humble, and put forth your ideas as questions rather than suggestions. In actuality, they probably do have better ideas than you if you let them explain... especially when concerning their areas of expertise.

Lastly, about "who should put it all together"... that position is usually called "director" in complex artistic work. Not "director" as in leader, but as in like a movie director. Yeah, this is often a leader, but that's only because the position of director requires taste and vision in more than a single medium, so they have more of an overarching sight which can be for the best even if it's not perfect in one department (visuals, music, writing, etc). The director should be capable of scripting the code him/herself (which isn't hard, and can be helped along by a programmer via the creation of macros) and be intimately familiar with the project, thus he/she should be selected from among your current staff.

Early on, the director should take the lead by doing things like setting up SVN spaces/IRC channels or otherwise allowing for resource and idea sharing. Later, when some writing and programming has been done, the director should be the one to determine what kind of resources the project will need from art and sound teams. For example... "This character should definitely have a sprite, and so far he has expressed the following emotions... oh, but we should add a transient sprite for when he's thinking up a quick lie on the spot" or "The new menu needs hover-over bleeps, it's too dull when silent. Right, and script file 020 would benefit in my opinion from a loopable walking-on-gravel sound effect." Don't neglect to mediate between artists and programmers... this is very important especially when designing the user interface.

Lastly and most strenuously, the director will need to make micromanaged decisions about every last transition (wipe, crossfade, etc), character expression, text delay (if you're trying to make more dynamic text ala Higurashi), font change, etc in the game. And script it. The scripting isn't an issue after the first scene, though.

It's for this reason that most people recommend having at max two or three team members... one can be the writer/director/programmer, one can be a dedicated artist (this is the hardest role), and one can be music/sounds. This way, the direction flows smoothly instead of being bogged down by communicating with various members of the team. Furthermore, it allows people to take pride in their efforts, which is ultimately the best way to keep volunteer workers working.