End Of Part I

All of these points may seem painfully obvious when written down, but they're much harder to spot when it's your team and yourself. Given that, the most important thing you can do to ensure success during the design phase is to listen to your team members, look for clues, and constantly monitor what's going on. It definitely takes some hard work. Far too many great ideas and great teams have fizzled out over the years because of bad group dynamics, poor team leaders, and other reasons, and while they all have their own unique reasons for calling it quits, after seeing so many, patterns begin to emerge. These patterns are the basis of these two articles.

This is the end of part one. Stay tuned for part 2…

Mason McCuskey is the leader of Spin Studios, a game development team working to break into the industry by creating a great game, Quaternion, and getting it published. He looks forward to your suggestions and comments, and can be reached at mason@spin-studios.com.