As a developer, how does your team function and get along?

[Black Sands Entertainment]

I will give my example first. I run a team developing Black Sands and it consist of the following:

• 1 artist - does BGs, CGs, Animations
• 2 programmers - one does the core mechanics and script, the other does special effects.
• 1 composer - makes musical tracks and undertones
• 2 voice actors.
• 1 co-writer which handles proofreading, rewriting, and editing of both Legends of the Rift and Sons of Nibiru

Throughout the development, we never argue about roles. It seems that the way I handle responsibilities and critiques seems to be acceptable for the group as a whole. Everyone has their own task and never need to do someone else' work. 

I keep my artist happy by allowing him pure freedom to design everything as he sees fit so long as he sticks to a couple of core concepts.

I never ask people to overhaul their work unless they notice something glaring. As a result, they most of the time spot something and jump head over heel to fix it without me demanding it.

My composer has freedom to make songs but at first, he didnt understand VN music. It took a while for him to understand the repetitive aspect of it but now he is knocking songs out every 2 weeks.

My voice actors as doing a damn good job staying in character and I gave them complete freedom to change up ANY LINES that were not deliverable in character or unnatural sounding. This made our lines sound way better in conversation then originally written. We then change those lines in the script to fit the narrative.

Finally my writer is given 100% freedom to embellish on any chapter I create. He can make it super wordy like a lord of the rings description and I let it fly. As a result, he keeps motivated to push more content whenever it is available. In the end, I am happy that I am not dealing with any drama at all with my team and I am wondering what you other devs are doing and how management is going for you?

[Arcadeotic]

That is pretty much a perfect team concept for an indie dev

And of course, the leader has to have his shit together, know the goals and milestones, and naturally, be a good leader in general

[Diamon]

Actually I'm more the directing type actually I guess, I often end up trying to give as much directions as I can, and see if my teammates are good with it, if they are not I try to explain my reasoning about why I think we should do things this way, and if they disagree we try to look for a different solution together. Overall it worked nicely so far (had to compromise from time to time though), and discussions often end up improving even more the original idea proposed.