[split] an essay about AC development

[SrPER$IAN]

Aerke is your proposed project manager.

While I agree there should be someone who should lead the team. I do not agree such person should be a "project manager". You need a vision, not management.

A "Leader", a "Manager" or a "Director" or whatever, these are just playing with words. The fact is that we both agree on that subject that there is one person needed to lead the whole developing team.

In case I don't agree with you about that Aerke's case. There is no doubt of Aerke's coding and leading skills. But today that the lack of coders is pretty sensible in the developer team, someone else in the team with more free time might be more appropriate to take this role.

For a small project, like AssaultCube, the bus factor is much more important than people sticking to their areas of game development.

I totally agree with your wise idea about the bus factor issue. Now with the current structure of the developer's team, there is a question "what will happen to the game if a bus hits Aerk(if he leaves the developing team alone)?". Expanding the members of the developing team might be a wise solution to this issue.

We need active people. People, who do not burn out, or get bored of working on this thing and leave things half done.

True, it's always good to have active members. But maybe firstly we should find an answer to the question that why most of the active developers become inactive or leave the team after a while. Are they lazy or what? I would reply "definitely not". Since you have been contributed the game some coding, you must be familiar with the current process of the developing team, in which as a developer each member faces to lots of undone tasks and he has to handle most of them all alone and all for FREE. It is very predictable that most people decide to leave after a while and most probably everytime 80% of the works are done by two members only, who really care about the game and dedicate their life to it (and usually leave the team after they finish with the next version release because of all the pressure). On the other hand, the developers are humans like me and you and they do have lives since they do everything for FREE, then any kind of counting on small teams with fully dedicated active members, most probably will lead to a big failure, IMO.

As a solution in the proposed structure, two main goals have been followed: 1- Increasing the efficiency of each developer by focusing on his main job. 2 - Splitting each task to small packages as much as possible and assigning them to more people so it won't cause them to burn out or get bored of doing huge job after a while.

Personally I believe bringing up solutions is needed as much as criticizing. Like a Chinese proverb which says "Light on a candle, instead of blaming the darkness".