Hey all;

Its me again, Adrian! Also known as Ductomaniac. I'm not dead! Seriously!Feels like it sometimes though. Directing a group dedicated to making a game is hard work. You gotta keep things organized, make schedules, make lists, make funny diagrams that help people visualize how every piece of the puzzle fits together, talk to people one on one, talk to the group as a whole, make meeting agendas, organize meetings, run meetings, determine ways to help people get more work done, find tools that make production easier and smoother, keep track of where different assets are and in what stage of development they are, among other things. If something above doesn't make sense to you or you don't know what it is, don't worry, neither do I ;) At least not fully. Every day I've learned new things about managing/directing a group, and this has helped me realize that there's EVEN MORE things I don't yet know.

So here's one thing I've learned about: the existence of resources that can't be measured. Invisible resources. I assume you all know about regular resources you CAN measure, such as money, time, number of people, etc. However I'm coming to suspect that that's not the whole picture. There's stuff like creativity, motivation, and dedication. Those are the resources that actually get the game done. Money, time, everything else is secondary to them.Now you're probably thinking "Wait a minute Adrian. That's an oxymoron! Part of what makes a resource a resource is that it comes in limited amounts! If you can't measure it, how do you know its a resource and not just a tool or something like that?" I won't get into semantics with you, and resource may or may not be an accurate name for something like creativity, but I do call creativity and that other stuff I listed as resources. Why? Because I know firsthand that they can run out ;)So what do you do to NOT run out? I've thought of a few ways.

Creativity: To keep myself thinking original thoughts I find it helps to inspire myself with other people's work. You never know where inspiration will come from, but there's some ways to help it come along. Sometimes. I'm not gonna go too deep into this, entire books could be written, but I have a suggestion: Stumbleupon. Get a Stumbleupon account, set it to take you to art, science, and poetry webpages, and then go crazy. Exposure to a wide variety of subjects gets the creative part of my brain running.

Motivation: Motivation's what gets you to do something. Without motivation you won't feel like working. I have found a few ways to keep myself motivated:It helps to have dreams. Dreams that are big. Too big. Not to think "I'm gonna make a game" but to think "I'm gonna make a game so good it'll be the game of the year and everyone will play it!" Yeah, I know that second dream probably ain't gonna happen. It's important to know your limitations and to be realistic ;) But ridiculously big dreams keep me motivated. They make me want to try harder, to outdo myself. To achieve them, impossible though they may be.To keep me motivated, I've also come up with success story list of people who have achieved big dreams similar to mine. They're not all game designers or developers, there's also some athletes, some artists, some random people. They just need to be stories that motivate me, stories that show these people had traits I want to develop in myself. Thinking about them makes me want to succeed as much as they did.Finally, I keep track of what the rest of the team has gotten done. I pick out the cool things and try to share them with the rest of the team. That keeps us all motivated. For example, when we finished making terrain and water rendering, everyone got to see it and think "Whoa, that's cool! I really want to get this game done"

Dedication: Dedication is what gets you to finish a project. You might start it because you're motivated to, but if it's a big undertaking, you need to be dedicated to get it done. Otherwise you'll just get your project half done and then get bored and find something more interesting to do. I've found that the most important thing to do to keep myself dedicated at something is to feel attached to it. In the case of this game, I need to feel like this is MY game I'm making, not somebody else's game. Each person in the team needs to feel that. That's a tricky bit for directors. While they could just write up exactly what they want their game to be and then pass it on for people to make that game, everyone in the team needs to feel like the game they are working on is their's. Everyone needs to be able to suggest ideas and features for the game, and those need to be taken seriously.

Well, there I go rambling again. Hope this was interesting and insightful :)