I think making EVO plugins is a lot easier than most people suppose. People advertise endlessly on this board saying 'I can do graphics, but I can't do programming'. In fact, there is no programming proper in EVO plugins, since Matt Burch has already done all of it for us, and there are enough utilities out there to make even ResEdit scripting a relatively painless task -- if you know what you want to do.
Compared to, say, writing a novel or a symphony, an EVO plugin, even a major TC is quite a simple undertaking. The actual volume of text you have to write is relatively small, you're making a couple of hundred quite small pictures - far less rendering time than the time to render a 3 minute DV video clip - add to that a few sounds and manipulating the various utilities to make your story work, and you've done everything you need for a big TC.
I've read a couple of novels produced by a two person partnership, and heard some collaborative music, but, by and large, the very greatest peaks of artistic excellence in music composition, novel writing and poetry, painting, sculpture and so on are the works of individuals.
I suppose what's different about an EVO plugin is that you need a certain amount of skill in a variety of disciplines - 3d design, writing, sound recording, binary logic. But not that different - many artists are now working in multimedia, including quite sophisticated programming in script languages or even in C.
Don't get me wrong - I love working in teams. I just came out of a rock band reunion, and the sound was just awesome - far bigger and fuller than any of us could have produced on our own. However, if you want to work quickly, then you need to work alone - even if the result is rougher and less polished.
Actually, this may be a good way for a plugin developer to work - producing a draft plugin and then inspiring some excellent designer to render it, and excellent writer to rewrite the text, somebody else to proof it.
I think part of the reason why multimedia lends itself to solo working even more than music is because of the way that graphics, text and scripting interact. With three separate people, (let's say Bill, Ted and Fred), Bill might write a storyline that requires a comet to explode. He gives the task of making the graphics to Ted, and of working out how to do it with the EVO engine to Fred.
Ted spends a week making the most amazing comet-explodes graphics - although he may have a shock when techy Fred compresses them down into 256 colours. Fred spends the week trying to come up with a way of making it happen. Eventually he comes back to Bill and explains that what Bill wants isn't possible, but he could do some other things.
Bill accepts that Fred knows what he's talking about, and writes a storyline where the player has to get away from the comet and onto a planet while it explodes, and watches it in the bar as a QT movie. Unfortunately, this doesn't work with the amazing graphics that Ted has made, so he sends Ted back to the drawing board for another week... and so it goes on.
Bill, if he was working on his own, would probably have realised fairly early on that his original idea wasn't going to work, then figured out what he could do, rewritten the story to match, and then done the graphics. True, Ted's graphics would have been better, but, after having animation set number 35 rejected for technical reasons, it's fairly likely that Ted will quit the project, leaving it either with no designer, or with half Ted-quality and half Bill-quality graphics, or with a completely different style brought in by a new recruit.
Just my thoughts.
BTW, once you move out of alpha and into beta, a team is absolutely definitely the way to go - never beta test your own products.
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M A R T I N T U R N E R
