StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Okay, so you're a guy with what you think is a great new idea for a video game. Problem: you have no skill at coding, no artistic ability, no dev company. All you have is a pile of money and a dream.

What can you do, besides give up and go back to your day job? Are there 'freelance' dev teams-for-hire that will create simple games on commission? Are there sources for the underskilled but overachieving to draw on to get their vision realized? Nests of young programmers and artists looking for a benefactor and a project to pad their resumes with?

What kind of game? It's much easier to get a few people together to build something in Actionscript 3 than it is to make a full, 3D game that is supposed to compete in the big-leagues with commercial releases. Depending on how much money, you could simply purchase an existing developer, or you could presumably contact them and ask them if they would be willing to make something for you in exchange for funding.

As far as I know, developers often seek out publishers to fund their games. That said, a man with a pile of money is a long way from a publisher. There must be some way that publishers get games they want made done, as in the "I have this movie license, someone please make it for me". Excluding wholly owned dev teams, obviously.

How big is your pile of money?

If it's big enough and your dream doesn't involve any pre-existing franchises (or if it's mega-big and it does,) you can almost certainly commission a big-name studio. It would be unorthodox, to be sure, but I doubt any studio would say "no" if someone has an idea to pitch to them and is willing to sink the entire development cost themselves to get their name in the credits and a slice of the final pie. They might be busy at the moment, though, so you might have a wait. But you're talking probably a hundred million or more for this.

If your dream isn't so ambitious and neither is your cash-pile, you can go to the low end of the scale: Flash game makers. Start hunting Newgrounds for games which evidence a level of competency and ability you like and think is within your budget. At this range you're going to have to hunt down the individuals involved; artist, programmer, musician, all of whom may or may not be one in the same. You can save on the money by using free music under their use-for-noncommercial-reasons from the Newgrounds Audio portal if you don't want to charge money for the game, or even find secondary people like talented-but-unknown artists/musicians looking to attach their names to a project that stands a good chance of going somewhere for free.

At this level, the scope of your dream will have to be scaled back; you can forget about awe-inspiring bioluminescent 3d environments that make you go "wow," but you should be able to pull it off for a grand at the most. You could also try getting sponsorship from one of those asshole sites like Kongregate who'll let you put it everywhere provided the versions you put on other sites like Newgrounds are crippled in some way so that their site has the only full version.

Good point. I could hire Bob the Coder to do a Tetris clone. Let's say something that would have stood as state of the art ten years ago; Half-Life and its contemporaries.

And let's say that the pile of money isn't Bill Gates; rather, it's middle-class project funds, meaning no more than $50,000.

I apologize for not being more specific.

You could try to approach a small, no-name dev with it. Alternatively, you could cheat a bit and get university undergrads to do it for you on the cheap as part of their assessment. At UTAS, we have ICT Projects in final year computing that involve being contracted out to companies to meet their needs, working in groups to get the thing done on time.

We recently added a games degree, and there is a "Games Project" listing....

For contractors, this is where I'd look first:

http://www.gamasutra.com/contractors/co ... pany_name=

Lemme tell you straight out--there are nearly no ideas so amazing that a development team will cede all creative control just for 50k. 50k isn't even a single person's yearly salary, so you're talking about making a game that will require no more than two people be paid for three months time, and must be done to your requirements.

So no, I don't think it's possible, unless you're willing to hire a single individual who does the entire thing and are willing to accept the graphics and code being minimalistic to accommodate for the auteur-style of game development.

Right... but the level of quality was listed as thus:

"Let's say something that would have stood as state of the art ten years ago; Half-Life and its contemporaries."

The amount of art assets needed to create a game like Half Life is beyond a single Coder + Artist combination within a 6 month period if one of your people is working part time. Simply doing the models and texturing could easily, easily take that long for a single guy working part-time.

I don't see it. The scale of work you need is huge. You even said "two months with two artists," but that's two guys allocated just towards doing what I presume to be very low-end graphics, and not that many of them, with someone else coding. You, perhaps? And even then not being concerned about polish.

He's got no coder, so right there that'd inflate your staff to three, or remove one of the art staff. I just don't see it being possible.

And let me say, as an artist, the old "It will look great on your resume" thing often comes off as insulting, because if we wanted to pad our resume we wouldn't need to work on a fairly no-budget game in which we don't even get full authorial control. I'd gleefully accept a 25k salary to work part-time for a year on a game, but I think you'll be disappointed to find how much time it actually takes to create something like Half Life. Just because the polygons are low doesn't mean they model, texture, animate, light, and voice themselves.

