MaberMK posted:

MaberMK posted:

Sulk posted:

Pretty much this

JMilton posted:

It's exactly why we're trying to find people for this job... most of us have little idea how the hell it all works. We have one member who is versed on the subject, and is probably better fitted to understand what's going on here but am I way off base or something?

epswing posted:

I'm pretty sure no one here is trying to be a dick, but the truth is you're asking for something ridiculous.

Firstly, anyone with the skills required to actually see a full game engine through is most likely already employed. Exactly zero developers are going to leave their job to work for free, for a largely unknown amount of time, on the basis that a product "might" take off.

Secondly, one developer? One? Ok, there are superstars out there, but it's highly unlikely that any one person knows everything about everything. And if they are such a superstar, they're employed, see point #1.

Thirdly, you keep saying "coders" and "programmers", your terms are all fishy (level designers and modelers are not "coders", programmers don't "manipulate C++"), they don't make sense, which makes us think that you don't really know what's going on. A coder is someone who writes code. i.e. a programmer. (There are slightly differing views on the responsibilities of a software programmer/developer/engineer/architect.)

So whether you know it or not, it sounds like you're looking for a student or equivalent basement-dweller with no bills to pay, who is willing to blow an inordinate amount of time for probably no return, and probably doesn't have the required skillset anyways.

MaberMK posted:

You need to build a *ton* of knowledge with whoever it is that currently comprises your team. Start small, learn some, gently caress up, learn from your mistakes, do something a little more ambitious, gently caress up again, and so on and so forth. Right now you have:

- A compelling storyline!
- It's going to be an FPS with strategy elements! It'll be even cooler than Savage!

And you need people with real experience, to include:

- a producer (this is the guy who makes sure the whole thing comes together)
- a designer (this is the guy with the cohesive idea)
- programmers (these are people who write code)
- artists (they make basically all the things you see in the fancy movin' picture)

And you're willing to provide:

- uuuhhhhhh some money from Kickstarter if we can prove we have competent people
- uuuhhhhhh a guarantee you'll still have a place to live (with your parents) if we crash and burn (as long as you live with your parents)

You're in way over your head.

JMilton posted:

Behind the scenes we do have competent people. Our admin and marketing teams are UC Berkeley grads, our music team have degrees from Cal Arts, and our artists attended USC. I don't think this somehow overqualifies us, but I want to assure everybody we're not high school dropouts.

shrughes posted:

I was going to be nice to you, but I had to point at laugh at this.

P.S. How are you capable of judging the difference between a good developer and a bad developer?

JMilton posted:

Nothing.

JMilton posted:

Can you as a developer draw for me a painting,

JMilton posted:

compose me a song,

JMilton posted:

author me a story,

JMilton posted:

arbitrate me a business meeting,

JMilton posted:

convince me throughout my day

JMilton posted:

and petition me in court?

JMilton posted:

Could you do all those things AND code?

JMilton posted:

There are plenty of things we know that you don't know, and we can help each other.

JMilton posted:

We aren't trying to hold our devs to the 'industry standard.' A capable team will receive MOST of the profits from this game.

shrughes posted:

Your rant

quote:

I think if I could spend my time however I wished I would probably wake up, fondle tits all morning, and then maybe in the afternoon I'd have a sandwich.

shrughes posted:

Also, as an exercise, please answer the following questions:

What is your "marketing team" going to be doing during all the time that programmers and artists are developing the product?

You're paying in equity, right? What will the vesting schedule be?

How did you calculate that 3+1 programmers would be needed?

You (until lately) had a pretty cohesive design team? And now you don't have a team? Did they all leave? Why did they leave? How much equity did they take with them?

How much money do you expect to raise on Kickstarter? How much money does a good software developer intern earn per month, in California?

Why did you pick this project to work on? Do you have domain expertise in the subject?

Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

JMilton posted:

So you can draw this
http://i.imgur.com/O18ws.jpg

JMilton posted:

self-record this
http://soundcloud.com/henry-moser/botanists-sketchbook

JMilton posted:

legitimate contracts

JMilton posted:

arbitrating meetings between potential clients,

JMilton posted:

You are indeed a very industrious person,

JMilton posted:

I think software interns make a decent amount of money in California since CA is one of the few states to really protect developers.

JMilton posted:

One of the reasons we organized in California (YES WE CARE ABOUT OUR WORKING CONDITIONS, IMAGINE THAT.)

JMilton posted:

Until lately we had a pretty cohesive design team who had made a working model of the game, but without them we need a new top nerd to talk down to us.

