I'm having trouble discussing with my team main mapper/designer for a mod, mainly because we are viewing our project from different sides - technical and artistic (and also because of my poor spoken English I have to admit). As of now, I'm the only coder in the team and he is the main mapper and idea guy. In fact we haven't done anything tangible yet, due to a merging with an established team that didn't work, after which we've decided to go on our own. Now, I'm feeling like my friend is way overconfident in our abilities, considering this would be my very first mod project, and he's been doing some mapping for a long time, but never participated in a mod himself. Basically he wants to pull of something similar to Natural Selection, but much larger in scope - as it includes fps, rts and rpg features -, from scratch and on time for the third submission in the Unreal mod contest. He is in charge of writing a design doc but hasn't sent anything yet, everything is pretty much in his head for now. I already told him that he shouldn't pin his hopes on this contest because there is no way a team of inexperienced modders would pull off something that huge in six months. Not to mention the fact that both of us and most of our potential recruits are going back to school in September. We had a meeting last week, and he said something in the lines of "codinging a character/multiclass system would be relatively simple", which made me wonder if he even had an idea of what he was talking about. Now this guy isn't just good at suggesting ideas, I've seen his work and he is quite good at making maps. But I have the feeling we won't get anywhere unless he accepts to slow down a bit, which I doubt he will do.
Is it exaggerating to say that a team shouldn't attempt such a mod as a first project, most of the team members or potential members being new to the modding scene? Have you encountered similar problems? How did you deal with them? Was it inappropriate to start this thread here?
Is it exaggerating to say that a team shouldn't attempt such a mod as a first project, most of the team members or potential members being new to the modding scene? Have you encountered similar problems? How did you deal with them? Was it inappropriate to start this thread here?