And of course, you could save a lot of time by cheating; if you don't intend to sell the project for money and just desperately want to see your baby made binary, you can hire a mod team to build it as a mod for a preexisting game engine, like Source or something.

I'm going to have to agree with Covenant here. There's no way your getting all the assets from one guy or really even two. Generally speaking for a Half-Life level game you'll need modelers to create and animate models, artists for textures to make your models look real, composers/musicians for music, level designers to actually design levels, etc.. That of course is just assets, you then are going to need programmers to actually build a game engine, or work on modifying an existing one to meet your needs. Then after you have an actual game engine in working order you have to work on actual gameplay (user controls, collision detection, AI, scoring, etc.). Finally, after all this you need to have people actually playtest.

Some of the asset needs may be able to be solved by using off the shelf assets, but you of course lose a lot of customization. Likewise you may be able to get certain assets like sound effects in a library (though they cost a pretty penny).

Really, with such a small budget and thus small team your much better trying for 2D rather than 3D. There you can probably manage to pull off something similar to games from the 16-bit era (SNES, GEN, etc).

Go for a small release that can be sold on Steam or equivalent. Not sure who gets the money on the cheap under $5 releases. Or create a mod or total conversion on a current engine, though usually can't make profit on it, but can get yourself recognized. Would be hard with 50k to do a licensed engine release it would all go towards that unless you have a bunch of skilled friends and treat it like a free time project.

Now, all that said, I think Shadow has a good idea:

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:And of course, you could save a lot of time by cheating; if you don't intend to sell the project for money and just desperately want to see your baby made binary, you can hire a mod team to build it as a mod for a preexisting game engine, like Source or something.

If your grand idea could be designed into a Mod then you might have actual potential. Look at how well Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Portal, Alien Swarm and other mod-first projects panned out. Hell, look at Garry's Mod. All of those games started off as Mods first, and now they're financially advantageous. Left4Dead is based on mods, but not a direct successor like the rest. If your idea really is brilliant then hiring a team of modders and paying them for content rather than salarying them could work out. Especially if you're paying for content instead of people's time. Someone like me may feel interested in it enough to build a model for you, walk away with 100 bucks, and let some other guy rig the thing and texture it later.

I'm not going to assume your game IS a first person shooter, but if it is done in any kind of 3D space the source engine is still a great way to go as far as modding is concerned.

If your idea is to turn 50k and an idea into 500k windfall profits, you're probably boned. This would literally have to be the world's greatest idea ever--even that doesn't guarantee sales, sadly.

I'll be honest; I think nearly every gamer has his 'one great idea' that he'd love to see made into a game. Some of them have dreams of a profitable career, while many others just want to see their vision realized. I'm the latter; it'd be like commissioning a portrait, in a manner of speaking.

While I am not short on concepts, I was curious about how realistic it is to aspire to turn ideas into something tangible. Obviously, I have no realistic idea how this is done - or more importantly, if the ideas of an amateur even amount to a playable game.

I was surprised to find out that there are contractors who work in this field; I'd assumed that everything was either roommate-dev basement teams putting out indie work, advertising firms putting out promotional flash games, or full-fledged software studios.

The mod option is actually a fairly brilliant idea; almost every style of game that exists can be modded, and it's perfect for the kind of labour-of-love projects that a lot of gamers probably have at one time or another.

I'd be surprised if 95% or more of 'one great ideas' were really just a game one guy wants to play. Putting aside being actually good or profitable, to get through the development cycle you need to work in a team which as Covenant says brings with it challenges of its own.

Lagmonster wrote:Are there 'freelance' dev teams-for-hire that will create simple games on commission?

Yes, at every price range from $10,000 to $100,000,000. Getting it published is another issue, but if it's a commercial quality product and you're prepared to pay marketing costs as well there will be lots of interest. Of course for non-console games you can self-publish.

Are there sources for the underskilled but overachieving to draw on to get their vision realized?

If you mean paying people to do stuff, of course. If you mean providing 'vision' to a project where people work for free (either in hope of eventual returns or open source) then no. Loads of people have 'vision', most of it crappy, a lot fewer people have the skill and motivation to do the work.

Nests of young programmers and artists looking for a benefactor and a project to pad their resumes with?

Sure, go on any of the many, many game dev forums out there (e.g. the Microsoft XNA forum).

Let's say something that would have stood as state of the art ten years ago; Half-Life and its contemporaries.

You couldn't make Half-Life for $50,000 now, but you can make something that looks much better than Half-Life for $0. The problem is the volume of content for such a long game, not the quality or technology.

50k isn't even a single person's yearly salary, so you're talking about making a game that will require no more than two people be paid for three months time, and must be done to your requirements.

