Do you know what?
A team, a project, anything needs to be purpose driven. There's no point making a team to think of a game you want to make. You need to know what you're doing first.
One person needs to be in charge and they have final say on what ideas will be used in the game. Everybody has to agree to respect their decision even if they disagree. It's all very well having a reason to exist but there needs to be some sort of organisation. People need clear roles and they need to know what they're doing.
I would not put a prgrammer in charge of something, neither would I tell an artist to be the boss. The person who will oversee everything needs to have a clear vision of what the team will produce. It is that person that organises and directs the efforts of the others. If someone doesn't understand the big picture then that's fine - they only need to understand what is being asked of them well enough to do their jobs.
I'm not saying the boss can't also be a programmer or an artist - I'm saying they they should understand their strengths and weaknesses. An artist may not manage technical issues very well whilst programmer's tend not to produce attractive interfaces. The best thing for the boss is if they don't try and do something that someone else is doing e.g. a boss who also knows how to program shouldn't try to - they should leave it to the people who are employed as programmers. The number two reason why the boss should just organise and not be involved with the actual work is because they will not have enough time to do a good job if they are organising things properly. The number one reason the boss should stay out of the work is that an artist doesn't want a programmer (or even another artist) how to do their job and the same goes for a programmer. Art, coding, sound, music, program structure, tools developers, 3D modellers and so on all require different ways of doing things and there's nothing worse than a boss who interferes with your work when they don't know much about what you do.
I know programmers are important, SoulMan, but they're not more important than anyone else. If I employed you as a programmer I might give you an overview of what I want a program or a particular module to do but that would be it - I'd respect that you would write the program in your own way. I wouldn't put you in charge of the artists, or anyone but yourself and maybe other more junior programmers.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of management and I don't like organisations that have more managers than staff (I've "worked" in places like that, as far as one can when you have twenty people telling you to do different things, each claiming to be more important than the other nineteen).
However, I do recognise that structure and authority get more things done than anarchy.
So, I recommend that the person who can provide the fullest description for a game they would like to make should put it on a website and do one of the following:
a) Get a team together to produce that game. The person stays out of the actual work involved (e.g. coding, modelling) but makes sure everybody knows wht they need to be doing. Also, they will need to sort out other things like maybe finding a publisher or sponsorship or buying in CDRW's to burn the game onto for paying customers.
b) The person finds someone else to "manage" the project so they can do what they're best at - programming, art or whatever. In this case the manager and the person should have a regular review to make sure that the project is proceeding according to the vision.
These don't have to be big groups and a single person can do more than one thing if they're competent at it. But this remains a positive method of creating anything if all the people involved are serious about it.
So what you have to ask yourselves is - how serious are you?
Ending a sentence with a French word is so passé
