(some of) What Lyllus Learned ...about Age Building as a team

I was a latecomer in the building of Adrael, but I had a previous experience with an age building team, with the Pradetsav project. The Age of Pradetsav was born within the Italian community and – in hindsight – it was doomed from the beginning. We had a forum dedicated to the project, which started, as usual, by discussing the story. We had a lot of ideas, some of which were really sound, and we tried our best to harmonize and blend all these ideas in a single design. We succeeded, but at the price of an age too big and complex even on the drawing board. Then, I would have to do all 3d modelling alone, and we had nobody with any experience with programming. On the positive side, I can say that we all cooperated well, but eventually the whole project came slowly to a halt, and it never moved since.

When I was invited to enter in the Adrael team, I found a completely different situation. There were three or four modellers already working on various assets, while just one person was responsible for the story and another one for the programming. I'm not saying that everything was silk-smooth, but the team was steadily working with encouraging results.

Personally, I had many troubles in settling in. To begin with, I was not familiar enough with the English language, and I had hard times in following discussions in an English-speaking forum. Moreover, all my modelling was done with 3d Studio Max, while the age was being built with Blender and PyPRP (the only option at the time for converting graphics files into playable URU ages). Also, I had to learn to use far less polygons than I was used to. But I kept going and learning, with the help of other team members. As is many times the case, learning and teaching were intertwined, and they were the better part of my whole experience with Adrael.

If I have to draw a lesson from the comparison between Pradetsav and Adrael team, I would say this: a team must have at least one member proficient with all main phases of age building, and all team members must be willing to share what they know and what they discover while going along.

- Lyllus, June 2011
(Translation from the Italian by Clat)