There are plenty of developers who will 'cede creative control' for that money. Whether they're any good is another issue, really good game developers are likely to be (a) already employed for a higher salary and/or (b) obsessed with their own ideas. I agree that you shouldn't expect more than 6 man months from US developers, although you can hire developers and artists from other countries for much less.

For comparison, the Xbox 360 game linked in my signature took me the equivalent of two months full time work to make from scratch (actually four months of weekends and evenings; I did everything except the music), and it is only about two thirds done (half done if I was to add full online multiplayer). Unfortunately my wife kept complaining about me not having any free weekends or evenings, and the to-do DIY was building up .

I'll be honest; I think nearly every gamer has his 'one great idea' that he'd love to see made into a game.

Sure, but ideas are pretty worthless (with very few exceptions, e.g. Tetris). Professional game designers have more ideas than they'll ever need. Sorting out which ones actually have mass appeal, working out how they can actually be made, filling in the details and tuning the gameplay... that all takes a lot of skill and effort (and usually, luck).

Starglider wrote:There are plenty of developers who will 'cede creative control' for that money. Whether they're any good is another issue, really good game developers are likely to be (a) already employed for a higher salary and/or (b) obsessed with their own ideas. I agree that you shouldn't expect more than 6 man months from US developers, although you can hire developers and artists from other countries for much less.

For comparison, the Xbox 360 game linked in my signature took me the equivalent of two months full time work to make from scratch (actually four months of weekends and evenings; I did everything except the music), and it is only about two thirds done (half done if I was to add full online multiplayer). Unfortunately my wife kept complaining about me not having any free weekends or evenings, and the to-do DIY was building up .

What I meant by 'creative control' are the basic kinds of things that are part of the design process. Giving that up to someone else means having to work around their expectations instead of doing what's easier, faster, or perhaps better. That's no small sacrifice, and it's certainly one of the causes of project bloat. If all you're paying is for X amount of hours with no contract requirement on finishing the game to completion then okay, but I think for obvious reasons you'd want a "must finish the game" clause. It becomes problematic quickly.

People are willing to put time into their own projects because they are their own projects, and it's personally interesting to them. The same that you'd be willing to do some DIY work around your house, but would have a hard time convincing a local carpenter to fix your deck for free and saying he could use it to pad his resume.

50k is no small amount of money, but when you start slicing it three or four ways, it doesn't buy you very long. I'd totally take 4-5k for a month's work on a project, but you could quickly find your money gone and relatively little content produced--and that's even before you handle the long-term support needs, marketing, and so forth. There's a non-trivial amount of start-up cost since it's not like there would be concept art, mechanic prototypes, level maps or so forth actually on-hand at the beginning of production. When you think about the whole pre-production, production and post-production costs of a project, 50k (when put in terms of man-hours) isn't buying you a whole lot.

For example, the game I worked on has taken more than a year of part-time effort, with me doing all the art assets and I can attest to you that I've spent and are still spending a lot of time building art, packaging art, and repurposing art for media outreach and advertising needs. Our coders are still cleaning up things for the Steam Wrapper and making it run on XBox again. It's a HUGE amount of time. I'm really surprised you got all that work done in that amount of time, and I'd love to talk shop with you (I'd love to hear about your 3D engine) but not every project can be done in that rapid time.

I'll also add that you may want to try to hire game design students or have it treated as a paid internship. If you work it as a mod and don't try to sell it then you don't need to buy or develop your own engine. Saves tons of money and time.

I know way too much on this subject. For the record, my creative director was a guy with a vision but no art or coding experience, who teamed up with a programmer (now our technical director) from the internets for his first game. And they really aren't that business savvy, so I'd say it's a lot more possible than people think. It's just bad to give people with "this awesome idea for a game!" much hope, since most of the time it's some guy who just doesn't want to do any work. Even if you're not an artist or a coder, making a game is a ton of work.

BTW, Starglider, your XBLA game Windhaven is really impressive.

Lagomonster wrote:Okay, so you're a guy with what you think is a great new idea for a video game. Problem: you have no skill at coding, no artistic ability, no dev company. All you have is a pile of money and a dream.

Assuming your pile of money is $50k, and your level of quality is Half-Life 2, and you don't plan to make a profit, then I say you can make a pretty good prototype for any kind of game. But you probably won't make a feature-length game with that money. And even with a prototype, it's unlikely you'll find someone (like a publisher) to fund the rest - and taking funding means giving up creative control anyway.

But as to a realistic way of using that money to make a game? This is what I'd do:

1. Find a programmer that's awesome and cheap (ha!) from an indie game dev site, and pay him. And hopefully your game is simple enough that he can do it in your timeframe / for that cost.

