Collab Retrospective

Collab Retrospective

rbwhitaker 15 Jan 2017 16:35

I'm creating this thread as a place to begin discussing the collaborations, and how we might improve on them. Specifically, we want to talk about what's working, what's not working, and what we can do to make them better in the future.

This discussion will culminate in a meeting this coming Saturday, the 21st of January in the #site-planning channel in the chat room at 7 pm UTC-0 time, which is 12 noon Mountain Time, and 2 pm Eastern Time.

If that time doesn't work for people (we didn't have anybody actually there for the competition retro this last week) then we can move the time. Just speak up.

Otherwise, feel free to post your thoughts here or in the #site-planning channel in the chat room!

Re: Collab Retrospective

rbwhitaker 16 Jan 2017 00:01

I'll get the conversation started. I have a few of thoughts on my mind about collabs.

1. I'm not sure what the purpose is. The first thing I posted in the competition retro thread is what I felt was the underlying purpose of the competitions were. (A way to help people make serious progress on their game projects, and incorporate game development into their lives.) I'm having a much harder time pinpointing what I think the underlying purpose of collabs are.

I think it's important to define this, because everything else is determined by this. Is it working? It's hard to tell if we don't know what "working" is supposed to look like. Is doing X a good idea? Impossible to determine without knowing what "good" means in this context.

I have a few loosely defined purposes. Something about learning from each other, and something about people getting experience working with others.

So I guess the first point of discussion that I'd like to introduce here is, what do you guys want to get out of the collabs?

2. I should consider personally taking on a smaller role in the collabs. I don't need to run the show on these, and I don't need to be the one dictating architecture. I'm happy to do that, but I'm also happy not doing that. Perhaps it is worth me letting go of the reins here a bit.

3. With how vague the purpose of collabs is to me (to be clarified over the coming week) I don't think we're wrong to consider some wildly different structures for the collabs.

I brought this up in the chat room at one point. Depending on what we want to accomplish in the collabs, there are plenty of other ways to structure them that might get us better results.

An idea that I had might be a sort of Round Robin style collab. Instead of everybody working on the game simultaneously, we pass it around. Everybody is in a circular queue (so it wraps around when you reach the end of the list). When it's your turn, you have 2 days to spend no more than 1 hour changing the code. You commit your changes, and pass it on to the next person. After some number of months (maybe a year as the upper limit) we'd quit and switch to a different project instead.

We'd be working together to build a game, but you'd have flexibility in terms of what you work on and how you do it. And you have flexibility in terms of when you would do the work as well.

I'm not saying, "This is the best idea and we should immediately get rid of our other collabs in favor of this." I'm just exploring and brainstorming. Feel free to do the same. (And also feel free to say that you think the original structure is a better fit for accomplishing what you want to see in the collabs.)

Re: Collab Retrospective

rbwhitaker 18 Jan 2017 23:59

A couple of other ideas popped up in the chat room today that I wanted to share here.

Perhaps people say, "This is what I'm doing. I could handle 3 other people joining me if they want." In theory, if your idea doesn't gain support, you might decide to switch to somebody else's idea instead. So rather than deciding on a single idea up-front, it happens a little more organically. This might be helpful for the future, because we're likely to hit any reasonable limit on the number of people who can reasonably work on a small project like that. On the other hand, you may just end up with a bunch of people who are all just working on their own thing, which is less good.

Rebrand collabs as a Game Jam. It's not fundamentally all that different from what we've been doing in the past, but I think the name change alone inspires a lot of different ideas than what we get from a collab.

The idea of 12 hour or 48 hour things instead of 8 also came up. Especially in the context of a game jam, expanding the collab to a full weekend could be interesting. It's a bigger commitment. But you might also get more done.

Re: Collab Retrospective

rbwhitaker 19 Jan 2017 00:07

Sorry to keep posting so much. You guys who get emails when I do are probably getting tired of all the emails.

I just keep thinking about that last post.

I think it illustrates why we need to pin down what we feel is the purpose of collabs. There were two ideas there that are actually wildly different. The first would encourage a wide assortment of possibilities. Somebody might say, "I want to work on a particle system. Anybody who wants can join me." Or, "I'm working on my game and wouldn't mind having a few other people jump in and help with tasks X, Y, Z, for a few hours."

The second idea would largely exclude that, in exchange for more of a focus on making little game prototypes that aren't clones of existing games.

Which itself is fairly different from what we've done with collabs in the past; those have nearly always been cloning an existing game.

Which path we want to pursue is largely a function of what we collectively want to get out of the collabs.

Re: Collab Retrospective

rbwhitaker 21 Jan 2017 18:02

Collab Retrospective starts in 1 hour. I'm posting this for you guys who get emails but aren't in the chat room as much, just to send out a reminder.

Re: Collab Retrospective

Brett208 22 Jan 2017 18:51

Some thoughts I had after the retrospective.

When signing up for the collab (or Game Jam), people should list their planned work hours for the collab. We talked about matching skill levels to a degree, but the reality is that people should be on a close time schedule when working. I know some of us work night shifts or live in Europe.

What do people think if we do a 48 hour collab, of making a rule where the final product has to be distributable without requiring compiling. IE a zip file of compiled code or a basic installer or something. I think we spend lots of time creating games without thinking about how to distribute them, so it would be nice. Also, it would make it easier for others to try out/provide feedback. I don't have unity installed so I wouldn't be able to compile a Unity game without a fair amount of work.

Okay, RB and I talked about a fair amount more, but I'll wait for him to post all that!