>Now my opinion means little, but with my expierence, to be a
>successful project leader, you have to:
> A) Know ABOUT Coding/Programming
> B) Be WILLING and ABLE to work with other people.
> C) Most of all, be READ, WILLING, and ABLE to deal with the people.
I really think it depends on the game you want to develop. At the moment, I
am working with my company - which consists of 3 members, including myself -
developing a new RPG. As the lead programmer, I have played MUDs a tinkered
with codebases for the past 4 years, and have finally developed my own from
scratch. The two other guys, who are going to be running the game and doing
customer support, RP awarding and just playing the game have both never
played a MUD in their life. "Gasp!", I hear you say? Well, I purposely don't
want the other two in the company to play MUDs, because then they
unconciously put barriers in their minds on what's possible and what's
impossible.
So when the other two are designing some sort of magic system, weather
system etc. just on paper, I simply say:
"Anything is possible to code, you just have to make it attractive to the
players," which is more or less true. So then they go a design a weather
system on paper, give it to me, and I program it in. These guys definantly
don't know how to code, but I don't see that as a drawback. They both have
never played a MUD, and I see this as a definate advantage. Of course both
have played Dungeons & Dragons for years, and read a lot of fantasy, so at
least they're on the right track.
All in all, if you want your MUD to be really successful, you need staff
that can do their job. If you want to be the head coder, be it, but I
suggest not middling in player relations unless it's really necessary. Get
PR people to do that, and I'm fairly sure they won't want to minggle with
the code. Do what *you* think is going to work, not what other people have done.
After all, how many MUDs have actually boomed? I'd say Avalon and the ones
from Simutronics (GemStone III, Dragonrealms) are about the only ones. And
they have a set staff hierachy where not everyone minggles with code, and
not everyone mingles with player relations.
Just my $0.02,
Andrew Ritchie.
---
Andrew Ritchie,
Rippon Lea Mansion and Estate
http://www.vicnet.net.au/~rlnt/
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