project management sure is hard, especially remote and without compensation
I spread the gospel of avoiding unpaid contractor help as much as possible; it’s never ever on time and therefore just makes everyone miserable with guilt and frustration.
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no, that’s entirely reasonable; the only privileged knowledge I have is of the enthuasism & the personality driving this project. the part that doesn’t scan to me and which makes it sound like the SA posters have unrealistic expectations of how much they’ve been betrayed is the implication that there is much “management” to be answerable to here. as far as I know they never succeeded in landing a publisher (I guess this is the other privileged knowledge I have) which means that no one ever really got paid a living wage other than frankie for a while, so I don’t quite get how most of the other folks who joined the team because they liked it or were talked into believing in it came to feel so put upon or that they weren’t empowered to make decisions on their own, given that they were, at any given time, the sole contributor to a volunteer project.
having typed that, I can definitely think of my share of poorly-run volunteer organizations and people whose personalities set them up to be exploited, but those at least have a veneer of goodness about them that theoretically motivates the whole thing. this … I don’t know, I don’t have a good benchmark for that kind of trauma. they probably shouldn’t have ever tried to hire on people who weren’t on level footing with the hobby horse in the first place, but that they would have even managed to do that with no money probably highlights the desperation of the available labour force for a project like this, and that’s definitely gotten worse since 2008.
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like it seems clear to some extent that they were never really serious enough about the project for it to ever ship, and I can’t really say that I would’ve wanted them to be if it would mean significantly changing the dynamic from the original hobbiyst project, except they were still going to conferences and hiring contributors on the strength of their reputation, which would’ve been basically a fine hey-hope-for-the-best grift if not for all the people who weren’t having fun or really needed it to come through
People curdle quickly when they sense that others aren’t pulling their weight and there’s no driving creative leadership that will die for the project.
From the posts on SA it sounds like most of the talkers are/were amateurs transitioning into maybe-paid work, which is to say, ripe for them to undersell their value at first pitch and realize their value later on and realize they’d signed up to something without the experience to protect themselves. It takes experienced production to help people help you without exploiting themselves in a situation like that.
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It fits with a pretty typical story: you already made a game, for free, in spare time; now you have money, experience, and a plan – how could you not succeed?
And you raise the scope and bring more people in and don’t realize that scope increases scale project work geometrically. And you always learn that when it’s far, far too late to just put in a few weekends, like you used to, and wasn’t it always fine back then?
Scope increases after project planning, like we see with Kickstarters, are especially deadly; theoretically you have a ‘production plan’ and you’ve already spent months brutally cutting features but once you let those doors crack open a bit the designers run in start opening all the windows and they just get all worked up.
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i’m waiting until 11/11/2023 before i consider the project dead
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I’m trying to figure out how much I would feel compelled to censure max bialystock if I knew him in real life
GZ is cool, see, because I love posting about: my own artistic ineptitude, 7 year old mistakes, my judgment of my brother, other peoples money, dreams, and expectations, squandering my friend’s gifts, my annihilation (apparently? who knows) of my oldest friendship, the roommate situation that involved 4 of us and my father with dementia, my own desire to find something worthwhile to do with my life that can feed my children, literally everyone’s precarious mental health, yeah, I actually love it
.
i do love this forum, and when i went to the sb meet and nobody gave me shit about my vaporware project and instead just spent time with me that was the best gift i could have gotten. i would love to give a definitive post here but anything less than absolute honesty in this situation is basically p.r., and that is what i will say that about everyone’s posts so far.
i do not want online psychos reading what i write, i don’t want to lie, and i don’t want to injure people who i care about
or myself! felix texted me a “heads up,” i never got tweeted at or tagged on here, and (like any decent person) consider myself instrumental in this game’s failure. i am swollen with guilt and my most damning criticism is that i Went Home To Be A Family Man. if i got a blood potion for a tell all post i would scream and likely die.
gz has had these same thoughts about the game, to the word, for 5 months and i know this because i had extremely long conversations with him and my brother that talked about input and contributions and ownership and “points” and more importantly, friendship and emotional stakes and the many interpersonal loose ends and the fact that i don’t know if chef actually ever “quit” the game or not because i have not talked to him in 3 years. we talked about this! we talked about the potential for a tog renaissance! there was a lot of (bad) energy then and i had some weird hope that it would serve as some pathway for reconnection. it didn’t, but now that same energy is back (in service of the truth and the backers and certainly not just revengeance), and posting, and replying to twitter threads, and I GUASS not actually stopping until some desired level of comeuppance is reached, whatever that is. so probably too early to say tog renaissance
will delete!!!
i thought about posting this in axe but i’ll delete it there too. whatever
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just goes to show people will use having kids as an excuse for anything
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me: i wander the earth consumed by guilt, neither punished nor absolved
wife: maybe you need a roast
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your witness protection identity on sb staying intact is important to me
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I’m just glad I got to meet a real wizard
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Pledging for Barkley 2 was definitely like retroactively paying for Barkley 1. I really don’t care that I « lost » 15$ on the project
Not everyone might think that way but: they’re ungrateful pricks
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This kind of vivid Barkleyism is what makes me a bit wistful about this game still. No other game has anything quite like this
I should go replay Barkley 1
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Yeah this is basically how I viewed it even then.
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With Shenmue III actually on the way, Barkley 2 must inherit its cult hoped-for status for the next X years
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if I were to ever do a kickstarter project I feel like my first decision would be to seek out an experienced project manager and dog ear a substantial amount of the budget to pay for them from the get go
but of course it’s easy to say that in 2019 after this kind of thing has happened so many times.
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Experienced AAA game project managers could just be deadweight on a small team. Just spending the money on getting everybody colocated in a shared office could do more to smooth planning.
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You are coming to Branson, right
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