Here is another idea ...

I think that if you advertised for just one other person to help you with a small game - as fastlane says - start small...you would be unlikely to get that much flack... Look at a game like this one

in showcase II

Forget the time it has taken these guys - this is not their first game ... but look at the scope. It is not a huge multi-player game or a many level game with a story line etc.

It is a containable project and the sort of thing you should target for your first game. Get just one other person helping you on it...admit it is the first game so there are no misunderstandings or false expectations - and work through the exercise start to finish.

There is a casual market for such games which makes it an even more attractive first project to cut your teeth on.

Anyway - just another idea.

Hi Ricardo,

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The thing I'm trying to impress upon you is that 3DGS is a mostly remote team community. In the last 3 Decades, I can't think of a single remote-team made game that has been a success. I'm sure they are out there, but I could probably count their products on one hand.

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Can I add the exception to your rule.

Trophy Bass 2006 is very much a remotely done project made up of 3DGS people.

Florian Jungwirth is in Germany and he has supplied 100 percent of the art for the Game.

I am in Mpls and I have contributed a big chunk of the code.

Dan Niezgocki is working in Boston, and he has added shader code to the project. He currently is the project lead on the XBOX port.

I have one other 10 hour a week programmer, that works here in Mpls.

3 of the 4 main developers of Trophy Bass are 3DGS community members, working remotely.

Trophy Bass has over 200,000 pre orders which qualifies it as success in my mind.

So the right people on a small team can accomplish big things, remotley of course.

I have multiple projects that are using this remote model of development under contract, and many more that will be under contract by Spring.


Ken

Like I said, I could count the success of remote teams on one hand.
The only exceptions to this rule are people like Nardalus with a proven track record of completing games and 15+ years in game development...hardly representative of the 3DGS population.


That would make the score:

successful remote teams 1;
unsucessful remote teams 100;

I want to say that AB, BBR, and Glider were also made with remote teams, but as I don't know of their internal affairs, I can't say for sure. Assuming for a moment that they were, the score would be

Success: 4
Unsuccess: 97


Thus my point stands: remote teams have not yet proven themselves to be a successful development model for commercial or non-commercial game development within the 3DGS community. Add the pay-after-publish business model and you have an almost 100% guaranteed failure rate IMO.

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Trophy Bass has over 200,000 pre orders which qualifies it as success in my mind.

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Congrat's on the pre-order success. It's good to hear your projects continue to do well.

P.S - This past summer, my second cousin had told me about a great game he just bought. It turned out it was your previous fishing game that was made with 3dgs. He's into the outdoors and is currently going to school for a conservation officer. To him, the game was easily AAA. I figured i'd note that, as a few people have been saying 3DGS or remote teams never produced an AAA title. It all depends on who you talk to, and the market your in.

Trophy Bass may just be the exception to the rule.

However I still stand by my previous statement, all be it with an exception. The quality or completed titles with GS on the whole is not AAA standard. This is not a bad thing, it is just a factor of development. Some things that looked like a AAA title in the making, never got further than a few screens, bcz some of the dev members left, or had no time or got better jobs....

In contrast I know of a company with 36 employed AAA standard programmers, designers, modelers and animators who sold a million+ copies of their first title, yet their sequeal which had a bigger budget, failed misserably.... So AAA isn't everything

There are a lot of very talented people here, and the potential to create a top selling title is there.... I just havn't seen it yet. But then, who am I to judge? After all I have no AAA title of my own to show!

Personally I think when you start out on this game development road, it is very lonely, and the thought of having a few others working with you on your idea is a comforting thought. Yet, if my company could afford to employ a handful of the experts here for a project we would. Why? Simply put bcz then its a job not a hobby.

If one of the team are not pulling their weight how can you change that if they are a volunteer? working for a far off reward that seems unlikely?

Finally, if your concept is good and you are a capable Production Manager, why would you want to hand out royalties or % of your money? I would sooner pay a fixed fee for a contract apon completion, than give away ownership of my titles.

What happens if you create an iconic game, get some of the expert character modelers to come up with some models, your game is very succesfull and the merchandise department wants to make figures of your characters.... who gets the money?

I write music as my hobby, if I produced the music for your game who would get the royalties? Performance Rights? Wouldn't I be paying myself out of my % of revenue???

Working for free is fine, but working for a % of revenue or royalties is bad business.

As several people here have pointed out, Work for % of possible sales is not something you see in a proffesional business plan, games industry or otherwise, and it would not make sense to embark on this road IMHO.

