How exactly does a mod team work?

[bananakillerBRO]

Hello there! I am currently working on a concept for a mod that will require a small team of people to work on it. However, I have no experience leading a team like this, and I don't really know how a mod team works, so I wanted to ask a few questions before I send out a call.

 

How does the dynamic work? Are there segments of people who work entirely on scripting quests while other people focus entirely on world building and writing? Is that fair?

 

How do we all edit the same .esp file? Or do we all make segments of the mod and then use FNV Edit to merge all our respective plugins into one big mod? For example, if I have two people working on a single word space how do they collaborate in real time?

 

How many jobs does one person usually have? I'm used to handling everything on my own so I don't really know what I can assign to a single person.

 

And finally, where would I post a calling? I hear the TTW forums have some good people, or would it be better to post here? Or both?

[madmongo]

I don't want to discourage you, but team mods very rarely work out.

 

What often happens is that people go into it with the best of intentions. Then some end up doing a majority of the work, while others do significantly less. Sometimes it is a lack of skill. Sometimes people just lose interest, or they find out how much work is really involved and they get overwhelmed. Sometimes real-life gets in the way and takes your time away from modding. Those who end up doing significantly more work get frustrated that the others aren't pulling their weight, and sooner or later you end up with a lot of hurt feelings and a disbanded mod team.

 

For the mod to succeed, you need a lot of things. You need a leader with a very clear vision of what the mod is all about, and importantly, what its limits are. It is very easy to dive into a mod with a great idea, only to find out that it's going to take much, much longer than you thought. The team leader needs good organizational skills, and good team skills in general, like motivating people, keeping things on track, figuring out realistic schedules based on the performance of team members, that sort of thing.

 

How things get split up depends on your team. If someone is good at creating worldspace exteriors, then you'll want to assign them the worldspace creation. If someone is good at modeling and texturing, you'll assign them to that. If you are fortunate to have people who are skilled at multiple things, then you just split things up according to their interests, and if there are things that multiple people want to do, that's where the team leadership comes in and the team leader has to come up with some fair method to assign tasks so that all the work gets done and no one feels that they didn't get to do the fun stuff. You will also probably have a few team members who have limited skills. It is up to you as team leader to find tasks for them to do that are within their skill set so that they can be productive.

 

A lot of things can be done just by splitting things up so that people aren't stomping all over each other. For example, you can have one team member creating the exterior worldspace, then have another team member creating interiors, and a third writing scripts. You can load two mods simultaneously and copy interiors from one to the other, so that's easy to merge. Scripts can also just be copied and pasted.

 

If you want to get fancy, the GECK does have a thing called Version Control built into it. I've never used it, but you can read through what it does and how to set it up here:

http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php?title=Version_Control

 

Good luck. I personally am working on a couple of very large mods that probably should be done with teams. I am very leery of working with a team though, so they are taking darn near forever to complete. I keep getting distracted by other mods that I want to make, which doesn't help.