Reflections on Team-Leading, and two new additions! (Patreon)

at long last, tomorrow has arrived

so i wasn't expecting to be writing this post so relatively late or i would've set this up slightly better

but basically in a post last month i talked about how i've handled file management on the team in the past compared to now, and i set up a bit of a timeline for it. but i know that not too many people care that much about the details of file management-- the real reason i was making that timeline was to provide context to what i actually wanted to talk about which has been my approach to running a team, and some of my previous frustrations and failures with it.

(and if you're not up for all this just skip to the tl;dr below)
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so i'll just recap here the main shifting points of the team:

• E1-E13-- solo
• E14-- just dan and robin
• E15-- kuro appears and eventually creates a scripting team
• E16-- i make a similar animation team, kuro exits stage right with varying degrees of intensity and marcello occurs harder
• E17-18 -- jasper & kanaya
• Starlight and E19-- modern day

as a disclaimer, i'm probably going to be talking about some of the others here a little more negatively than i'd generally like to. it isn't my intention to make anyone look bad or anything (especially given that at the end of the day, everyone here was originally just volunteering time to help out on this project for free), and i don't want this to come back on anyone, but my goal here is just to talk about my emotional experience through this stuff...

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E14

so to start back at E14, i was originally super excited to be working with others on a project for the first time. i'd been making games since i was 11, but i could never even get my best friends back then to work on something with me, so it was really my first time collaborating with others. dan did a lot to reach out and convince me to actually accept help, and like i said in the other post, at first it was a tonne of fun-- but that only lasted a couple weeks. 

dan has openly wrestled with depression and self-motivating for years, and robin is a force of pure chaos who works with the wind. neither of them really made stable or consistent development partners for me, who would be coming back to the project nearly every day to push it forward. and when they stopped really show up to do stuff with me, i lost heart.

i think that was when the frustration really started to sink in. not with them, to be clear-- but with myself.

the first 13 episodes came together relatively quickly in about two years, but i was really wanting to make the game better rather than just more. quality became more of a focus and so development time kept increasing. but then with e14, i no longer had the excuse of i'm doing everything myself to write off why every episode was taking longer. now i had a team, technically. and E14 still took the longest time to develop.

i began to feel like i was really doing something wrong.

in retrospect, i don't think that was actually the case. robin's chaos can't be tamed, and having lived with dan for most of three years now, i can pretty confidently say that there's nothing i could've said or done to keep him consistently motivated to push forward. both of them helped in some places here and there, but i was probably still doing 98% of the work. it was still almost effectively solo, but by merit of no longer technically being solo, the expectations i had for myself, the game and development time went way up.

there were definitely some things i was doing wrong. i didn't trust them enough. i didn't really include them in decision-making, i often didn't communicate well about what was i was doing, and didn't really give them information about where the game was going. i kind of had this feeling like if i snubbed them or if they just decided to quit, and they had classified information, they would just go leak everything out of spite and i wouldn't be able to keep the game interesting to the end. feeling that way wasn't fair to them, but something similar had happened in the past-- and i've had somewhat of a history of being anxious/paranoid anyway. however, i don't feel like the circumstances with dan and robin would have changed significantly even if that hadn't been the case.

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E15

when kuro appeared at the end of the E14 release and offered to help, a lot of that paranoia and frustration really took center stage. they were a corporate programmer, significantly more experienced than i or anyone i've worked with-- also very drunk at the time they asked-- can i really trust this person to help out when it hasn't really worked out even with two of my closest friends????? i decided to accept and take the risk.

kuro did a lot of good and important work, and they also took it on themselves to act as sort of a mentor for me-- especially with regards to team management. i was frustrated with myself and the existing team from the previous cycle, and they were in a management position at their job. so, they decided to position themselves as leading and training a programming team of their own for reborn to show me how it's done. 

they hosted applications, selected a few people, and set up a process that they and dan would manage all on their own so that i could avoid having to focus on the scripting side of things and learn how to lead. unfortunately, dan didn't really show up for it and i had to make a difficult decision to let him go. he didn't take that great, and i think that experience-- my first time firing someone from development-- really left a strong negative impression on me too. nonetheless, marcello came from kuro's team (and everyone else dropped out somewhat quickly) and quickly learned and adapted.

however, this was still just the scripting side of things. E15 took a year to complete-- the longest yet at the time. now, not only was i not solo, but the team had had a total of like nine people on it. still a year.
i was incredibly frustrated with myself for most of that entire time, and resolved that the solution was that i simply needed to work harder. i was being lazy and weak-willed by doing anything that wasn't development, i've got no excuses, i need to work harder. my hands are hurting, but i don't need to let pain stop me. i just have to keep working. ignore it-- and oh, my hands stopped working and i physically cannot click a mouse, fuck.

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E16

for E16, i was making plans to patch up some of the most blatantly incomplete parts of the game, the animations and the AI. at first, i thought that i could simply do the animations myself like i did everything else. after spending about a month and a half on them and nothing else, the community encouraged me to make a team to handle those while i continued to move forward on main development. this was an objectively correct decision, so i followed suit as kuro did, polled for applications, made an animation team similar to the scripting one and taught the folks how to do it.  i did this basically just in time for my hands to give out, and took some comfort in that even if i couldn't type or work, at least the team could keep going.

