Posted: 11th Jun 2003 23:36
Honesty's the best policy.
I had a not-quite-a-friend who was like that...he was more of a "I want to start a team, I have the info, but I need so-and-so and this-and-that" guy, which is why I don't quite call him a friend. More of a working acquaintance. Anyway, this was back in 1998 or so, and he was wanting to do a little something with some open-source game engine. I started off being one of the artists.
Next thing I know, I'm also an assistant coder. Then I'm also an assistant level designer. Then an assistant storyboarder. I'm starting to get suspicious at all the hats he's giving me to wear, and I start asking where the rest of the team is. He sort of deals with it in an evasive manner...like, he'll say "Oh, so-and-so's had to take a temporary break" or "The guy normally responsible for that needs help because he's swamped" or whatever.
Eventually he suddenly tells me I'm responsible for the whole game because he "wants to abandon the dated open source technology and start from scratch with a new team who doesn't shirk their responsibilities." So he wanted me to code the engine, do the sprites, textures, and models, plus the levels. And for that, I would get a staggering 50% of the net royalties. So I ask him what exactly it is he's gonna be doing to justify his 50% cut, and he says "Oh, I'll be doing all the marketing and promotional work!"
Fair enough. Coding was fun enough on its own at the time. But then the unrealistic and silly demands started to come. He described Neverwinter Nights perfectly before it came out, and he wanted me to do it all in six months, with a working rough draft within three months. Of course, I'm beginning to wonder if he's got a crack habit he isn't telling me about.
So I started off by creating highly optimized data structures and the beginnings of a networking system based on the Winsock libraries, plus creating an incredibly tight code port of a paper-and-dice roleplaying game ruleset to power the task resolution. I also worked on a "console" dealie with a pretty sweet parser to verify and proof the netcode over a MUD-like prototype, and which would later serve as an in-game console once the graphical end of it was plugged into the code. I figured for the sake of actually having a working prototype, 2D graphics in the background of the console would do...kind of like a cut-down Ultima Online meets GemStone III. 3D stuff could always come later.
About a month and a half later, I had the basics working. You couldn't really do much beyond walking around in a text console and beating people senseless barehanded in a MUD. (I hadn't included any weapons or armor. I didn't feel it was necessary for a networking proof.)
He gets panicky and starts berating me about it "not being what he expected" and how "it's supposed to be 3D and fully functional"
and how "Neverwinter Nights stole my idea and they have a headstart on us, you need to get busy so we can compete, or we're doomed!"
Of course, I'm all "No shit, Buckwheat, it's a networking proof, we have a pretty good framework for that." It was totally lost on him, and he was just freaking out about "I didn't think it was going to be like that, this project isn't gonna succeed!"
Then he calms down and starts demanding I finish a working 3D proof within three weeks. And he starts demanding to see my code (This guy isn't a programmer, he doesn't know very much about it), and he starts trying to micromanage the code side of it. You know, like "Why are you rolling hundreds of dice before initializing the game engine? You should roll them in realtime!" and "You shouldn't precompile sin and cos tables, that's cheating", and my favorite, "Where's the 3D code? Is it all this 'BitBlt' stuff?".
Annoying pissant stuff like that. Went on for about two and a half weeks before my patience finally evaporated.
I told him "Either you let me code this engine as I see fit, conforming to your written parameters, or you can F--- off and do it all yourself, because I've had it with your tired little wannabe 'I'm-the-next-John-Carmack!' dramatics."
He finally shut up, but by that time I was already so sick of the project and his utter cluelessness that I told him I wasn't having anything more to do with it. He asked me for the code I'd done up to that point, and I told him to go to hell because I had done practically all of the work myself while all he did was bitch, moan, whine, and panic.
At the risk of sounding cliche, at the moment when I finally told him off for good, I felt like a load was taken off my shoulders. Since then, I've politely turned down around 8 or 9 offers to join a game development team after reading their proposals, because it just isn't worth stressing yourself out for someone else who really doesn't have a clue.
-Misanthrope
