Do you work solo or with a team?

[Sir_Silver]

I was curious about those of you who are currently, or have made games using LOVE, what your experience was with working with a group of developers to try to make a game.

If you work alone:
--Do you work alone because you enjoy having the process of making something from start to finish, or for some other reason?
--If you could choose to work with a team to develop whatever game you are working on, would you want to?
--What skills and expertise would you bring to the team?
--What skills would you expect of other team members to have?

If you work with a team:
--Do you enjoy working in a team?
--Do you feel like you have good synergy with all of your team members?
--What brought you and your team to work together on the same game/project?
--How many people are in your team (including yourself)?

[ken.athomos]

If you work alone:
--Do you work alone because you enjoy having the process of making something from start to finish, or for some other reason?
--If you could choose to work with a team to develop whatever game you are working on, would you want to?
--What skills and expertise would you bring to the team?
--What skills would you expect of other team members to have?

- I currently work alone because I'm still learning the language as a whole. Also yeah, I enjoy that feeling of being able to progress a project (even though I'm still currently in the process of finishing my first one).
- Depends on what I'm working on is what I want to say but I still wanna work alone because of the statement above.
- Graphics design, dark fantasy, Victorian goth, and pessimism.
- Better programming skills (in general) than what I currently have.

[zorg]

I work alone because i can't really explain my workflow, nor how the coding workload should be divided. Also, working in teams will inadvertently force people to have... "better" coding practices, even if that just means that you'll be more focused, if only to push small commits onto your choice of CVS hosting, that only relates to one specific part of the codebase. For some, that can be a bother. Even if it'd be helpful in the long run.

Not saying i wouldn't try to be with a team, it's just that whenever i tried, it never quite ended well.

I'd bring grandiose ideas, but since everyone wants to be the designer (except for those that are empty inside), i'd say music and +1 supported language.

I'd only expect others to somewhat see my vision, if they would be joining on my team, otherwise i'd expect myself to do just the same when i'd be the one joining. I can and will explain why i do things the way i do, though i'd accede if what others say works out better. Also, i suck at graphics, so the first person i'd ask for help would be a(n) (graphical) artist.

[laperen]

Not specifically for the Love game engine but working on a game with the goal to ship in general. This is assuming your finances are fine and you have reserves to focus on making a game.

Working in a small group is great if everyone has something tangible to contribute to the game. Mainly sound, art, and code. reason being there is always visible progress, and this keeps the morale up for the group to continue. The designer role is a myth in such a structure. You have to contribute something tangible, if not you're out.

Working in a large team is good IF AND ONLY IF there is a competent project manager specifically for managing schedules. Reason being this person is "the bad guy" keeping everyone on track. Things easily get lost in a big group. Competency is needed at the top hierarchy, and even then the core competency is really managing subordinates. The rest are there to do the actual work in bite size parts issued by the top in hierarchy, making it as manageable as possible for the lowest of competencies in the team.

Working alone is good IF AND ONLY IF you are able to do a little of everything, but quality will always be traded for time, vice versa. Should be rather self explanatory. The project only progresses when you work. External resources/hires may seem like a good idea on paper until you have to deal with delays or incompatibility. In the end you have only yourself to reliably depend on, so you have to learn a little of art, sound, and coding.


I multi-discipline in art(2d and 3d), and scripting, so either an artist or assistant tech guy.

In a big team there can be a bunch of level designers specifically figuring out what interesting bits could be made from what they are provided, so that's not too bad a role either.

Alone is being everything to its not applicable. I'd only work alone if I want full ownership of creating the game, or circumstance.

[marco.lizza]

When I started coding back in the early nineties, changes to be work in teams were rather scarce, due to difficulties in both the communication (you had to rely upon telephone e snail-mail to share stuff) and popularity of coding among teens (I was the only one seriously interested on the subject among all my friends).

In the mid-nineties, for a period, I joined a couple of demoscene groups and I teamworked with others. We used modems and BSSes to share data. It was rather funny but difficult, indeed.

Nowadays I could afford to work with others, thanks to Internet... but I prefer to work alone because I want the complete ownership of my gamedev projects and (more importantly) I have to struggle with everyday duties (life, work, children, ...) and sometime I end in being discontinuous.

However, having a team of tree/four pals to work together on a single project would be an interesting experiment, and I would definitely try and see the outcome.

I would certainly focus on coding, in the case (given that in a small team everybody would be somewhat involved in designing the game).

[kevin.o'mara]

I'm currently working alone on a LÖVE game. I'm working alone because 1) I'm still learning LÖVE and Lua, 2) I'm still learning about game development, and 3) I like tackling large projects on my own.

For my current project I would appreciate someone to help with sound as I have absolutely no experience in that realm. I can handle the programming and most of the art, but not sound.

As a team member, I could contribute as a programmer and an artist (in limited capacity). Also, I'm not afraid to tackle mathematical programming tasks, as my educational background is in math and physics.

First and foremost, I would expect team programmers to follow a consistent coding style. In my limited experience working in groups, disparate coding styles makes it more difficult (for me) to piece things together. For non-programmers, I would simply expect a useful skill: sound, art, "management" (?). I'm still new to game development so I'm not too sure what else would be useful for a small scale game dev group.

[baconhawka7x]

I mostly work with a team that consists of me and another artist. Some positives are that you can feel more motivated to work because you know you have people relying on you, but also it can be hard if you or a teammate isn't keeping up and can create tension and just generally discourage everyone involved.

I feel like me and the artist I work with share very similar ideas as to what makes a game great, and we both have a similar creative process which is extremely useful.

I think I posted something on here or on one of my tutorials asking if an artist wanted to work with me. He added me on skype and we've been making games for like 5 years now.

We work remotely though, and in different time zones which can be a huge burden. But no matter what, whether your team is big or small, working in the same office or different continents, the most important thing to being a productive team is communication.

[raidho36]

I do it as a hobby so I work alone. I would work with writer/artist/etc but I would seriously consider teaming up with other programmers. In my experience I wind up spending 50% of the time helping others unfuck their own code. I don't like to take myself for a great expert (dunning-krueger and all) but you just can't help it when your supposed pro teammate produces nothing but spaghetti or couldn't figure out something simple all the time so he would reinvent square wheels all day. Like tat one time the guy spent half a week writing endian converter in a language that had one built in. It was like 600 lines, it was ridiculous, and the rest of the code was clusterfuck of similar magnitude. In case anyone wondering, it was a legit production code for industry application software with professional team.

Dang, typing on a phone is pain.