E16 took a year and a half-- always knew it would, had to redo the entire city-- so it hurt a little less than E15 did. at this point we had three people for scripting, three for animations, robin (who would proceed to become an animator), and myself. now, if you're smarter than i was at the time, you might notice the problem here: of the people on the team, i'm still the only one who's actually working on content at this point. and given that i had like massively expanded my goals for scripting and animations, the actual amount of content that i personally had to make had still not been reduced whatsoever.

obviously, i didn't really recognize that in a meaningful way, and proceeded to be frustrated with myself some more. just working harder was no longer an option because the mental stress i was putting on myself trying to do so led to my body shutting down-- the only option was to get better at leading a team to do it.

for that part, kuro was starting to despawn, and marcello and i started talking for the first time without them in the middle-- and by 'for the first time', i mean literally the first time. kuro set the team up before to minimize my contact with the rest of the scripting team... because as i said before, they're a corporate programmer. and so although we didn't realize it at first, they specifically set our dev team up in a corporate structure. 

which we have since learned, is not appropriate for a small indie team where i cannot pay the poor volunteers. it really just makes everything more disjointed, impersonal, and slow. i appreciate marcello a lot for sticking through that phase of things and getting to where it is now, because we both recognize in retrospect, it was a very strange and unideal set up 

lessons learned. 

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E17

going into E17, the team was something like, marcello on scripting, robin, smeargle and mde on animations, and some fleeting miscellanea help here and there from some others.... and i was just. jaded. i still had all of the frustration from not wanting development to take forever, but i couldn't just work harder and so far the team stuff hadn't gone great (and all of my flaws about not trusting people and communicating still fully intact anyway). having realized the problem i had where i was still responsible for all of the content, i was really wanting to enlist someone to help me with mapping and eventing. 

kuro showed me that i could just teach others to do stuff, and i really began to value, from previous experience, people who i know would be able to work reliably. so i had a couple of unrelated friends who frequently asked if there were anything they could do to help. they talked to me very often, so i figured they would probably be reliable, so i accepted them onto the team to help out with mapping the desert areas.
they were jasper and kanaya (sazane).

if you have been in the community for a while, you probably recognize at least one of the names, and know that this was a very poor decision. to their credit, they were both reliable. however, the story doesn't end well because i ended up having to block both of them for personal reasons that i won't get into for their sakes. that was the case for kanaya only recently, and she consistently helped out even throughout most of starlight's development, and she took the separation relatively well. 

jasper, however...

i ended up blocking him just a little bit after E17 released. i have talked on the server about why, and why it probably should've happened way sooner, and how admitting him to the team was a really bad idea. when i blocked him, he really doubled down on that by asking that everything he contributed to the game be removed, and aside from that, getting back at me personally in just about every way he could by using things i told him in confidence to try and hurt me or sabotage my relationship with others.

in that vein, i was also afraid he would spoil some E19 stuff i worked with him on, just like i had always been paranoid about happening in the first place... but, to my knowledge, that is the one and only singular thing he never used to get back at me. i am grateful for that. in a funny, roundabout way, it has probably helped me trust others on my team more. 

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E18-19m-Starlight-19p

after e17, cass and i met and started talking, and i accepted her onto the team on pure intuition. a great decision. since she later moved in that year (after e18) she has done a lot in terms of encouraging me to open up to the team, communicate more with them about what i'm actually doing, trusting others both with information and to do the work well, and so on.... 

basically all of those flaws with leading that i mentioned i had in the first place. i've still got a lot to work on there, make no mistake, but she has pushed me in what finally feels like the right direction. during starlight especially, i feel like the team really came together-- and that we actually had one, as opposed to like, half of one, and an awkwardly quiet dev server even when i was getting thigns done (as had been the case for most of reborn's development).
so, you know, among all of the other everything she's done, i'm grateful for that too and love her a lot
#CassAppreciationPost

this has been a long post, and a lot of it has been more negative than i would like, but ultimately i'm trying to write this from a point of forgiveness to myself. i've had several Wrong Ideas (or no ideas--) about how a team should operate, and i very much feel like i've been failing at leading the team for years. but, looking back at it, and how things have developed-- the information and people i had to work with at the time-- i can see how a lot of my negative habits and feelings were circumstantial in response to the situation. and i'm hopeful that in continuing to improve, i can learn to let go of some of that frustration.

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TL;DR i've sucked at leading a team but im getting better and maybe trying to forgive myself for sucking before

so on that note, i've enlisted a little bit of extra help to finish out the postgame strong (and with better teamwork than we've had in the past). please welcome Crim and Azzie to the team for the home stretch!

as y'all may know, Crim was helping out with sprites on Starlight for a lot of starlight's development already and it's been incredible to watch her grow and learn so quickly over the tail end of this last year.. so we're bringing her home to Reborn to keep that goodness up and also help us out with mapping and some of our legendary quests. she's already gotten a jump on a few things because she's great

and as for Azzie, many of you might already know her (aside from modding and brightening up the main server) from her Tourmaline Travels fanfic! ...is it still a fanfic if she's on the team now? oh well, who cares. Azzie will be taking over a lot of dialogue in postgame nightclub for things like battle pavilion trainers, boss rush, etc and maybe more while i charge onwards to the quests. 

please welcome them both and give them lots of support~ <3

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speaking of the nightclub, i have just a few loose threads to tie up there before i turn it over to azzie and move on. i was hoping to be done with this last week, but in a somewhat spontaneous turn of events, cass and i are going to be moving again!  touring places, arm-wrestling with the leasing companies and all that line of stuff, and a few other things, have really left me a lot more drained and anxious than i would have liked, so i haven't quite been able to focus on finishing up that last little bit of the nightclub. 

but soon, we will be charging back into the legendary fray...

..oh also marcello said i should put this in the post! this is from crim playing through the main story of e19, just as a fun reaction tidbit.

:)