communicate the game idea to them? create a communication policy that will allow us to communicate with as little misunderstanding as possible? and should I hire one team to do the whole game or should I seek separate teams that specialize in different areas of production?

Write a design document. Have online meetings/confrences using a voip program like Teamspeak or Ventrillo. Look at test builds they produce. I'm no expert but those are some logical ideas I would use.

All the above and do them frequently so that you catch any errors early.

where can i find a development doc template?

We were planning on roundtable meetings every other week or so.

development doc template? did you try to make a joke? :-p

There's one here. Not the best I've ever seen, but workable.

good luck with designing your game!

Also look into the general theory of "Extreme Programming" (aka "XP"). While I don't suggest that you force that particular methodology on the team, I do suggest you use their approach to communication between customer and implementor. You would probably be playing the role of "customer" as well as "tracker" with XP terminology (if you want to know where you stand, at least :-)

There's a couple of good primers here: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/forsey/448/UBCSyllabus_2001.html

One of the Radical guys also teach Game Design at UBC, and was allowed to use their internal template documents as teaching material.

Allan

Thanks for the advice and help guys.