Team Trouble

First off, I've been having trouble working things through in my head, so today I'll tell you where we are on the project and the dilemmas I have.

So far, we've split the roles between the three of us and we have a general idea of how the game will play. Unfortunately, communication isn't going as well as it could, so we're not really in sync and I really don't know how it will pan out. Also, the other two have little experience in game development (one of them has made tetris with allegro and the other is a full fledged newbie), so naturally I'm nervous.

I'll explain our roles:

Our third and latest member volunteered to do the graphics. However, the reason she did so wasn't because she's good with graphics; she wants to learn graphics. Frankly, it would save time if I did it. You can't rely on someone who's still learning, especially if they're busy. I'm afraid I'll eventually have to pick up most of her load.

The second member's role is more complicated, so I'll explain. First off, we're going to load the questions and answers from an xml file. However, that's the easy part. A reference librarian performs searches through almanacs and the such on the internet, so we're basically going to create a mock-browser and a large file full of the data to display in the browser. The hard part here is collecting this data. Typing or even copy/paste is out of the question. Ideally we could use a scripting language to collect it automatically, but no one knows how. Anyway, that's his job, and he is still working on the q&a.

My role is to code the game logic. Though I previously expressed my preference to do the graphics, the game logic is even more important. I've been able to reuse a ton of my Sever code, such as the GUI, the input classes, and my state machine code, so most of my work is already done. All I have to do now is piece it all together. I'm confident that my portion will turn out fine.

I think I'll complete my portion as fast as I can so I can focus on helping the other two out. I'm afraid we might not finish in time. I never realized teamwork could be so stressful. Anyway, if anyone has any tips, please please send them my way. Thanks.

clevceo