Let’s talk a bit about how the original Grimoire Assembly Forge team got organized and managed to work together despite being scattered throughout the world. While initially expected to be a tight-knit group by project leads Jocchan, thetrin and Mik2121, the volunteer list soon passed the 100 mark within days of the official thread’s creation. Danthrax and Earthstrike soon joined as producers to help manage the team. Once Will Goldstone became the lead coder, the game was officially running on the Unity engine. Team leads were assigned soon after that; tasked with watching over and guiding the volunteers within their own field of expertise.

The team became a sort of onion-like hierarchy with four concentric layers. The project leads were at the inner core, and together with the producers and Will, they formed the core team. Both layers were specifically meant to take the most important decisions and give the game direction, something much easier with a smaller number of people. The team leads are the third layer in the hierarchy. As the name implies, each one had a different team to manage and give assignments to. This allowed each team, whose collective was the fourth and final layer, to work independently.

Being a distributed team working for free over a long period of time meant that everything was inherently very dynamic. Contributors joined and left constantly, even core members, which led to significant changes over time, but the solid structure underneath allowed for the stability of the team to not get disrupted in the process, and kept the project going regardless.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 22nd, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Main News.