Looking for developers and artists/mappers

edited in Jobs
Hey guys, a friend and I are about to start creating a game based on the source engine. I know ideas don't mean much but I asked on the steam community on Steam Green Light and they they liked it. We would appreciate an artist/mapper and a C++ programmer (Source is in C++) to help us. This isn't that urgent because the website skills we have now wil do but somebody with experience in we programming would be great.

Comments

  • edited
    Hi Charly! Could you link us to your Greenlight concept (it's a bit premature to ask for help before you've really explained what you want to do and why).

    [Edit, I assume you are talking about your Valve Kart Racing?]



  • Hey man, as a working professional, and a lot of experience freelancing, I just need to let you know that you are going to battle to find help from this post. You need to provide more information. Some of the basics you did not cover:

    1) Is this paid work or not paid work.
    1.1) If this (who am I fooling of course its not paid) then you need to be open about your ideas from the start. No one is going to dedicate a year and a half / 2 years of their life to a "you will get profits" scheme based on the information you have given in this post.

    2) What is this?
    Is the game 2D or 3D? Is it a First person shooter or is it a JRPG?

    What sort of skillsets are you looking for? Just saying we need an artist doesn't work. If you haven't started the project yet you will need someone who can draw. and lead the project. If this is not paid work, then the type of people that are going to join your project are people who can't find work in the first place. IE people with a very limited skillset or don't have a lot of experience. You don't want someone who can only unwrap and texture with photos, if you don't have any models or even concepts for models. This would be different if it was paid work because then you can just hire someone who will meet your requirements. This is all assuming you are not famous or have a ridiculous portfolio filled with shit hot awesome games.

    What is the project called?

    Do you have a website?

    Do you have any credentials?

    What is your company called?

    Hope you come right anyway!
    Word

  • @charly, you'll find some AWESOME insights into getting your idea made in this article, we've all read it, and we always recommend people to read it: http://makegamessa.com/discussion/6/gamedev-newcomer-faq
  • Thanks, here is the link to the green light page.

    @bevis Take a look at this.
    It's called VRE. No, not yet. The website is being built at the moment. We haven't officially started a game company and we are still deciding on our name.

    EDIT: since I uploaded the picture and written the post there has been 1 more like and favourite.
  • My friend seems to have bailed on me. I want to go into a partnership with somebody and do the work 50/50 and maybe also start a small indie company if this game goes well.
  • @Charly, just to throw my 2c in as well. Forget all the company stuff and partnerships and everything else(for now at least). Spend your time and effort creating something to test and get feedback on. I don't know how much experience you have with game dev, but it doesn't start with creating a company. It starts with creating a game and gaining experience.

    And I have to ask, if you are looking for an artist and a coder, what exactly is it that you will do?
  • @Rigormortis I totally agree. I'm not sure if this will be possible to do by myself so that's why I asked the community if they would like join me on this. I suppose I might be able to push out a beta by myself but it might take some time.
  • @charly you don't need to beta or alpha anything yourself, you just need to make a start yourself, and if that start is substantial enough you'll be able to get people interested.

    As it is now you have couple of seemingly repurposed screenshots and a paragraph of text. If you were a developer, would you commit yourself a year or so of your own time to that project without any guarantee of money?

    Talking about beta before you have an alpha is too soon.
    Talking about an alpha before you have any gameplay is too soon.
    Talking about gameplay before you have a prototype is too soon.

    I sincerely recommend you read this if you haven't yet:
    http://makegamessa.com/discussion/6/gamedev-newcomer-faq

    Good luck for your making a game! :) We all in this to make games, I've spent 3 months now learning code from scratch and have a few effed up prototypes behind me, and I'll be learning for a lot longer to come. It's a process and I'll be sticking to it :)
  • Tuism said:
    @charly you don't need to beta or alpha anything yourself, you just need to make a start yourself, and if that start is substantial enough you'll be able to get people interested.
    This is more along the lines of what I meant. Start something. You haven't told me what your background is, so I can't give specific advice, but use what you already have and creating something. Paper prototypes are also good. The idea is to get started on what you want the game to feel like and learn how to do that as you go along.

    The community is definitely here to provide advice. And I'm sure they will help where they can. But they are also working on their own stuff that they find interesting or need to do.