However, as far as I understand things, in most cases you would not be developing a complete game. The aim would be to develop a working demo to proove you can complete the full game, should it be picked up. To have 90% of the game code in place is a good start, but 100's of models and world environments is not. You should only develop what is needed to complete your proof. This is something easier to budget for and raise funding for. Produce your business plan, establish what is required for the proof, then work out what you need, in terms of resources and man power. Then and only then, would I look at recruiting more people.

Just my 2 cents

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This makes alot of sense for our community.
If instead of people gathering together with hopes of making a complete game ("Dream Big"), they instead recruit people to merely make a passable demo ("Start Small"), they can then use the demo to gather funding for real development.

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Although I like the approach, in all honesty, I do not believe the forum dynamics will allow this approach to work for so-called newbies. But it might be fine for established forum members. And, as I have said, I do like the idea.

If you are a newbie though- I suggest to you make every effort to define a first project that you can do on your own or with one other person. Start small with a small project. Use it to become established. There is no other way in my opinion. It may suceed. It may fail. But either way, you will learn a lot from it.

Hi Ricardo,

This is a very good way for a team to get rolling.

The is one little hitch that may or may not come up. This is the fact that the publisher would only want a portion of your team. I.E. the coders, and not the artists, or the artists but not the coders. This occasionaly happens when publishers pick up new projects.

For Example, my artists had to take a back seat to the Disney artists when Disney was publishing my software.

You want to be careful what you can promise your team once you start pitching the game. Being a new team your leverage will be very small. The publisher will have ultimate control of what your team make-up will be.

A split of profits for team members is a fairy tale. It's just is not going to happen in the real world of publishing. Anyone offering that has no experince in getting projects published and should be avoided like the plague....

You need to think in terms of fixed costs.

6 programmer months @ $25 per hour = $24,000
9 artist months @ $25 per hour = $36,000
3 Producer months @ $25 per hour = $12,000

Project Development Cost Total $72,000

Maybe these can be converted into shares of ownership in the project.

Things get complicated if you have one group do the demo, then a different group does the actual full game production.

Additional costs to the group:

Now how much money would you pay to have an experienced game pitch man get you a deal. Many companies pay up to 50 percent of there revenue to the group that gets them the deal. 30 percent seems most fair.

Cost's associated with travel for face to face visits with publishers, purchasing skills not in the group, purchasing materials to create marketing materials.

Who is the "Bricks and Motar" contact person / company. Publishers will want a contact person that has a permanate mailing address, etc.

Bottom line the most succesful teams do this not for finacial rewards but other rewards. Like being part of a motivated team, reputation, resume upgrading, and just good old fashioned experience. A balance of an experienced and newbies is a good way to spread the knowlege wealth in building games with remote teams.


Ken

Some very interesting discussion here. I'd like to get back to Sylver's problem for a bit.

Franky, I think what he was offering was very reasonable. My impression of America is that everyone is rich and I bet even the street beggers make more than $25 an hour, which is probably why you have so many of them. I could be wrong, but it seems that way.

My first job as a graphic artist paid $NZ180 per week for a 40 hour week. That works out at $NZ4.50 per hour, a bit more if you count in my meager holidays, but I didn't get any special allowances for transport or a pension plan or anything like that. NZ$4.50 is about US$2! I was one of the lucky ones. Only one other person from my art course went on to a full time job afterwards, and that was because he went to London.

For my $2 per hour I would produce ink and chinagraph illustrations of the clothes the store was selling for newspaper advertisements. After a bit of practice I could kick out a finished peice in less than an hour often inclding cut and paste (it was an old fashioned department store. No computers).

If you paid anyone US$30,000 per year in NZ, it would put them in the highest tax bracket, and they would have to pay about half of it to the government and be considered wealthy.

The highly talented manga artists in Tokyo make less than people who work in comvenience stores. Starting programmers and artists in the game industry make make about ￥180,000 per month, which is about US$1,600. They tend to work longer hours for that, too.

For a talented commercial artist, kicking out a professional quality sketch in twenty minutes shouldn't be a big issue as it is something they do all the time. If they are not up to the level where they can produce art quickly and confidently like that, does not make them worth more because they need to spend more time on it.

Anyway, I just wanted to show you another perspective. Especially for artists, even making a living out of it can be tough.

In any case, Sylver, do not advertise how much you are prepared to pay. Call for portfolios first, then talk with the artists one on one and see if you can negotiate a price that you are both happy with. Here is not the only place to look. Go to a site like Deviant Art and browse. Also, as Ken said, a lot of people aren't doing this just for the money. You might find someone who wants to be a part of making a video game (but give them a contract and pay them anyway).