Oh, the “idea guy.” Can’t live with him, but...

The Vision is a catch-all term for what the game “is.” It’s not so much as the gritty details as the image that pops into your head when the name of it is mentioned. It’s not so much the file structure as the feeling you associate with booting the game up. As intangibles, these are not something you can measure, and sometimes it’s difficult just to communicate them. This is the realm of the idea guy, all pie in the sky. Or is it? The inspiration that one person, or a few people, have is just a match, but without that match the fuse can’t be lit. It all starts with this fluffy, intangible Vision.

Assuming you already had a vision (otherwise you wouldn’t be interested in designing anything at all), then your immediate goal is to make that vision tangible. No small part of that is laying down the principles like previously mentioned, but those are for internal guidance. To get the ball rolling, to justify what you're doing, that message needs to get out, even though it's nothing but an image in your head right now. What you need is to flesh it out so that others can understand what you’re babbling about, and that means the catch, the lure, the draw. The idea guy must also be the first salesman of the project. Not many people like that job, but nobody else is gonna read your mind.

So, here goes nothing:




Maybe these appeals to emotion seem trite now, but I’ll bet they were roaring hot in 2004. Who’s to say they weren’t still roaring hot in 2012 when Star Citizen became a thing? Or No Man’s Sky? And that’s just this vague space exploration/rpg genre; imagine the nostalgia trips for titles like Doom, Duke Nukem, Blood and Rise of the Triad. In fact, it covers any and every single reboot made or hinted at in the past 30 some-odd years.

What people remember, what they feel, isn’t the game in all its buggy glory. It’s the sales pitch. It’s that potential. It’s the same thing a child experiences when they crawl into a cardboard box and pretend it’s a spaceship. That’s vision.

When Freeworlds: Tides of War made their pitch, what did they emphasize? First of all, the brand, which was obvious enough. But secondly the visuals. Followed by the galaxy map. Star Wars -> Remember how awesome it looked? –> Remember how big this galaxy was? They were proposing a post-Return of the Jedi game. The old “Expanded Universe,”or “EU,” since retconned by Disney. The EU was the bread and butter of Star Wars fanfiction for decades. The movies were often treated like some kind of untouchable holy writ, and so a lot of the creative energies flowed towards this post-movie timeframe. That spelled roleplay, and potential. The visuals were such a step up from vanilla FL that it screamed “brand new.” On top of all that, an existing Star Wars MMO, Galaxies, was on the fast track to being shut down, opening a slot in the market at least a few thousand people wide. It was a match made in heaven. That’s vision.

So let’s try getting a little more specific, shall we? Maybe I can impart a bit more of my little vision to you.




... Not enough?




Melodramatic, but you get my point. I hope, anyway. The emphasis is on the experience, that gut feeling, not on statistics or fancy screenshots alone. It’s an idea, greater than the sum of its parts. To convey it in text is extremely difficult. It's much easier to do so with audio-visuals, but beware: You're selling the idea, not the assets, so whatever you showcase should be the game, the process, the emotions, not simply particle effects and planets. Can't tell you how many mods I've seen fall flat on their faces because someone's pet hi-poly model got more attention in promotional materials than, y'know... the game.

Now... how the heck to build it. Pretty bold words, huh? How much of that is even doable with the engine’s limitations? It sounds like all kinds of workarounds would be needed. How un-fun could it end up? And how do you square it with a small playerbase? And how, and how, and how...

Well, I’ve still got a few more ideas kicking around, if you care to listen.

This is where the rubber hits the road. You know it, I know it... boy do I know it. Team composition is a function of the vision and the principles; people are reflected by the thoughts they have. If you have disjointed, incoherent ideas, well, I can bet decent money that I just described your team as well.

There’s no sense trying to avoid ruffled feathers here, because ruffled feathers are a feature of poor teamwork dynamics. I’m not going to drop any names, but if I end up describing something specific that you are aware of or already experienced, just keep in mind that I’ve seen these things play out over and over again all over the place. My professional education was in management and leadership, so I was primed to pay attention to this stuff.

The way I see it, you have two kinds of teams: The “true believers” and the “fly by night.”

“True believers” means a core dev team that bought into the Vision or were responsible for generating it in the first place. If they’re willing to step up to be devs, it’s a safe assumption that they’re in it for the long haul. Morale here is high, or at least you sure as heck hope it is, and the chief executive of the project is almost assuredly in this group even if the rest of the team is “fly by night.”

This solid core of the team is going to make or break the project. The keyword in the last paragraph was morale. Remember? The thing that all mod development hinges upon? “True believers” are the original reserve of morale, and as soon as that runs dry, it’s highly unlikely you’ll find any other part-time contributors capable of carrying the project to completion. This morale can also be a double-edged sword: Integrity First. If this group hasn’t internally vetted itself for adherence to the guiding principles and isn’t totally onboard with the vision, then you’re laying the framework for infighting and rock band-style breakups in the foreseeable future. Most of the development’s energy is pent up here; turn it inside out and watch the fireworks.

