Project Management + Inspiration

[Bill]

Hello there,

Perhaps I am missing something, but as I am using the project management, I have a team making 1-2 products and only focusing on sequels etc. This part I get and am fine with.

The other part that I am struggling with now though, is that all the products end up with 2/5 or 3/5 due to terrible inspiration.

How am I to combine project management and still have a balance with the inspiration factor?

Any suggestions? Thank you.

[ChrispyNut]

I've been (successfully) experimenting with having the lead designer in a team by themselves or just 1-2 others and having them only do 4 or so hours a day and having a second design team take up the slack with putting the real work in to get through the design phase.
EDIT: This hasn't worked in further testing, there may be a ratio of time spent on design to Lead Designer time spent. The less time the lead spends as a percentage/ratio, the worse the creativity.

[Bill]

Interesting idea. I'll try to do that and just reduce the lead's hours. Thanks.

[nosedigger]

Just a few observations:
1 full bar of inspiration is enough for first design phase where (only) the Lead designer's creativity is used and depleted. Since hired employees can go sick, vacation etc. this can really impact final products creativity score, so I use only my four founders as Lead designs, just to be extra sure this doesn't happen.
When I do manual project, it always Outstanding/Visionary, however, when I give it to PM, sometimes I got "Good"

Second thing, it tames several days/months of not doing DESIGN jobs for creativity to replenish. So mine design teams are specialized designers (3* in two skills) and secondary developers (2* in several skills) so during project project development, they will first design, then code -> this will allow your Lead to replenish creativity bar to full, so he/she can start on next project.

So, I think what are you experiencing (from what you wrote), is that your design team will create one after another project/sequel, working all the time only on designing, and the Lead designer (even when not doing lead design) can't replenish his creativity bar.

Note: game will alert you that a Lead designer is working with no creativity

[Bill]

So how would you suggest I break up his routine? What should I have my leader do? I can't assign multiple leaders. Should I put multiple design teams?

[ChrispyNut]

I have edited my comment. It didn't produce reliable and consistent results.
Lead designers just seem so finicky.

[nosedigger]

Originally posted by Bill:

So how would you suggest I break up his routine? What should I have my leader do? I can't assign multiple leaders. Should I put multiple design teams?

Because of this, I don't allow PM to automatically produce sequels. This is the simplest fix.

Here's my full example of one project management:
Create software how you want and in the end send it to PM to develop it (button on the bottom). I'm not sure that PM will use latest tech or max interest/feature ratio, etc, so I always do it like this to be safe.

When creating PM, I assign one design team which will do design and coding, and two coding+art teams additional. As I said, design team will do design then coding, and during that time my Lead designer (one of founders) will refill creativity. After PM releases product, next day I create sequel for different IP (I did DnD, next is Doom) and that's it.

Design team should be (early) 1 Lead/Design, 1 Founder, 3-5 designer with 3* in system, 2d, audio, and 2* in all of those for coding.
Development team will be 1 Lead/Code, 5 coders with 3* in sys, 2d, audio (and maybe 1-2* in art as secondary), and 4 artist/coders 3* in 2d or audio and several 2* in coding sys+2d+audio.

This way I cover everything and I'm sure product will be delivered in 6 months tops (except OS). I start creating sequels to target full 3 years from release, because of this, each of my PM will deliver 1 sequel per year, covering 3 IP's in that cycle.

Once again, to avoid having crappy sequels, disable "Automatically produce" checkbox in PM settings menu, dont be lazy, design each of the products to be with latest features and tech. This is a surefire way not to get average/bad quality products from PM.

[Bill]

So having too many IPs done by PM doesn't actually work out well at all. And ultimately, it seems that though the automation is there to help, it is in fact penalising you for being lazy. Whereas those 3/5 and 2/5 releases will still generate some money, it's nowhere near what a 4/5 or 5/5 release would yield if you manage it all yourself.

I wonder if there's going to be some option for that to be factored in to PM in the future?

[nosedigger]

EDIT: How long is your development period set in PM ? I always increase it to 130%, this way coders have more time to finish development and enough time to test it for bugs. That's the only other way to explain why are you getting average product, beside Lead designer not having full bar of creativity, or he/she is absent during first iteration of design phase.

Look at it from the real world perspective, when is something automated and done by others better than doing it yourself ? There is even saying :D

Joke aside, there is no limitation how many people you can trow at the project, dev implemented old IT saying "Project manager is person who thinks that 9 mothers can give birth to baby in one month", so the game is off balanced there. So to counter balance it, you can automatize sequel development, but it will depend on PM, Lead designer, which are NPC and sometimes you will get average product, because you are not there to control every aspect of process. This gives at least some level of realism to the game.

Also as you can see, all of the AI have several IP's that they work on in previous years, which is basically how companies work. They will usually produce one or two product categories (except games, they will develop several) and rarely will you see them having more than 4 original (active) IPs.

[Hu Flung Dung]

You can change the lead designer from the PM screen. Down the bottom of the PM window where it says "projects" you will see your software being made by the team. If you scroll right you'll see the words "lead designer". Click it and change. Your PM team will surely have a few replacements or if not you may have to hire one.
Edit - I noticed you can only change a lead designer when the software is in the design phase... at least it appears that way. Clicking "lead designer" on an IP in alpha phase had no affect.

[Geomancer-HT]

Originally posted by nosedigger:

EDIT: How long is your development period set in PM ? I always increase it to 130%, this way coders have more time to finish development and enough time to test it for bugs. That's the only other way to explain why are you getting average product, beside Lead designer not having full bar of creativity, or he/she is absent during first iteration of design phase.

Look at it from the real world perspective, when is something automated and done by others better than doing it yourself ? There is even saying :D

Joke aside, there is no limitation how many people you can trow at the project, dev implemented old IT saying "Project manager is person who thinks that 9 mothers can give birth to baby in one month", so the game is off balanced there. So to counter balance it, you can automatize sequel development, but it will depend on PM, Lead designer, which are NPC and sometimes you will get average product, because you are not there to control every aspect of process. This gives at least some level of realism to the game.

Also as you can see, all of the AI have several IP's that they work on in previous years, which is basically how companies work. They will usually produce one or two product categories (except games, they will develop several) and rarely will you see them having more than 4 original (active) IPs.

The idea of automation would be yeah, the NPCs can fail and deliver average products, but the game should have those NPCs come and report to me and if I want to extend the project because it's lacking polish, that should be fully doable, the same as releasing early a broken software.

I'm delegating the work but not the important decisions. Just as it works on any company in the world... you will have to deal with project management bull**** but that should also be part of the game, them telling you what you want to hear...

[nosedigger]

Originally posted by VoxxysTale:

I've been using Democracy 3 as a simulation tool to better understand tricky scenarios in project management public sector[mantralis.co.uk] roles. It’s been pretty handy for testing the impact of policies and budget decisions without real-world consequences.

Wow, I never thought South Park predicting the future was true, but here we are. This seems like an AI or bot, posting comments in Discussions, relevant to the name, but with advertisement link in text. I've checked the account's post, all of them are like this. For a moment I actually thought this is a legit person, but now I see it's a paid ad xD

EDIT: Yeah, also report it, once you check the posts from the account