the four horsemen of silence (Patreon)

ok hi pt 2 from yesterday sort of, featuring a completely different subject matter so it's not really a pt 2 at all

i continue to think regularly about various things like why an average episode's development time has increased so much from the early days, and i have a laundry list of reasons, many of which i have talked about here in the past so i won't go into all of them... but lately, i've been exploring another angle into that. 

specifically i was having a cat with another patron (hi jonny) about development time and the number of people who would want to help in the community, and one of the things i mentioned was some epithet i've heard in the past and found to be somewhat true... it's something like, the time it takes to develop a program is inversely proportional to the number of people on the team.
this makes a lot of sense in the context of a larger company with many branches and the left hand may not know what the right hand is doing... and it makes some sense in the context of a solo developer who doesn't have to teach anyone, review anything, or explain anything for anyone's approval. there's a lot less communication and noise, and a lot more work going on.
so it is something i have kept in mind. 

unfortunately i couldn't find the source for it, and frankly, i still can't. however, when i was looking for the source, i found something different, an article about how small teams can outperform large ones with specific reasons and advices for them doing so
a lot of the stuff in the article is stuff that i already agree with or strive for or in some fortuitous cases ideas that i've had for a while that this gives clarity validation and language to. i happen to appreciate the article a lot for that reason. 

there is also one point that jumped to me-- that about teams not withholding information. the article is fairly critical about it:

There is no excuse to not share this kind of data in a small team.

ow. 

some people i talk to ask about the other people on the development team, and then are surprised when i say that nobody else on the team knows the game's story but me. it just seemed natural to me. and y'all know from some of my more personal post that i struggle to share and play nice with others.

so i'm not sure what the article is referring to with "data"-- it makes it sound like sales, which i couldn't care less about even if this were a marketable game, but i read the above as being, in my case, the information about the story.
i've often kept the team in the dark overall and only told people the specific details that are relevant to whatever they'll be working on. this is the "need to know" basis the article mentions.

on reflection, i've had a few reasons for doing things this way:

• Habit
  reborn was a solo project for me until E13, and I worked on a handful of games not worth mentioning as a kid/teenager, but it was always alone. true, i've run site staff teams for years, but when it comes to actively working on a project together and leading a development team, i have a lot less experience, and by that i mean reborn is my only experience. so i've been pretty used to kind of to just doing everything myself, and keeping everything close to the chest. it's how i've always worked, after all.   
  
• Structure
  in E13, i finally accepted direct help on the project in the form of inuki and dan. it was really fun working with some of my closest friends on it, and honestly the days when we were all pow-wow'd in a call doing our own things for it are some of the fondest memories i have of development, ever and i'm tearing up a little thinking about it. unfortunately, neither of them are really the type to work reliably or take initiative over a long period of time, so it often still felt like a solo project.
  then along came kuro, which could probably be their catchphrase. those of you who know kuro may know that they're a corporate programmer. very talent. very experience. a little intense. after a point, kuro decided that they were going to train a replacement, and set up a repository, and some convoluted documentation system and some other strenuous processes to get some other helping hands into the code. half of them dropped off right away and the first disappeared and was literally never heard from again, and the last was marcello who i repeatedly joked about having won the candy factory. but the truth is i didn't even directly speak to marcello for like, months. kuro trained him and the others, and handled the versioning and all the other intermediate stuff. and later on when my health was wavering, i followed their example and did something similar with the animation team (granted without a middleman so at least i was directly interacting).
  but honestly all of that never really felt right to me. i couldn't fully identify why at the time, but after reading the article i linked above, it's pretty clear to me now. kuro was setting processes and other stuff up as if reborn's development were a corporation. which it isn't. and as someone who hates corporations and to a lesser extent their compartmentalization, i certainly don't want it to be. however, because of their experience and my letting them take control of the scripting/hiring/team-handling side of things, it's basically had a lot of the same distance and over-complicated process doctored into it. only as i type this am i realizing the extent of that, and i am kicking myself a lot for not seeing it sooner.
  and to return to the original point, along with that forced compartmentalization and complexity has been a strong distance between myself and some of the others, so i don't really have either the chance or the rapport to event get to the point of sharing all the information with them.
  while i really appreciate kuro doing their best for the project and putting the time and energy into it that they did, i'm actually super annoyed about this right now, lol. and i'm also really grateful that despite this, marcello has become one of my best friends. so like, there's hope in the world despite all of it, but i'd really like to undo some more of this junk.
  
