the main risk concern I have regarding this project is actually about my group members. I am working with a group of people that are not part of UAL, meaning they have no incentive to be hurried along to the same deadline as I am. As I am around two three weeks into this project already, I am beginning to feel the problems that may arise out of this in the future.
My team consists of 4 (probably) artists including me, 1 programmer, and 1 music artist. To be honest, the way the team came together was less than ideal– there originally was only 3 people sharing the lumiron world as we have been loose friends throughout the years, but eventually fell out of contact due to simply growing apart. My original plan for my FMP was to make an art book completely solo, but recently one of the other two old acquaintances invited a slew of people into our archive server to make a game. It all came rather suddenly, but the idea of having programmers and artists that want to work together with me to create something bigger made me excited, so I changed course into wanting to produce a game demo.
The problem with this is just. I don’t know any of these people. And the two that I know I don’t particularly know them for being very reliable.
Mostly, I’m worried about motive– I struggled with this last year too as the art director of my group’s game project, where I didn’t know how to motivate others to work because our priorities are different. This time even more so, considering my team is not tied to UAL grading systems and deadlines. Since everyone is working for free, I just have to trust these people (who have school and jobs in their own rights) to be passionate enough about the project to be able to assist me in it.
Three weeks into the project, my team has managed to have one meeting so far. Everyone else is in the NA timezones compared to me, so the meeting times are less than ideal for me, usually way after 3 AM. Not being able to attend and enforce these meetings in advance is stressing me out, honestly, even though I did get meeting notes from them after that one meeting. Otherwise they haven’t managed to meet again due to personal commitment. Research has been minimal from everyone aside from my part as well, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the project.
I think the main problem currently is the lack of role assignment as we are still in the research phase of the project. We have divided up roles vaguely to look into different aspects of what we will need, but I haven’t heard back from most of them yet. It seems like this group of people is the type that needs to have clear tasks assigned to them with clear deadlines for them to work– my mom would call them abacuses, probably. Moving only when prompted?
I need to rethink my approach towards managing the team. Since we have much less structure than the last time I attempted art directing, the project feels disjointed and stagnant. Aside from my responsibilities as an artist, I need to devise up better planning to utilize the most out of my team. Hopefully this lull won’t last forever once we pick up the pace.
Until then I just have to try my best to not threaten to kill myself in front of them at every minor inconvenience