    Start hashing out the idea with prototypes and post them here. You'll have some feedback to work from and some exposure to other people that might want to join in and help.
  • I know I should be focusing on the game at the moment but I was away from my home PC for a while and I threw this together in a short while. www.tbolmc.com It was an old domain from one of my old websites.
  • I'm curious, what does that website get you? How does it move you closer to having an actual game people can play?
  • edited
    @dislekcia
    I know I should be focusing on the game at the moment but I was away from my home PC for a while
    I needed to kill some time.
  • edited
    @charly I also want people to help with my game Grave Days. I personally haven't tried finding someone online like this, but I imagine that your success rate won't be too good. Don't you maybe have any friends that can help you? I spent a few days training a friend to help and he ended up not helping. It is very difficult for you to help someone follow your own goals and dreams, especially if you can't promise them payment.

    Right now, I have found an artist (a friend again), who will help me because she is excited about working on it, not about getting paid for it. I think this route is better for finding someone to help if you can't pay.

    Good luck

    ** oh, and get a prototype of the game out
  • Do you think if I push out a prototype it might attract some attention from people that might want to join me? I've been looking for ages for a place I can ask valve if it's ok if I do this with their game, does anyone have any idea?
  • Do you think if I push out a prototype it might attract some attention from people that might want to join me?
    A prototype shows me that you're serious. You're not just talk: you've actually put something together that shows the direction you're aiming to take your project, and I can evaluate whether your judgement of whether something is fun to play (and fun to work on) is similar to mine.

    A prototype shows me that you have enough skill to make something. This means that you're not merely an "ideas" person (like about 1+ billion other people); that you'd actually be able to work on the project, and I wouldn't, somehow, end up doing all the work... on your project... instead of any of the hundreds of ideas that I have myself.

    A prototype that has shitty art but is fun to play... IS ACTUALLY AWESOME. Because it gives me, as an artist, pretty much a blank slate with which to work, and I get to feel as if I can "own" my work. I'm not just some monkey churning out sprites/models/textures, but I can be an artist, and exercise lots of creative freedom.

    A prototype that gets me excited makes me inclined to tell my friends about it. Then, if I don't have time to work on it, I may have a friend or two who does the kind of art your game could use that I could refer.

    If you don't have a super fun prototype, then you should work on making one. Or have lots and lots of money to throw at me. Because otherwise you have exactly 0% chance of getting my help. :)
    I've been looking for ages for a place I can ask valve if it's ok if I do this with their game, does anyone have any idea?
    Um. It's on their website. Just ask them. http://www.valvesoftware.com/contact/

    I've mailed individual employees before, and they've been super polite and passionate, sending me SUPER MASSIVE GIANT WALL OF TEXT ESSAYS in response to my questions. Maybe I was just lucky and emailed super polite, passionate, SUPER MASSIVE GIANT WALL OF TEXT ESSAY writers. Or maybe Valve is made up of super awesome people.
  • And once more, if you haven't read this yet, I'm gonna just pretty much ignore you, cos it sounds like you're not taking advice seriously and am just waiting for someone to do your bidding without putting in actual effort yourself.

    http://makegamessa.com/discussion/6/gamedev-newcomer-faq

    Again, good luck.
  • edited
    I've been looking for ages for a place I can ask valve if it's ok if I do this with their game, does anyone have any idea?
    General rule when dealing with other peoples IP: If you are going to make money out of it, it's not cool, and do not expect permission to use the IP. I wouldn't bother asking Valve yet, because you have nothing to show them. Once you have an awesome playable prototype, then you can worry about approaching them. It is much easier to get people permission to use the IP if you can show you will be able to treat the IP with a level of respect and skill, unless you have an amazing portfolio of work, no one would give you the rights to use the IP until you have something to show for it.

    Next question, why does it need to be Valve's exact characters? I can see the general appeal (by that I mean, I get the concept) but you are getting ahead of yourself, first you need a prototype of a racing game, that broadly implements some of the skills/abilities that you want to include to see if it'll be fun.

    Good luck!
  • edited
    Valve is made up of super awesome people.
    This.

    So much this.