JMilton posted:

Our old design team still wants to work with us; we're just dissatisfied with their results. It's a long story how they came to work for us but we parted amiably.

shrughes posted:

Yep.
With some instrument substitutions.

quote:

1. Your efforts to convince us that your people know what they're doing.

quote:

2. The question of how you can discern between good and bad software developers.

quote:

All I found amusing was the detailed irrelevant description of the various universities your team members have graduated from. As if being a graduate from a university was a sure-fire signal of excellence or, the details, relevant.

Lief posted:

Behind the scenes we do have competent people. Our admin and marketing teams are UC Berkeley grads, our music team have degrees from Cal Arts, and our artists attended USC. I don't think this somehow overqualifies us, but I want to assure everybody we're not high school dropouts.

quote:

Something we know that you don't know is that we know you like to sprinkle in big words you don't understand. Examples:

arbitrate
industrious
legitimate
deep
shamed
personal hygiene

quote:

California does nothing to "really protect developers" in ways relevant to programming intern wages. Programming intern wages are a function of market forces. (One notable CA law says that any work done outside the workplace using employees' own time and resources remains the property of the employee, and that employees can't sign this away, but that has nothing to do with software development interns' wages.)

quote:

This is where you reveal yourself to be a crazy person, because there's nothing to stop you from caring about your employees' working conditions (in their parents' basements) in other states. You could at least try being rational.

musclecoder posted:

Let me guess, anyone who gets the privilege to work with you also has to sign an NDA so they don't take your ideas.

See, JMilton, developers get hit up all the time by people who have the next big idea. The next Facebook, or Twitter, or Pintrest, or whatever is hot. They get hit up by marketing majors who barely know how to open Excel, but just know that their idea is gonna be the next big one, if only they can get some developer to code it. Every competent developer on these forums have at some time or another been approached by someone who is not a developer and promises equity in the LLC they paid $300 to set up to build them the next big thing. And this is for building easier things like websites or iPhone apps. Building what sounds to be a AAA game is incredibly long and difficult work. Just read about the death marches AAA companies put their employees through, and these are well paid highly financed billion dollar corporations. Like everyone has been saying, if someone is that highly competent and willing to be put on a death march for a game, they're already making big bucks at an established company or are starting a company themselves.

"If Facebook has 800,000,000 users, and we attract even 1% of those people, that's 8 million users!"

Well, what happens when you attract 0% of those users?

pigdog posted:

JMilton, I'm not trying to be hostile and do appreciate the effort, but you have no idea what you are doing. We've all seen projects like this a million times (with 0% rate of success). I'm sorry but game ideas are dime a dozen. It's the implementation (and financial viability of it) that's the hard part. It doesn't look like you have enough of a clue to even understand the problem.

Start small and do something, such as a (small) mod to an already existing game, to get a scope of it.


PS: The very slight but only possible chance you might attract some developers is if you had actually worked hard, for months/years, and with true effort really created and documented the game, rather than just "I'd like to play a game that's like <this>, so I'll just find some people to make it happen and make money in the process" . Game design isn't just waving hands and telling people what to do, in serious projects it's actually quite a serious work. For example, here's a design document of Planescape:Torment for a scene that took maybe 20-30 minutes of the player's time. It's 100+ pages.

JMilton posted:

I think software interns make a decent amount of money in California since CA is one of the few states to really protect developers. One of the reasons we organized in California (YES WE CARE ABOUT OUR WORKING CONDITIONS, IMAGINE THAT.)

JMilton posted:

As it stands, our storyline is about 250 pages long with game direction included, so it exists on paper. It's not as open-ended as Planescape but that's a dizzying document and your point is well-taken.

Rello posted:

Competent software interns in the CA area make about $5000/mo + relocation packages and a lump sum (about $1300/mo) to pay for rent, or an apartment, just thought I'd put that out there.

Sab669 posted:

Heh, what? I live in Rhode Island and I'd love to get over into California but relocation was always one my biggest issues. Can anyone else confirm this? $5k as an intern sounds pretty drat far fetched unless you have a 4.0 from MIT

JMilton posted:

I don't know why you're asking me about interns, but I'd like to know why though!

JMartin posted:

Yes, you would have to sign an NDA.

JMartin posted:

You're a pedant and you attack me for using "arbitrate" at probably a good enough time.

quote:

How did you calculate that 3+1 programmers would be needed?

