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sauerbraten organizational changes

by Aardappel_ on 09/16/2006 21:47, 39 messages, last message: 12/02/2006 20:34, 3795 views, last view: 05/04/2024 14:46

As most of you know the sauerbraten has sofar operated using a very shallow hierarchy: there's me as tech/design/art director, and I deal with every contributor individually and talk with them down to the pixel what I want for the game. This has worked well keeping a single vision and ensuring the right progress, but its also rather clumsy.

So slowly I want to move to a position where I am not calling all the shots anymore. I will still hold the central vision, but for day to day content production others can do stuff.

These people have already been doing this to some extend, so this is just formalizing what they do. Introducing:

Lead Artist, makkE!
makkE understands the sauer art vision well, and knows how to make effective improvements. All art people in the team can work with him to make the game even prettier! :)

Lead Level Designer, Kurtis!
Noone knows sauer editing like Kurt, not even I do. Without his maps, sauer would never have moved forward so fast. Work with him to get the highest quality maps done for the FPS or the RPG!

Lead Programmer, Eihrul!
This should come as no suprise... from just doing enet he's slowly getting his hands into every part of the engine, and rather effectively so.

I may add other roles in the future, particularly I'll need to coordinate the many people that want to improve on sound.

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Also, now may be as good a time as ever to tell you all that me & eihrul have been brewing evil plans to form a company together. We have been writing and discussing software together for some 7(?) years or so now, and I don't know any programmer who I'd rather work with. We reckon we're a pretty effective team together, so our idea is to formalize that into a company and see if the stuff we already do can be made in to cold hard cash :)

This doesn't affect the sauerbraten project all that much, and when it does, only in a good way. Sauerbraten will stay an independent open source project from the company, with all the same rules and licenses as before, only now it just so happens that the 2 biggest technical contributors also have a company together. This may mean that now or in the future we can dedicate more focussed resources to sauer.

Most of our plans for generating cash lie in projects outside of Sauerbraten, but we have one idea that we may try, and that is to try the usual open source business model: charge for support. So we can offer sauer for free under ZLIB to small companies as before, but when they then want the assurance of technical backing from the creators, they can pay us for that. Not sure if that will work, but hey, we can try right?

Overal it should only have the effect of giving sauer more focussed development, attracting more people, and generating more commercial opportunities for community members. Exciting stuff? We shall see..

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by Sauceofallevils.. on 09/19/2006 05:26

I wish you all the luck in the world Aardappel and eihrul, you are trully great programers! I was just curious, what kind of things are you planning on programing to make money? Any random ideas, for the future? Well regardless, if it seems useful and I see your names on it, I'll probably purchase it:) I hope the future brings you much success!