So what the heck is “fly by night” then? That describes any team that gathers as a kind of loose alliance or confederation. This is far more prevalent in the modding scene than in professional contexts, but you’d be surprised how quickly it can show up there, too. The “fly by nighters” gather together on the most simplistic understanding of the Vision and volunteer here and there, in preferential bits and pieces, to get it done. It’s relatively low-energy, low-investment, which means you can attract a team pretty quick.

Do I need to point out what all that implies? Let’s face it: These teams don’t work very well. Crack open Mod DB and look for “community mods” and you’ll notice that, at best, they’re all patches. Not overhauls, not really mods, just minor tweaks. Why? Because virtually all of the overhauls failed. These teams lack that reserve of morale because its every man for himself; they aren’t unified by the vision, let alone any core principles, but rather what they can get out of the project personally. Remember the pet hi-poly model? Yeah, it came from someone on this team. The allure of getting quick and easy access to manpower is a business flaw so ancient and so maddeningly predictable that you’d think folks would have wised up by now... but alas.

So, what about FL? The “fly by night” team model is awfully alluring because the game is so old, so mod un-friendly, that pessimism sets in and you feel the need to scrape the barrel to find any help at all. Unfortunately, you’d have it completely backwards. It is precisely because of these barriers to entry that morale becomes more important than ever. A “fly by night” team’s contributions decrease in proportion to those barriers. Haven’t you seen for yourself how many times volunteers will step up for this or that project offering... beta testing? “Ideas?” When the mod is already under development and should have had a plan drafted by now? How about those pet hi-poly models, eh? When it’s such a pain to make just one of them, how many do you think those intrepid volunteers are going to make? Yep, just one.

From here it all begins to rattle apart. The precedent is set: “No shirt, no shoes, all service.” Tone-deaf and low-quality contributions are accepted wholesale because of a desire not to offend or scare away further “fly by nighters.” Principles like Making it Count and No Half Measures start to fall by the wayside as contributions flow in, all directed at whatever the individuals wanted. You'll be lucky if even half of it really fits the original plan, if anyone cares about that by now. Crowdsourcing money is one thing, but crowdsourcing a project is what’s called “having too many cooks in the kitchen.” So principles are broken, the vision starts to fade, and with it goes morale, and with that...

Am I saying that you can’t run a project without a team all lined up to begin with? Certainly not. The occasional “fly by night” contribution can be like finding an oasis in the desert, and even teams heavily skewed to this model can still churn out patches and smaller mods like previously mentioned.

But that isn’t the objective here. We’re dreaming big. Big dreams need some pretty big muscles to carry them.

Back to “true believers” then, even if it’s just you and your dog. Better you and man’s best friend than the fickle alternative.

The “true believer” team has to be built largely at the start of the project. Onboarding new members half-way through is dangerous territory for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that it sounds like you’re replacing someone you either lost or who lost you. In business that’s called Turnover, and guess what Turnover hurts? Morale. But even without that, bear in mind that every new member brought in has to be vetted for belief in and adherence to the principles, and this vetting is a task in of itself. I’ve never liked the phrase “human resources” but the department exists for a reason; this is a serious matter given what’s at stake. You can’t bring just anybody onboard, since that slides closer to “fly by night,” will probably increase turnover, and thus: Demoralization. Just as with the rest of the project, when bringing on new folks, Make it Count.

Another reason to get off on the right foot here is because the team is bound up in the plan. Not just the planning but also how the plan is executed. As we’ll cover later, the plan has to have some serious depth to be respectable, and that means allocating time and experience, those “human resources,” ahead of time. Swapping those out mid-way through is shaky ground. Professional businesses have some passive protection from this because roles are being paid for, thus if one person leaves, their replacement takes up that role exactly. But a mod project doesn’t quite work that way, especially if some members of the team are disproportionately skilled with each other. Adding another item onto some capable person’s pile is just as bad as bringing in someone else who then deprives a capable person of work they clearly had an interest in picking up. Every shakeup avoided is one less accusation of unfairness, of nepotism, etc. You can avoid these pitfalls simply by Planning Ahead and allowing No Half Measures with the team’s composition and duties.

... Except it’s just you and your dog, right? Unfortunately, all I can say to you is, “Tough.” If you can’t find a minimum acceptable “true believer” team, then you’ll have to face the consequences of the “fly by night” variety. My strong advice then is to seriously cut down your ambitions before you’re the one cut down instead. All hope isn’t lost, though; maybe you can get that team once you’ve done enough work to share the Vision more thoroughly. Maybe you’re a one-man army, willing to work for a decade, and you’ll just call in some passerby at the tail end of it when you could use some extra polish. But whatever you decide to do, get it right the first time and plan ahead.

Which is convenient, because that’s the next topic I had in mind.