Hello, my name is Kevin. Story and Battle Systems ... are all finished! I'am working with a team and we used Ogre Engine. Our Models are about 2+ mio. polygons with displacement mapping of course. And we managed HDR Lightning. The problem is the working process is very low because our Computers are not quite fast and the GPUs are NV30 or so :(. How can i managed to get a sponsor or something like that? We are working on a Techdemo so that we can show something.

Quote: Original post by KDSBest
We are working on a Techdemo so that we can show something.

You'll need that before you can get a "professional" sponser / funding. The typical process for building a company from scratch is:

1) get investment money from friends and family
2) buy initial equipment/hire people using money from above
3) get venture funding (with a techdemo, etc)
4) buy more/hire more/do more work
5) get 2nd round funding
6) profit

if you have an established business network or are a team of experienced professionals you can generally skip directly to #3.

if you're just a hobby project of poeple with no professional experience you're going to need someone you know to loan you the money.

-me

Paladine is spot on. People don't "sponsor" indie game developers. Nor do Publishers fund indie developers.

Professional investors (or Publishers) invest into sound commercial propositions. That means you need proven industry experience (you need to have shipped a retail game), a business plan, design, schedule, budget, tech demo and clearly defined production and management methodologies. Creating those things (especially the demo) costs money and that money usually comes from friends, family or savings.

You might find some business start-up grants from your local government or some media grants from a local screen agency or regional development agency (I work with a regional development agency in the UK that funds games, TV and film). However, these agencies also require your to be a proper business and the money they give out is matched funding (you put up $50k and they match that so you have $100k). In some areas you might be very lucky and find some arts funding org that will believe that games are digital art and will give you a grant. However these grants are likely to be fairly small.

In short, starting a business costs money. If you don't have the money then you will have to continue working as an indie with your current equipment.

>> The problem is the working process is very low because our Computers are not quite fast and the GPUs are NV30 or so :(.

>> How can i managed to get a sponsor or something like that?

Ask.

Have a plan in mind of what you want, talk with them about what you can offer them, and ask.

For the business it is a fairly small investment in advertising -- so let them know it will be money well spent.

I have seen several times where college students with pretty good demos have asked for and received hardware from different places for senior projects or their own large projects.

One group of students (2001-ish) contacted video card manufacturers and received a free high-end card for the three students to develop their games, with conditions. They needed to include the ATi logo movie and a notice that hardware was donated by the company, implement a few hardware-specific effects, allow ATi to use them for marketing material, and do some other small things. Another team around the same time did the same thing with AMD chips, with condition of a specific AMD logo, certain word-of-mouth conditions, offering a license back to the vendor, and so on.

Yet another team (2003) contacted the on-campus rep to get Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 Professional free for all their senior project team, on conditions of including a Visual Studio 2003 Professional logo at startup, and other stuff.

Other students ask local computer stores and get hardware in exchange for putting the store's logo on their game and giving a certain amount of word-of-mouth advertising. One store in particular now offers last-year hardware to students. Sure it's the stuff that still works but was returned out of warranty, but it is valuable to the student, and the student does't care about the hardware history as long as it works for them.

But without a demo or other evidence that their investment in you is worthwhile, Don't expect to see any goods.

Quote: But without a demo or other evidence that their investment in you is worthwhile, Don't expect to see any goods.

True, but, how to get a demo without the needed tools? I agree that there are many free tools out there for 3D Modelling, Programming and other important things, but they are not as good as some professional, or more professional tools, which are not free. To get a nice demo, you need apporpriate tools which you don't have money for.

But then again, "you get what you pay for". Same way you spend your money on movies, junk food and drink, you can invest some for your game project. Although it is not much but it's a start.

VBmaster

>> but, how to get a demo without the needed tools?

How do you get an egg without a chicken / chicken without an egg?
How do you get work experience without already having a job?
How do you get get water to sharpen the axe when there's a hole in the bucket?
How do you write software for console hardware that doesn't exist yet?
How do you download a patch from the web when the problem prevents you from connecting to the web?

The answer really isn't as hard as it seems. You can figure it out.

But getting back to your specific case...




>> our Computers are not quite fast and the GPUs are NV30 or so :(.

If you have really reached the point where both CPU speeds and NV30 are your limiting factors, then you are doing several things horribly wrong. Either you are serious and you have an incredibly complex game (in which case you could farily easily get money), or you have serious problems with your stuff. The statement that your "models are about 2+ mio. polygons" is one place I'd look next. I'd also see what artificially imposed bottlenecks a profiler would expose about your code. Between the two, some thoughtful improvements to the code and models could probably drop your computer from being fully taxed to being nearly idle.


That hardware you listed is reasonably good for development of a modern small-shop game. Sure your game can't have all the effects from a 2006 AAA title, but you aren't building one of those on your budget. Sure the machine is a few years old and you might have a hard time running this year's debugging tools on them, but that is hardly an excuse for not having a passable demo.

It is better hardware than either the PS2 or XBox consoles, and better development hardware and tools than the first round of development teams had when writing titles for those consoles. PC games like The Sims 2, Quake 3 Arena, and Max Payne 2 had lower hardware requirements than what you posted you have for your game -- the machine you breifly described was a high-end developer station when those were being developed.

Although it is convenient to have millisecond compile times, you can survive with minute long comipiles and even hour-long full rebuilds. Lots of people do.

Good luck on your thing. I've got to get back to mine, the build is finally finished.

I'm working on a Demo.

A friend of mine, lent me his Graficcard.

So i can programm better Shader in the game.