Yeah there are definitely companies that will do this. You can probably look inoto ones in cheap countries like India, but I wouldn't pick anyone you can't get a recommendation for from someone you trust.

For cost, well coders are cheaper in such countries but you basically want a lead programmer type. If we say they're on the salary of a standard coder in the UK - about £24K maybe - then you're looking at £2K per man per month. You can probably find an artist to do the assets first if you have a really detailed design.

I would consider Torque and the RTS pack before going in this route though. Go to www.GarageGames.com (I think it's .com) as it's got loads of Torque developers.

two houndred and fifty thousand dollars.

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Original post by Madvillain two houndred and fifty thousand dollars.

Hey, I can pull figures out of a hat as well -> one hundred and ninety thousand, six hundred and seventy two dollars and thirty eight cents.

In response to your previous post:
You don't need to know how to code to design a game. In uni, even though we were all coders, me and my friends talked about game ideas from a mechanics standpoint, things like "Wouldn't it be cool to have a 3d connect-4 game where if you skip a turn you get to change the gravity." What has that got to do with coding?

I'm currently brainstorming game ideas and at no point have I considered technical limitations (the only real use for being a coder when you're wearing your design hat). What's the point in limiting yourself? If I come up with a good but technically infeasible idea and drop it I could be missing out on extrapolating that idea into a great idea that could be coded.

p.s. I know plenty of DJs who can't/don't scratch - a bunch of my friends are into Hard House.

This details the making of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6079652/p-6.html

the prototype took 12 people about 3 months with a demo so promising that landed them a full-scale production. However, I believe they already had a publisher...

Madvillan, without question that was the most useful piece of information anyone here has given me! Thank you....seriously.

I knew that the title of this thread would be a little thorn in the side of these forums but as I read more and more into these forums (and those at garage games) I am amazed at how many people literally just have an idea of "wouldn't it be cool to have a game that did x, y, z!" and even going so far as to request team members to work for free based on a share of future (nonexistant) pofits. I didn't realize just how rampant this problem was :)

Well, as far as my best-idea-the-world-has-yet-to-see concept, I still have a lot of work to do to create and then analyze every detail so until I reach that point you can rest assured that I will not start requesting a team and I don't think I will ever go so far as to do so for a pro-bono rate.

I think that you have all (especially madvillan) given me a good basic idea of entering into this industry, costs and alternative routes. I appreciate it.

Nobody's mentioned this, I think, although I might have missed it while reading the replies.

As far as hiring people without telling them the concept: Not a great idea. I sure wouldn't work for someone who won't tell me what he wants me for. I assume you've written the design document, though. If not, do that first, since nobody can help make an "idea" that isn't solidly presented.

You don't want just an NDA, you want a Non-compete agreement, as well. If you are being truthful and you have the financing for the game, then you will want to hire a lawyer to help you incorporate a company and to draft the NDA and NCA, as well as the agreement that your Independent Subcontractors will sign when they work for you. You can circumvent the lawyer by just going to your state government site, reading their filing requirements and filing it yourself, and then getting some pre-made "fill in" NDA/NCA/Contractor agreements.

After you have done this, then you can go about hiring people to work for you. Just like any other employer, you will want to see resumes, portfolios and to check references.

While you surely can put together a game without doing any of that, there are so many things that can happen that can rob you of the rights to your great idea. So, unless you're doing this out of love and to be totally free, not following actual legal procedures can wind up costing you more in the long run. Also, by creating an actual company, you may then deduct off the taxes the things you will be spending money on, rather than just paying people and buying servers. Believe me, if you get successful, you want to deduct the expenses of your business, otherwise the government is going to be taking huge chunks. (This is US-based. I have no clue what other countries require.)

If you want to produce a full-on game, compete with the big boys, then you must also be a "boy". An incorporated (whether C, S or LLC corp) company with a registered Trademark (cost maybe $700 for a big city lawyer to do both of these, expedited, including the company registry searches in the US and Canada). NDA/NCA agreements take a lawyer about 4-6 hours to draft, depending on how much you need, so make sure you know what the lawyer charges per hour. IGDA had the average industry salaries chart somewhere, as well, so you can gauge how much to pay someone for their job.

Now for "how much". I just made a spreadsheet for a very barebones MMORPG, in which we have a team of 5 people who will be working for free. We'll be buying AMD Opteron-based server(s) and running on Slackware Linux (open source). Panda3D (open source), Blender3D (open source).. you get the picture. So, the total for us, including the lawyer, accountant, servers, co-location and bandwidth and webpage hosting will bring the total to about $25,000 to launch the game. No plans on advertising, since we can't afford it. We'll spread by mouth.

However, if money was no object, you could use Unreal Engine (hundreds of thousands of dollars plus royalties), 3DS Max (costly), speedtree ($6,000), etc..

So it's a range of costs. Anywhere from "no upfront expenses and you give us 50% of the profit" (Kaneva) to millions.

If you don't wanna learn to code and wanna attract a team to do the work for you then I'd put together a *complete* design document for your game.. Making it as detailed as possible will give you the chance to iron out all of the bugs and make sure your idea is feasible and still looks like it will be fun after you've played around with it..

Plus there are loads of resources around here to help you know exactly what you need to put in there..

Good luck anyways!

Oops. I forgot to mention one thing. You do want to "learn code."

I don't mean be a programmer. I don't mean studying for years to program things. What I mean is: familiarize yourself with the languages your team will be using. Otherwise, you'll be a poor Project Manager, giving the programmers vague directions, and you could wind up ina situation where your programmers are BSing you. Unless you know a bit about how programming works in general, you will have no clue if what you want can be done, should be done or will be done.

If you go to Gamedev.net's Postmortem section and just read one after the other, more often than not, the "What went wrong" parts deal with a lack of good Project Management and a lack of direction in design.

Knowing a bit about programming will help you immensely in picking out a team, because otherwise someone could tell you "I know Fortran and COBOL, and they're the ultimate in assembly languages." and you might hire them, believing it. ;)

Ellis: A MMORPG on 25 grand, eh? I hope those 5 people working for free are gonna stick with you all the way through!

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put together a *complete* design document for your game.. Making it as detailed as possible will give you the chance to iron out all of the bugs and make sure your idea is feasible and still looks like it will be fun after you've played around with it..

That is what I am going through at the moment. Started with many many pages of concept notes and am now in the process of converting those notes into static illustrator versions to see how things work visually layed out and along with that am also making interface screens and basically, every element that I want to end up in the game. As with any complex idea, this is the most important phase (IMO) as it grows the conceptual into articulated.

So far, most of the ideas I have for this game are translating quite well. As to the ability of a programmer to turn some of the more complex mechanics into operational reality...will have to find that out down the road but I don't see any logical reasons why the functions cannot be created.

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familiarize yourself with the languages your team will be using. Otherwise, you'll be a poor Project Manager

I think that makes for very good advice.