A leader is to make sure that everyone on a team is running at peak efficiency.
By motivating them, pointing them in the right direction and most importantly, making sure the project stays on track.
The leader of a team is never going to be as good as an artist as the team’s artist, never going to be as good as a builder, as the team’s builder,etc,etc
So he/she might actively make the project worse by deciding to tamper with a member’s work.
If you need a real world example,
The art lead of the Eidos Montreal(The dudes who made Thief and Deus Ex HR/MD) doesn’t actually do any 3D modelling,sculpting,texturing,etc instead he approves/makes concepts,gets some references,etc
Ideally, at least in my opinion, roblox development adheres to a meritocratic structure.
Which would mean the most talented people doing the most work are to have the most influence on the project’s direction and the rest of the team.
Successful small indie studios operate in much the same way, and this is seen in nature too.
For example, very small animals tend to not need much of a brain, because everything just works. Instinctive reflexes of individual parts of the body do most of the thinking for them, like our knee reflex.
Of course with larger teams it’s probably another story, though industry legends (like Hideo Kojima or the late Satoru Iwata) tend to famously step in to make things exactly right.
With the average roblox dev group consisting out of only 3 or 4 people i think we should be perfectly capable of supporting each other without someone cheerleading us on the sideline.
Which is why i think having a non-developing leader is a terrible idea.
I’ve been in a lot of dev groups, and the ones with ‘leaders’ have died almost always the same way. The game isn’t going as good as we hoped, someone in the team calls quits, the leader isn’t able to fix it and has to hire someone else, everyone else gets demotivated, everyone else calls quits, game is trashed.
