Management and Free games

[Integral]

(moving out of the Art forum)

The wonderful thing about free software like this is that dave does not have to be a "good manager" in the business sense, since time ? money in this. He doesn't have to breathe down people's necks, because he doesn't have any concern about "bringing the bread home."

I think Dave is an excellent manager -- in the sense of being able to lead/organize a group of people to get stuff done. If you doubt this, compare Wesnoth to much hoarier Free games that don't have strong leadership (say, Freeciv): in under a year, Wesnoth has surpassed most of them. I think this is because Dave is very good at setting *achievable* (ie, simple) goals for the project that fit in with a consistent vision for the project, and motivating people to work towards those goals. (it helps that he somehow managed to get artists and musicians to join the project -- as far as I know, this is a first for Free games)

Now, maybe this doesn't make someone a good leader of a team in a business, but I think that being able to create something that many people want to use in under a year is something a lot of businesses would like to do. The article you linked to describes a company that was spending most of its time "moving sideways": they never really settled on a concrete design for the project, and simultaneously paid a lot of people to "tread water" (direct quote). They also worked on at least one project with a grandiose design that they didn't have the resources to complete. Both of these hazards have been pointed out many times on these fora as things that Wesnoth is deliberately avoiding.

Daniel

[Shade]

Agreed. I think a lot of the Artists / Musicians came because the game was multi-platform, with out having too many (of the more Evil) UNIXisms. I mean civserver turns me on, but if you can't launch a single player game, you aren't sticking around to do tiles. He also hit the nail on the head with release early release often. . . I think he knows Open Source pretty well, the way this place is organised is like a manual on how to do 'good' Free Software.

[Viliam]

Doing the free game also for Windows was a good decision - I couldn't participate otherwise. Thanks for skipping the *nix elitism.

Perhaps Dave (or someone else) should write a booklet/article "How did we make Wesnoth" that would describe experience from the project, and how all those necessary parts have happened. One interesting part would be "If I would be doing Wesnoth again, what would I do differently". (I think that e.g. using UTF-8 character encoding consistently from the beginning saves a lot of troubles.)

Include some statistics... For example I would like to know how many people did graphics, and if it was something like "20% of them did 80% of pictures"; which graphical programs / operating systems were used. (The OS ratio between programmers and graphicians will surely differ.) There could be some very interesting results.

[turin]

there are not just two classes, programmers and graphician(?). there are programmers, artists(!), musicians (although those could be counted as artists), scenario designers, and translators. i think it would be interesting to see the ratios of OS use between all of them...

[Dave]

Thanks for the kind words guys

Perhaps Dave (or someone else) should write a booklet/article "How did we make Wesnoth" that would describe experience from the project, and how all those necessary parts have happened.

I would like to do this, however I think it is rather premature before version 1.0.

One interesting part would be "If I would be doing Wesnoth again, what would I do differently".

This is a common question that people ask themselves, convinced that if they had the chance to do it over, they would do it 'perfectly'.

You know what? I think there is a good chance that if Wesnoth were done other, it would fail miserably. Why? I would attempt to develop a Master Grand Plan that accomodates all the mistakes made in Wesnoth and avoids them. I would have everything planned out 'perfectly'.

That kind of thing makes a project fail, imo. Often known as The Second System Effect, it is something to be avoided.

So actually, if I were doing Wesnoth again I'd pretty much do it like it was done the first time. Except for avoidance of a few obvious mistakes, such as....

(I think that e.g. using UTF-8 character encoding consistently from the beginning saves a lot of troubles.)

Yeah I agree. Using gettext would also be nice. In fact, gettext is the only library or API people have suggested we use that I now regret not using.

David

[Roots]

Hey Dave, I think it would be really helpful to others if you posted about mistakes you made/obstacles you encountered and how you dealt with those problems. I am one of those types that likes to learn from other people's mistakes and I'm sure that a lot of the other novice developers in this forum would get a lot out of such a discussion. Just an idea

[benheath85]

The good general conquers those easily conquered. For a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the acme of skill; winning all without fighting is the acme of skill.

--loosely taken from Sun-Tzu's Art of War