2. Find a cheap commercial 3D engine. UDK is Unreal 3 and fairly cheap ($99) but Epic pockets part of your royalties. Unity3D is also popular and affordable and has good tools.

3. Figure out if you need a designer. On that budget, you probably need to do all the design work yourself - if you can. It really depends on the genre. Design overhead on a profitable modern FPS game is 2 years and 5-10 designers, and for Tower Defense is more like 1 person for however long it takes to program it. Since I'd aim for a prototype, you can get by with just yourself if you're willing to learn the tools (and all the non-code technical work needed as a designer).

4. Make the game. It'll be ugly (cuz there's no artist), but you'll have a proof of concept that you can make the whole game and you can make it fun.

5. Use your ugly game to find funding for an artist, though funding removes your creative control. Or just settle with having an unapologetically ugly game.

Or, if you don't care about profits or ownership of IP or any of that silly stuff, then just hunker down and make a mod.

Then again, it really depends on a lot of factors. An FPS or RPG will be a lot more expensive - and take a ton more time - to make than a space shooter. Unless you are making that space shooter in UDK (Unreal Development Kit) - in which case it's easier to make an FPS instead.

As an aside: How many people in game development do we have around here? As part of a small studio (three guys) I'd like to do some business chatter at some point.

I got a question for the IT professionals on the board. I am part a small company that makes j2me and symbian applications for smartphones. But my real passion is in video games. This year an opportunity has presented itself to put together a solid team of programmers, modellers and musicians to create something good. The problem is I am in Bangladesh. The work we get here through outsourcing is very different from game development. The overseas companies at US or Europe don't seem to consider outsourcing game development work here yet. Even though there are tons of good technical people here like in India. We had games made by eastern european companies that made tons of money. No such precedent exist yet for games developed in here. So if I approach a publisher how should I convince them it is a good idea to publish a game developed in Bangladesh ?

Stark wrote:I'd be surprised if 95% or more of 'one great ideas' were really just a game one guy wants to play. Putting aside being actually good or profitable, to get through the development cycle you need to work in a team which as Covenant says brings with it challenges of its own.

This raises an excellent point - that it's far harder to design a ground-up marketable project than commissioning something that's just of interest to you and your pals. Point is, as Covenant has said, that it's likely just way too costly unless the project is remarkably simple.

I've designed and printed a few board games as an independant - it's understandably easy to do - as something just for 'me and my friends', ie., never intended for market. As a result, they're self-tested, sometimes rules-buggy, and printed at a local print shop and stacked with parts and tokens pilfered from hobby shops and other board games. In that context, a 'mod' continues to be the best option for someone merely concerned with realizing a personal vision for something he can enjoy himself, or with friends.

Sarevok wrote:I got a question for the IT professionals on the board. I am part a small company that makes j2me and symbian applications for smartphones. But my real passion is in video games. This year an opportunity has presented itself to put together a solid team of programmers, modellers and musicians to create something good. The problem is I am in Bangladesh. The work we get here through outsourcing is very different from game development. The overseas companies at US or Europe don't seem to consider outsourcing game development work here yet. Even though there are tons of good technical people here like in India. We had games made by eastern european companies that made tons of money. No such precedent exist yet for games developed in here. So if I approach a publisher how should I convince them it is a good idea to publish a game developed in Bangladesh ?

Not an IT professional, but as a video gamer I can tell you that games which are made in non-English-speaking locales tend to suck if they're made for a locale that speaks a different language than their own. Some of them are atrocious, unapologetic, unholy shitbombs like a game that came out a while back called Restricted Area. I'd say it was eminently forgettable, except it was so bad it wasn't. I only played it once, for two hours, then uninstalled it and hid the box, and the memories of that shitbomb still haunt me. In addition to being an unholy union of Diablo II and Shadowrun, only sucking ten times worse than that sounds (seriously, a cyber-brain is a field-installable piece of equipment?!,) the voice acting was fucking godawful and the text made it pretty clear they settled for a babelfish translation.

Then there's ones that are... Not so bad, like one called Exodus from the Earth. They actually hired decent, native English speaking voice actors and had the script checked over by someone who spoke the language fluently and could erase about 99.9% of the ridiculousness that occurs when you run something in one language through a software translator. It was still obvious in text descriptions of items, but it made for a quirky, kind of amusing game with decent gameplay and a fairly gripping (if tragic) story. But that is by far the exception, not the rule; mostly they're so bad you lament spending some money on them and forget them in a month's time. Some of them are good enough you're glad you own them because you might at some point want to play them again, and some... Well, some will leave you scarred. If you have a real passion for video games and want to produce them for the English-speaking market as opposed to the market you live in, I'd advise you to move to North America or the UK or Australia, in that order of desirability.