    That said, not cool trying to sell a game that uses their IP and characters. Making a freely available mod that has kart-racing Garys Mod-enabled characters in it? Totally cool. Because you're not asking people to pay you to use other people's work that they then get nothing for.

    So yeah, make a racing game. The ragdolls on top of the carts have absolutely 0 gameplay impact, so why bother thinking about them at all right now? Be careful that you're not setting yourself up with an automatic excuse to not make a game: It's far too easy to try to blame people for "not letting you use their characters" when that's not even a real constraint.

    Have you messed with Garys Mod at all, BTW?
  • Thank you all, work has begun on the prototype. I know I shouldn't be bothered by this any time soon but how would I create a login system like minecraft. This is incase I make a different game and I don't want to use steam. The user would be able to buy an account on the website and then to run the game he must login. When he tries to login it will check the sever if there is an account with those details. Would I need to learn a web language or would it be better to hire somebody. They would probably charge a huge amount of money. Again, I know I'm like 10 steps ahead of myself.
  • @charly: Login systems like that aren't too hard to cobble together. Yeah, you need to know your way around a server-side language (we use PHP) and a couple of security issues, but I wouldn't worry about that now. I'm pretty sure that we'd be able to make the system that runs DD (payments, wordpress integration and all) available to anyone that was looking to sell something awesome :)

    Don't waste time thinking about how to "protect" your game when you don't have a game yet. Plus, be aware that your first few games are probably not going to be sellable material anyway, they're more about building up experience. How often was the first time you tried to make anything on par with the stuff you'd pick up in shops? ... I know it's taken years and years for my cooking to not make me want to head out to pick up takeaways.
  • @dislekcia
    When my game is ready I'm not sure what I should make it available on. Steam or myself, hmmm.
    Steam
    Pros:
    Good exposure
    No need to advertise the game much
    handles payments and hosting of the game
    Secure
    Cons:
    They take something like 30%
    I will be restricted by their regulations (if they have any)

    Doing it myself:
    Pros:
    Get to keep 100%
    Probably not as secure as Steam
    Cons:
    Need to pay a PHP programmer (A pro for you :D)
    Have to host the game (I already have a VPS which I use for Apache and 1 or 2 private game servers)

    Would WordPress be able to work commercially? What would be a rough estimate of how much you would charge to set up a system like this? (You can PM it to me) I know I shouldn't be thinking about these things yet but my mind doesn't work like that :P
  • @Charly,

    The problem is that you are worrying about selling a game which doesn't exist yet, and probably wont be sellable. Get a game that is worth playing first. The first game you make will not be that game. Heck the 100th game you make might not be that game. It takes a lot of discipline, but try to focus on making the game and getting that experience. The money will follow after that.
  • edited
    Just make a game! Thinking about it won't help, thinking about selling it won't help. You won't believe what I'm saying because you think "what he says doesn't apply to me, I'm special, and I'm gonna be ready for all that and my first game will be awesome and make millions because my idea is special and awesome".

    We are all special. So we are all not exceptions to the norm. And the norm is make a cool game first, and other stuff will naturally follow.

    So trust me, in fact not me but everyone here. Just MAKE A GAME FIRST. Forget everything else.

    Just out of curiosity, what's your day job @charly?

    (I know I said I'll ignore this but I just can't seem to, arrgh)
  • edited
    @charly: Besides putting the cart waaaaaaaaaaaaay before the horse, asking if you should focus on Steam or your own site is a completely moot question. You should always do both when given the opportunity.

    You can't get a game on Steam without having something you can prove people really like anyway, either through direct Steam contacts (super fucking rare and difficult to make happen from SA, I know because that's what we did) or through Greenlight. Both require that you have an awesome game playable by at least SOME people first. Your best bet is to actually make something that loads of people can get hold of and play easily actually, otherwise generating enough noise to be visible is really, really hard.

    Nobody expects you to have epic perspective on this sort of stuff yet, that's what learning is for, plus I know how alluring the idea of selling a game is. But the amount of time and effort that goes into building a website or handling PayPal sales systems is utterly trivial compared to the act of building the game. Be careful that you're not falling in love with an idea of success instead of enjoying the journey there.
    Thanked by 1hermantulleken
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