Managing Giant Projects:

This panel was presented by the creators of a new game called Planet Mercenary. These are my notes form LTUE 2016.

Game began by finding partners/ team members who share a common interest.
You can’t do everything, you don’t know everything. Find people who are good at the part of the job you don’t know.
The management person needs to have material ready for the creators. For they will create in spurts and need to have tasks ready when the ready to do creative actions.
In advance you need to define a role of who does what.
Have a weekly meeting. You need to know what needs to be done and each person needs to get a report of what they’ve accomplished and what they need to do next. Everyone needs to have an idea of what to get out of the meeting. If you don’t have a weekly meeting then your project stalls. Each project has stages. Each of them have individual goals for each stage. As each person must reach a goal there also prerequisites to reaching that goal.
You need to give yourself time to work.
Creating planet mercenary took 10 years to create from concept to reality
They invested $1500 to commission work from artists. Then you can find out who you like the commission becomes a audition. Every project has multiple moments of doubt.
If you emotional about a topic don’t respond emotionally. Stop maybe sleep on it before making the decision.
Accountability, each member needs to be self-accountable. One example of this is it when you send an email to somebody do they respond quickly.. One communication challenge is that certain creative people need specifics on what they need to accomplish. The writer needed specific word count per page because gives them the idea of how to feel the page with the illustrations etc. and the manager of the project didn’t realize they had to do preliminary sketch to give the author an idea what is expected
You may have a wide base of fans but only certain fans will be interested in a specific project. Realized that certain fans will not be happy with the end result. Most of the acceptance of the project you can’t control but deliver what you promise.
Used kick starter before do the project..
In this game the characters of the dissipate of those the speak first. One could expect that the loudmouth could then take over the game. But as they make a decision that is wrong they get punished for it. And they may be discouraged from the domineering. You want to design your game so that even those that are more reserved and are not loudmouths still can participate.
You need outside eyes because creators cannot recognize all perspectives and having beta players gives you those possessions. You can see how you need to plan for the unplanned response
In bound market is when you have beta players play the game and they give feedback. Then you change the product by the things you learn to improve it. Give it back to the players and you create a feedback loop marketing is about giving out information.
Tools of the project: Google drop box, Skype and Google docs. Google docs lets two people share the one document at the same time. Dropbox let you put a file folder that is labeled in the works. That means don’t touch that file until the creators finished working on one at greater person is done they moved the file from the in the works folder.
Be careful of not willing to spend money for the use of a tool when you to spend $100 and become more effective in your tasks by the use that tool.
How to maintain morel. You can do this by creating milestones and as you accomplish those milestones you feel successful. You can feel discouraged if the project starts to feel uninteresting. That may be because now you have do the hard work and not just a fun work. Another possibility is that your building something that is boring. Another example of this is in the writing if nothing is happening in the chapter that you may need to remove the chapter.
A contract between the dispense Nice to be clearly defined responsibilities that define roles and jobs as well as deadlines.
Find people who are interested in capable in the project not just because they’re your friends.