If, on the other hand, you're content to be the kind of person who works on an Uwe Boll film and freely admits to anyone who asks that the only way you sleep at night is the fact that you have no intention whatsoever of ever viewing the film you helped to make, then go ahead and try to get a video game outsourcing thing going on. You might manage to make some bucks before the latest in the line of evil video game developers picks up to the fact that these games are not selling and pull the plug.

Covenant wrote:As an aside: How many people in game development do we have around here?

Once upon a time I was the technical director of an MMORPG start-up. Kind of fun but ridiculously stressful. Haven't been in the game industry since late 2003; I've looked at the idea of making licensable game AI libraries a few times, but it's never made commercial sense for my company.

Sarevok wrote:The overseas companies at US or Europe don't seem to consider outsourcing game development work here yet.

Frankly, that's a good thing. First world countries have already shipped enough of their technology jobs and infrastructure overseas, it would be nice if we could keep a few sectors here.

So if I approach a publisher how should I convince them it is a good idea to publish a game developed in Bangladesh?

Why do you need a publisher? What is the target platform and sales figures?

Starglider wrote:Once upon a time I was the technical director of an MMORPG start-up. Kind of fun but ridiculously stressful. Haven't been in the game industry since late 2003; I've looked at the idea of making licensable game AI libraries a few times, but it's never made commercial sense for my company.

Was that Dawn, by any chance?

Sarevok wrote:The overseas companies at US or Europe don't seem to consider outsourcing game development work here yet.

Frankly, that's a good thing. First world countries have already shipped enough of their technology jobs and infrastructure overseas, it would be nice if we could keep a few sectors here.

Seconded. Fortunately there is a barrier to such outsourcing: while people may be willing to tolerate it for their ISP's technical support and it's hard or impossible to tell where a given piece of functional software was programmed, entertainment made in one location but aimed at another tends to be poorly received by the audience; as I mentioned above, games made in non-English-speaking countries but aimed at the US tend to suck hardcore; even if it's sold on a box in a shelf doesn't mean it's going to be any good.

Why do you need a publisher? What is the target platform and sales figures?

I think the more important question is what is the target market. If he wants to produce games in Bangladesh, with a Bangladeshi development team, for the inhabitants of Bangladesh, he might have a shot. If he wants to produce games in Bangladesh for, with a Bangladeshi development team for, say, North America, well... I'd wish him well, but I might accidentally wind up buying it some day down the road.

Covenant wrote:As an aside: How many people in game development do we have around here? As part of a small studio (three guys) I'd like to do some business chatter at some point.

I'm not exactly in game development, per se. Though, I am a recent (09) college grad with a BS in CompSci, who focused on the game development side of things and whose dream is getting into the industry. Currently, I've been fooling around with XNA trying to work up the nerve to put together a 2D game to make some income, seeing as I can't find any entry level positions in my area as of yet. My main stumbling block has been assets, my artwork sucks, and I just know anything I release will probably end up looking like utter shit.

Covenant wrote:As an aside: How many people in game development do we have around here? As part of a small studio (three guys) I'd like to do some business chatter at some point.

I'm a full-time game designer. I've worked on some pretty popular games, but I don't like to post the specifics where people can google it.

Sarevok wrote: I am part a small company that makes j2me and symbian applications for smartphones. But my real passion is in video games. This year an opportunity has presented itself to put together a solid team of programmers, modellers and musicians to create something good. The problem is I am in Bangladesh.

I'm guessing, considering what the team has done in the past, that you're looking at mobile game development. I don't know much about it, but I'd be surprised if there weren't some mobile games already being made in India at the very least.

I don't think the publisher model is as strict with mobile development either - i.e., mobile games are cheaper to make thus publishers take more risks. The best advice I could give you is to make a prototype game to show a publisher that you guys have the skills they need to make a game, and then offer to build what they need, usually a licensed game (like Barbie Horse Princess). It does require a bunch of networking, so if you're serious then you should join the IGDA and post on their forums and sign up for the special interest group mailing lists - they have one for mobile game dev.

And actually, a lot of larger companies start out this way unless the company's founded by 'industry veterans'. They make mobile or web games that are cheap and based on licensed properties (like movies and books, just not the best movies and books). That usually guarantees at least some sort of return in investment due to name recognition. If you're lucky enough to make a profit beyond what the publisher takes, then you can start funding your own IPs, but most companies never get enough profit to do that.