matt’s

About leadership, long-time motivation and success.

We, as a team, attended Dusmania 2001 and 2003, and we held very successful presentations in those years. In 2001, we made it into the popular German “PC Magazin”, where DVW was entitled the “most professional looking game”, and in 2003 we won the prize for the best Dusmania project, were interviewed and shown by German TV channel “3sat”, and were in the news on several popular online portals and so on and so forth.

To make a long matter short, this was the zenith of sechsta sinns efforts.

Dusmania 2006 ended on Sunday, 16th of July. Weeks and months before, all of us agreed to invest the best efforts to use this golden opportunity for a release party, but we didn’t even release a demo, nor did a presentation. In 2001 or 2003 we discussed heavily in our mailing list and discussion board at this time of the year, so close before Dusmania. This year, we had four or five postings a day, in the average. The atmosphere was relaxed, in contrast to our hectic efforts in 2003. Or, in other words, it became a bit half-hearted.

The funny thing about this is that all the DVW activities rose and fell with my personal commitment. This is not just the exaggerated opinion of myself - you can literally read from the CVS (or now: SVN) history when I wrote my thesis or when I had papers I had to learn for. I guess you would get the same impression if you would analyze the mailing list or board traffic over time. I did a lot of moderation when I had the time, I pushed as many topics as I could to get the work done. I also did a lot of work before Dusmania this year (although it was nothing compared to the years before), and this increased the overall commit rate, too.

There were other key events, indeed. mattin got bored of science fiction graphics very quickly, later had to abandon his work for some time due to health issues, and has a time-consuming employment as a lead graphic artist today. Sebastian, Jochen and Julius started studying, relocated, took some time abroad. Christopher suffered from a heavy (and constant) lack of motivation, Gregor had to deal with his unemployment and with his new job which is time-consuming, too, Dennis decided to leave because he had too many projects, Raphael left because he wanted to concentrate on his career as a professional musician.

The worse thing is that I can’t commit as much as I could back in 2003. As I wrote in an earlier post, spare time has shrunk since I started my professional work. And even if there’s a day without any overhours and any other obligations, it’s sometimes hard to concentrate on the project if I’ve been chewing over something the whole day at work. Another point is that the overall progress of DVW is not satisfactory. Finally, it’s simply demotivating to see noone else commiting to the project, neither code-wise to the repository nor in any other manner. And this is what I examine at present.

Maybe this is the reason why I started a little personal project which keeps growing quickly. It’s refreshing to do something where you don’t depend on others, and it’s refreshing to do something you didn’t do before (digging into 3D stuff, that is, never wrote a “real” 3D game yet). I might add a job posting for a graphic artist on developia.de soon because I really need some more stuff to play with. But I will talk about the details another time.

For now, I’ll get back to DVW and implement something that came to my mind while I was playing with the other project…

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