GMC moderator Takagi posted yesterday explaining that the Game Maker Community Game, until-now focused on a game named Eve, will begin to take a different route. Instead of a planned large RPG the team will downsize the project to something a little less ambitious. The details are still being worked out but the the team has decided that Eve will be completely dropped and a brand new (smaller) project will begin.
Along with the new game being planned, several GMCG leaders have stepped down. The following leaders have resigned from their positions:
- Rusky, Programming Leader
- Opacus, Graphics Leader
- monocledsardine, Sound Leader
The GMCG has been criticized from the very beginning and disagreements, collaboration issues and other problems seem to have finally surfaced. With over a years worth of work thrown away people may think twice about contributing to a new project that may end up being trashed as well. The lack of replies on the announcement from Takagi could indicate that people have already lost interest in the project.
About time. Always thought the project was D.O.A.
@xot: We were actually working on a GMK exporter that would have given us the functionality of a level editor. The problem was not with the size of the team or even the style of game- it was constantly being simplified, and a level editor, combined with the other editors a GMK exporter gave us would have been enough.
The problems were that we took way too long to get organized and didn’t handle decision-making very well (it is rather hard with so many people trying to contribute ideas), so people lost interest after the initial storyline ideas stage. The only people working on it were the leaders and a handful of others who didn’t usually do any programming.
The idea of a community game seems to work when everyone can make something and post it without too much input from anyone else, so I think that if they can overcome the fear of everything being thrown away again, any number of simpler genres would have a better possibility of succeeding than your average “team” project, which often fail just like the GMCG did.
Again, I say that comes down to the style of game. Any story-based game is going to require centralized, or at best, bureaucratic design. There are so many other games types that don’t need that — just about any other. I’m talking about games that can be designed (and played) in bite-sized, independent chunks, without the need to stick to a rigid structure.
Put a few guys on the engine and get a simple, dedicated editor into people’s hands as quickly as possible and say “go nuts”. Then concentrate on the presentation, like graphics, sound, and music with small dedicated teams. I think starting with a story was a huge (and all too common) design mistake. Mechanics first, then playable content, then worry about a theme later. That’s the simple order of dependency for any game, but the GMCG seemed determined to go the opposite direction.
@True Valhalla
It’s just impossible with a team that big. Every pixel of every sprite and every detail of every little planned game mechanic has to be scrutinized and approved by so many people and it’s just not productive.
And when you get down to it, with a community like the GMC there were plenty of unskilled members involved making contributions as large as the truly talented, just gumming up the works further. It’s not like they could be selective about who was contributing to this.
I was counting the days until this announcement happened.
It’s not the team size, it’s the style of game they were trying to make. A different kind of game could benefit from a team that large, and only a few of them would have to be technically proficient. How? Two words: level editor
What I don’t understand is why they found it so hard to make progress? Even on an ambitious project, surely you’d make a lot more progress than they did in a year. Surely that blame can only lie with the leaders of the project.
Thank you, Takagi!
It’s about time.
Last I checked (like 2 – 3 months ago), they had about 2 – 3 weeks of actual work done.
I had figured… Depressing, they just got the first demo out… But, it wasn’t running that smoothly anyway, so it makes sense.