Depends wether or not the AD is respectworthy and knows what he's talking about. There are a lot of AD's in this bizz that are totally useless imo. There are some goodn's tho. But listening to him blindly without question just 'cos he's the AD? Nah ( from experience ). If we did that on our team we'd never fit the game…
I personally love the idea of small teams developing and publishing their own games. Albeit, I know this can be extremely hard to do, but with new applications coming out - like Steam - this is becoming more and more easier. Now as for the art side of production directly: 1.) I agree on having a programmer specifically…