• Paranoia
  here's some oof and oof accessories for me.
  if you have ever seen the movie The Truman Show, then you'll already know exactly how this works. if you are not familiar with that movie, i'll explain: the main character, truman burbank, is an ordinary guy living a mostly ordinary life-- only his entire life is filmed as part of a tv show broadcast 24/7 to the effective entire rest of the world. everyone in his life is a paid actor. the events are scripted. everyone sees his every move.
  for the record, i have never seen that movie, so i might have some details wrong. but i also never want to see it. because suspicion that i was in a situation like that was exactly how i thought for much of my life despite never having heard of the movie or its premise until i was already well-entrenched in those thoughts.
  as it relates strictly to my personal life, this whole openness thing is a pretty standout concept of me because ten years ago i hated talking about myself so much to the point that i would refuse to use any sentence that had the word "I" in it because it seemed arrogant.
  and now just look at these posts.
  i bet teenage me would have an aneurysm on just a glance.
  and aside from fear of arrogance, i also had the idea that if i ever told anyone anything, no matter how in confidence it should have been, or how close to the person i was, i would just kind of understand/assume that then the entire world would know. i didn't tell others much of anything. i usually just deflected questions with other questions.
  "How are you?"
  Why do you want to know?
  yikes.
  around the time of my senior year of high school i eventually realized how ridiculous that was and accepted that it was just a form of paranoia. i discarded it, and pretty much got over it. besides, on the ridiculous chance that i am in such a show, i'd rather make it an interesting one anyway.
  but despite having left that belief behind, i sometimes kind of have a shortage of logical thinking where i'll tell one person something, and then i'll kind of just go about my business and forget that all the other people i talk to don't also know the thing-- not that i would want to deliberately keep it from anyone, but it's just like, oh. right.
  and so when i think of sharing the story that i have planned out with anyone, even if it's just in the development team, stupid monkey brain is just kind of like nooo don't spoil the story, the whole world will know so i kind of subconsciously shy away from it. whoops.
  and in a sense, as would naturally play into this, there's probably some form of...
   
• Mistrust
  i make a pretty big deal about openness and vulnerability, and by natural extension, trust. those things can't exist without each other. but the truth is, i've had a lot of work to do on the matter.
  part of the reason that reborn stayed a solo project until E13 was because i didn't really trust others to even access the game files. with people i was good friends with like dan and inuki, i didn't really have to worry about someone i gave access just deleting the entire working copy out of a rage or deliberate sabotage or something... but you can bet i thought about and accounted for that possibility anyway.  
  you know, i have a new respect for parents who leave their kids with babysitters. just a side thought.
  kuro was the first person i gave project access to without really knowing them very well, and it took some solid convincing on their part to get me to that point. i don't really know what part of me thought it was reasonable that the people who are here volunteering their time and energy to make this game better and faster would have any ill intentions towards it
  but whatever part that was has definitely been reinforced recently.
  i wrote here a few months ago about how i had to let someone go from the development team for personal reasons. the result was that they pretty actively lashed out at me throughout various sub-communities around reborn for quite a while and did almost everything they could to make me look bad, even if it meant sharing intimate things that i had told them in confidence, or other such violations of my privacy.
  that person has since apologized, and to my knowledge, stopped these things. it is not my intention to implicate them here. but it is relevant to mention because
  i think that that is exactly the kind of thing i was afraid of
  for better or worse, since i have not made a habit of sharing more information or permissions than necessary, there wasn't much relating to the game that they could leak or destroy.
  but if they had?
  when they were that hurt, and that mad at me? i wonder if they would have done anything they could. obviously i have backups and such, but the principle of it is pretty alarming to me.
  and i think it's that extreme scenario that's always been in the back of my head. if i do something to make someone hate me like that-- i'm not really the type to care desperately about how others feel about me. but i have to care if i give them so much leverage.
  
  and also
  i believe pretty strongly in a certain passage of amanda palmer's book:

i prefer to trust people until i have no other choice.
which is exactly why the point from the article hit me so hard:

They feel like trusted co-owners instead of pawns who get told what to do without having the full big picture.
The bigger risk is blindfolding the people on your team, giving them a reason to mistrust you.

that hurts, because i recognize just how much i've dropped the ball in those regards. i absolutely don't want others to feel that way, and i think that right now, i can see a lot of them doing so. the inside of the development team isn't always a cozy place and that bothers me so much. i absolutely want to do better. 

it's helped by a couple things, like marcello has been going back and forth with me with some ideas for a game that he'd like to make someday, and i think that he and i have been feeding off of each other's ideas pretty well. but i recognize that this is only able to happen because he's willing to share his even very imperfect plans for where he's at and would like to go. basically, it's a direct example of how a project can benefit from that openness.
and i'm impressed.

so that's my new resolution. i've already started taking some steps to breaking this open and adjusting my style of communication with the others... i don't know if it will be enough or to what extent i can push myself appropriately with this in the time that's still left for reborn... but i sure as hell can start doing better.

i still haven't gotten to the thing that i wanted to talk about in the first place, so we're gonna have another to be continued here i guess. sup.