I think it's hard for an artist to manage their own project. A programmer can work on a game by himself until it's basically finished (and just in need of some non-programmer art) but an artist can't do that: he's got to find a programmer and get the programming done first before he can start adding his artwork.

I fully agree with sunandshadow: the trick is to do everything yourself. If you have any talent for programming whatsoever (or even half a desire to learn), get started with something like Panda3D. It's unbelievably easy to get up and running, in fact at the end of the five page "Hello World" tutorial, you get this:



So, as I say, if you have any programming talent at all, you should be able to get that to work. Then, if you find a "real" programmer to join your team, and he drops out, at least you should've learnt enough that you can continue on without him.

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
Having done this failed volunteer project shit for too many years, I'm rather bitter about it. That's my disclaimer. In that cynical tone, here is my theory about how to actually get to a completed game:

- Everything you can do yourself, do your goddamn self. It doesn't matter if it isn't very good; if the project ever starts paying for itself you can use the $ to buy better replacement part, if it doesn't earn money it doesn't deserve the good shit.

- Never, ever make your own game engine. Just don't go there.

- Making a game absolutely requires a programmer, an artist, and someone who can write in coherent, intelligent paragraphs. Preferably this should add up to one person. Tolerably, it should add up to two people who know each other in real life. If you have to go to 3 or more you are in trouble. Forget music, that junk is icing, you do not need it unless and until you have baked an edible cake, i.e. game. For every team member including yourself, they can't join the team unless they pass the test of doing an actual piece of work which can be used in the game.

- Contract: any ideas and work contributed to the project belong to the project. Anyone who quits the project before completion forfeits all rights to ideas and work they already contributed or future compensation for these.

- You don't gain the right to work on writing a novel worth of game story until you have created a playable tutorial level. You don't gain the right to do concept art for characters who aren't in the tutorial level until you have created working animations for the characters who are in the tutorial level. You don't gain the right to design combat that is not it the tutorial level until a playtester can kill level one blobs in the tutorial level.

- Pick an existing, fun game as close to what you want to make as possible, reverse engineer a design document for it, strip it down to bare essentials, change the details to yours, then implement that. Making a game that is a combination of two existing designs is possible, but if you are trying to combine 3 or more to make something really new you are in trouble.

I'm not really bitter about managing the growth of a volunteer project, and I still agree with these points. Lots of sound advice in your post.

If you're going to require an artist to be able to produce something usable in order to join the team, why isn't the same requirement being made of the team leader?

Some people were born to be leaders, some people weren't. What happens often, i think, is that people who aren't leaders happen to have all the ideas for the games.

If its your brainchild, its hard to think of allowing someone else to call the shots. But it goes without question that the people you assign to tasks actually have talent in those tasks. If not, then you need to find someone who does to do that task for you.

You can do anything you want, but each new thing detracts from the time you'll spend doing those other things, and i don't care how good you are at something, if you don't have time for it it won't be good.


Also consider the rules system that's being talked about here; rules this and rules that. Your programmer might be able to deal with that, but don't ask your artist to. There is a relationship between skill and creativity that works in strange ways; sometimes they're to scale, other times they're inversely proportional to each other.

The more skilled an artist is at turning out a specific type of work (character models etc. ) the less creative that artist will be in the allover sense. This only stands to reason, as routines make for faster output but less deviation.

But if you are trying to make a name for yourself, if you want to stand out in the crowd, you need something ultra creative. You need some real art. At least from one of your artists.

All i can say is, rules are a huge turnoff to me. If its not fun i won't do it. And i don't think i should.


This is the magic of art and music: Emotions come thru to the listener. What emotions do you hope to convey in a piece of music that was made under boring, stressful conditions?