JMilton posted:

I think I've already made it clear that most of us are unaware of any meaningful jargon that'd disarm you. Most of what we know is whether or not it looks like poo poo. I mean, we're paying the developers MOST of the money, can't we be afforded that luxury?

quote:

I wanted to add that we get coding something is different than debugging something and it takes a lot of time.

quote:

Please refer to your payment.

quote:

You're inconsolable. You're a pedant and you attack me for using "arbitrate" at probably a good enough time.

quote:

I don't know why you're asking me about interns, but I'd like to know why though!

quote:

Yes, you would have to sign an NDA. Honestly, if any serious developer wants to sign that piece of paper and sit down with me and hear about our game idea, storyline and marketing plan, you'd find it compelling I'm sure. We've spent many hours on it. But hell, to us it's all about the game's content anyway. Even if it was coded in some dinky engine, if the gameplay felt good and it got the storyline out there, we'd be happy.

Cicero posted:

You have no clue. Oh no, someone will steal your game idea! Except, there are about bajillion awesome game ideas floating out there constantly, and the difference between successful games and crap ones is rarely the idea, but the execution of that idea. Every decent coder comes up with at least ten times as many awesome ideas as he could ever actually execute on.

JMilton posted:

Seeing as we're a start-up, your payment would be equity in our company and a share of the profits, which is understood to come after the game is released and sold. We however have a solid business model and with it a good understanding of marketing so our cocky side considers the wait a formality.

oRenj9 posted:

Come back with some money and a better understanding of what needs to be done and I assure you that people will bite.

oRenj9 posted:

As a software engineer that is going down this path, allow me to relay my experiences. Hopefully they will imbibe you with the of what you are asking. I don't mean that in a hostile or condescending manner at all. It just seems like you are in over you head a bit.

Last year, I decided that I wanted to create a game. I have never shipped a video game before, but I've have launched several large and small software titles. Having worked in a project management, software architect, and engineering roles, I believed that I had this necessary skills to turn an idea into a rough product.

The first thing I discovered is there is a huge amount of time/money tradeoffs that need to be made to create a game. You can buy a game engine and the tools for creating assets, or you can and build them. In many cases, it makes much more sense to buy them. Would you rather tie up a programmer making image manipulation software for your game, or just buy Photoshop? This tradeoff extends throughout the development process.

Photoshop may be expensive, but relative to the costs of the other software you will be needing, it is dirt cheap. If you're going to create a 3D game, you have to license an engine and tools and they are not cheap. Gamebryo and Steam both required NDAs to even discuss pricing, but my research online suggested around 10k per developer. Every level designer and programmer will need a copy of this software.

This isn't to say that one person can't create a marketable game on their own. There are free tools like the XNA toolkit that provide the opportunity for individuals to do exactly that. However, you will find that a lot of indie developers just forgo things like marketing and cheap out on artwork and music. They will either make it themselves (as has been demonstrated here, there are lots of artistic developers around), or they will pay somebody peanuts to do it for them.

In my case, I just paid a friend a low rate to do make some artwork and music in a specified format. It was cheap too, my $500 budget bought me a lot of professional looking artwork. He was also willing to provide cheap licensing to a large library of cool video game inspired music.

I'm not getting paid for the work I do on mine (hell, I'm actually losing money by continuing), but the tradeoff is that I'm making what I want on my own schedule. I get 100% of the profits from my creation and I am the boss. What your offering is the same pay, less than 100% profits (and the possibility to be screwed out of my share), and having to deal with a boss.

If are serious about getting this done, the my recommendation is to get the capital required to pay the right person to run the software show for you guys. Your best bet would be to reduce the scope of the project significantly then pursue capital funding. You guys are the B&M team and that's what those roles are responsible for. You guys might be able to pull off a small phone game in under a year for under $50k.

If you get some money, then come back with something along the lines of, "Our team is in need of somebody complete a game design centered around our concepts, screenshots, and music, then put it all together into an iPhone application. The rate of pay is $55/hr plus a bonus of x% of gross product sales." then you might get some serious inquiries.

I've seen similar posts on getting some serious interest. But coming in here and creating slightly condescending posts (i.e., "top nerd", but can you programers do ART!?!, arguing, etc.) while simultaneously projecting illusions of grandeur ("[you'll] be paid in excess") are what is putting people off. Come back with some money and a better understanding of what needs to be done and I assure you that people will bite.

Edit: Gah you bastards beat me to points while I was writing this novella!

Avenging Dentist posted:

When you don't have the ability to actually create much of anything you get really posessive over the little scraps you've managed to put together.

JMilton posted:

this guy has spent his life reading books and watching films

JMilton posted:

We've already spent well over 50 hours researching the potential market and probably another 50 hours assembling a business model; it's not unreasonable for us to want to protect these things, and our NDA literally specifies what we're protecting--it's not some bog standard, open source NDA. It's just until lately we never dealt with anything software related, even though we're a software company. Sounds nuts but don't you wonder why you're paid so much? It's because to most people it's a crazy moon language that works by magic.

