Thoughts on a Syntensity 'Team'

[Bios Element]

Something that comes up very often is the somewhat lacking amount of documentation & organisation that Syntensity has. This is of course to be expected in any new project but I think we have reached a point where something can be done about this.

I propose (pending kripken's approval.) expanding the Syntensity team so that tasks and knowledge will be somewhat further delegated to allow kripken to focus on his work. I think that a small team is very appropriate for a (currently) small project and so I propose the following roles: Lead Developer, Art Director, Map Director, Web Director and Community Manager.

These roles mostly speak for themselves and once filled would result in a small 5 man team. I believe that once these roles are filled, the team itself can grow organically as needed without any major problems. As a side bonus, this will lower the number of "Umm, you'll have to ask kripken" and raise the bus factor.

[kripken]

Would be great to expand the team, the main problem though is finding people I think. For my part I would be happy to delegate responsibilities. Also possible is to change the license of the main codebase if it annoys someone that would otherwise be interested in joining the team.

Regarding team structure, it might make sense to have an 'engine team' and a 'game team', the former focused on general stuff for the platform, the latter making specific games (or even just 1 such game).

[Bios Element]

Well that's exactly what I had in mind. I think that we'll have to decide at some point between 'official' game teams and 'everything else' as well. Because for obvious reasons we can't have every single person who makes a cube building an official team. >.>

For my part I'd volunteer to do Community Management work which I'm basically doing already looking for people who'd benefit from syntensity.

[adrix89]

Its pointless to discuss about "official" game teams and game teams at all
First of all that people that have a project in mind will have there own team to accomplish it whether that is a one man army ,a few friends or real team
So even if kripken had his own project it wouldn't be that different then the rest of the teams after-all syntensity is a platform not a game
Secondly is pointless to organize something that isn't there and even if it where it would join per project with there own hierarchy

[Bios Element]

Its pointless to discuss about "official" game teams and game teams at all
First of all that people that have a project in mind will have there own team to accomplish it whether that is a one man army ,a few friends or real team
So even if kripken had his own project it wouldn't be that different then the rest of the teams after-all syntensity is a platform not a game
Secondly is pointless to organize something that isn't there and even if it where it would join per project with there own hierarchy

No it's not, you're totally wrong and have missed the point entirely. Syntensity as a whole needs a team to create content for use with any/all of the different games that Syntensity will have.

This is not about dictating game teams, so you can stop going on about that. This is about Syntensity and official content, similar to how sauerbraten handles community content. High quality content is merged into the 'official' packages.

People who create high quality content will have a chance for it to be packaged into the official Syntensity 'network' so to speak. (aka. the Lobby as it exists currently.)

Content also needs made for the platform itself, which is something you don't quite seem to understand. Syntensity needs "general use" assets which can be used as a starting platform for projects, similar to how sauerbraten has a ton of shipped assets which can be used from day one to start mapping. Sure, they'll need to branch out eventually but once they get started they have the drive and momentum to do so. Starting from a blank slate is much harder.

As a further note on kripkens comments, recruiting teams of people to work on 'official' Syntensity projects is also a great idea and a key direction to go. Without the racing game, I doubt I'd have looked twice but because of it I could see the power of the engine and that made me decide to dig deeper and start contributing. Without that I'd probably have moved on.