Novo posted:

No offense but a programmer might spend 50 hours just researching and pulling together all the tooling he'll need to do one iteration of your project. If he's lacking the thousands of hours of applied practice that it takes to be a good developer then it will take a lot longer and each iteration will go more slowly to boot.

It may seem like magic moon language but I assure you it's like any other creative process, except more highly constrained. Everyone understands that a movie represents the director's creative decision making and the work of dozens or hundreds of people off-screen. However, few non-developers can appreciate the kinds of decision-making a programmer has to do when translating specifications into software.

Every client that's ever come to me with speculative work always thinks their idea is well-developed and just needs someone to wave their ten little magic wands and through some kind of clerical key-mashing, transform it into a product. They always try to woo me with promises of equity and even ownership of the code, ignoring that the code is worthless without a profitable business behind it.

I have learned to refuse this type of work even if the ideas are good because invariably this type of inexperienced client never has the will or resources to bring their design documents up to snuff. They want to skip that and save money by hiring rockstar coders to jump in the deep end, but their own ignorance gets the better of them since coders who fancy themselves rockstars and are willing to work on speculation are probably the inexperienced type that burn out after iterating themselves into a corner (and rewriting things that were ambiguous in the original design). A few months later I'll see the same job ads, except with "Our offshore developer didn't pan out, so we're looking for rockstars!"

JMilton posted:

Bro, we have a good writer. His story is really good.

quote:

We've already spent well over 50 hours researching the potential market and probably another 50 hours assembling a business model; it's not unreasonable for us to want to protect these things, and our NDA literally specifies what we're protecting--it's not some bog standard, open source NDA. It's just until lately we never dealt with anything software related, even though we're a software company. Sounds nuts but don't you wonder why you're paid so much? It's because to most people it's a crazy moon language that works by magic.

JMilton posted:

maybe you should take your cock out of your own mouth for a minute

JMilton posted:

We've already spent well over 50 hours researching the potential market and probably another 50 hours assembling a business model

JMilton posted:

It's just until lately we never dealt with anything software related, even though we're a software company.

JMilton posted:

It's just until lately we never dealt with anything software related, even though we're a software company.

JMilton posted:

Thanks for this. Good insight. What does "well-developed" mean exactly?

Cicero posted:

Well we all know what makes FPSes sell these days is a good story! Except not. (Portal is not an exception to this, it sold based on cool puzzle mechanics and Valve's good name; the well-written story was a bonus) Seriously I'm all for better story in games, but if you were to rank gameplay mechanics, overall design, visuals, audio, and story, story is easily the least critical. It enhances good games, sure, but by itself does little.

Also, never say "bro" unironically to a developer, you're liable to get your head torn off (or more likely, a developer that turns mute and slowly backs away).

50 hours? That's it? You realize a standard work week is 40 hours, so you're saying that you've spent ~6 days' worth of a single person's work time to do research to convince others to spend thousands of hours working for free in the hope of riches.

edit: And based on your writing, I have my doubts as to whether you could actually identify a good story. You know you're bad with words when a room full of CS majors is criticizing you for your language.

To make this post at least slightly helpful (I'm actually a nice guy in many other threads, believe it or not!), what you need is some kind of hard, useful skill. If you want to make games I would highly recommend picking up coding, or level design, or modeling, or composing, or something along those lines, and then producing something that displays competency. Saying "well that's not my specialty, I'm just gonna handle the business end of things" sounds suspiciously like "I don't want to do the hard work, I want to write press releases and schmooze with clients and then pick up my check."

For example, even ultimate businessman Steve Jobs knew how to code, and had he not been able to code he probably wouldn't have been able to pick out Woz as being an awesome programmer in the first place.

epswing posted:

AvengingDentist, please confirm that you can indeed suck your own cock.


Y'know 100 man hours is 6 people brainstorming for 2 days right?

2 days.

MaberMK posted:

I dare you to make less sense. Though we've all seen a remarkable effort from you, I don't think you can actually pull it off with this one.

Novo posted:

Maybe "fully formed" or "comprehensive" would have been a better term. Unless your design materials were written by a developer or in collaboration with actual game developers chances are there are they don't come close to accounting for the kinds of tradeoffs a programmer is dealing with when trying to create software which is portable, fast, maintainable, extensible, etc. It may turn out that 5% of your desired features will account for 90% of the complexity, you just don't know because you're designing the thing you want to see not the process that will make it real.

JMilton posted:

Bastards! Thank you though, to Cicero. I was using bro ironically there, don't worry.


Do you have any examples or readings about this that isn't spam from DeVry? Would like to know more.

JMilton posted:

Thanks for this. Good insight. What does "well-developed" mean exactly?