I have characters I've been sitting on variants of for the last 25 years. I had been in school for Psychology for the last 10 years but a bout of depression and a bad therapist made me rethink that career path. With no idea possible idea of what to do with my life I decided to make video games. Thing is all I can do is design levels, and write the story I need people for everything else.

Finding people has been hard. Figuring out how to pay for everything is even harder as I have absolutely no money for this venture and I live in Rhode Island, Like this state is going to dump money on another game studio. At the very least I'm going to try to build a team get something crapped out and try crowd funding. I think In terms of starting a studio and getting funding I have no idea what I'm doing. The actual design of the game I have an idea, it's the building the team and getting funding that I have no idea about. I can't expect a team to work for free after all but I also need people to help me build something so I CAN get funding. A friend of mine suggested hiring people off Fiverr to help with some art and stuff. I found 2 people willing to help me with music. I need programmers and artists (and already made a thread for that and I guess there was some interest)

So where do I even get started? Aside from my ideas, and the game story and a basic lay out of what the game will be (adjusted for a budget of absolutely nothing) I don't know what else to do. I have thought about taking development classes, not to learn anything but just to recruit people.

SO where do I even start? The only glimmer of hope I have I can do this is Bright Memory Infinite which as far as I know one guy did by himself. But I clearly need some advice on getting things off the ground.

Hi Pope,

Several options at play here: joining a collaboration with others, starting a company of your own, getting a job at an existing company. Those are all completely different ways to go (and can lead to the other ways). It is NOT recommended to start a company of your own without prior experience making games. If you want to try collaborations, check out our Hobby Projects Classifieds board. You'll need to collaborate on others' ideas - with no prior experience making games, nobody's going to want to work on your idea for you, while struggling to educate you on the process all the while. Your mention of “school of psychology” sounds like you're university faculty? That means you'd be switching into games from another career field, and I wrote an article on that (https://sloperama.com/advice/lesson41.html). I also wrote articles on getting a job and starting a company. I don't want to spam this board with links - they're at Sloperama also.

Your best step at this point is to start reading. Forget about recruiting people to make your vision, and instead look into seeing what you can do to collaborate with others to build up your contacts and to gain some insight into the process. It'll be hard to get started with that since you confess that you know nothing at this point, which is why you need to do a lot of reading and research into how games are made and, more importantly, how finished games are marketed and sold. Good luck!

Are you going to be able to get a team together and successful crowd funding without experience? Probably not. Software is hard. Even experienced developers have messed up crowd funded projects. In most cases I would say you need a track record and a significant portion of the work done on the game. (I haven't done crowd funding so my advice may be bad.)

I would suggest trying out some tutorial for making games using some engine. I personally would use an open source engine like godot but there are generic commercial ones and genre specific ones like RPG Maker. You could also see about modding games. However, these are probably not going to get you funding quickly.

Bright Memory was done in the developer's spare time. I suspect that means he had a job which basically funded the game. Even with that he got in trouble for using assets without permission.

What I've been doing is looking at various games of different genres to see how many people made them. Games of varying quality too. I have ONE industry contact in Rene of NG Dev Team/Hucast but the games he makes and what I want to do are totally different things. I'm pretty friendly with the guy behind FX Unit Yuki and I know he's been having trouble getting ideas made too. Besides that I'm pretty much at square one. The only real experence I have with actual making of things are some well received Mario Maker levels. I could probably cobble a platformer together but the game(S) I'm trying to get made are of the beat em up variety.

I'm not considering crowd funding unless I have no other options. I learned my lesson from Mighty No 9 and never funded anything again so I assume others are over crowd funding too.

I'm blabbering nonsense, I'm basically just saying I can't do what I want done on my own and need help. So far all I've learned is finding music people is pretty easy. I found somebody who does the exact genres I'm looking for with in a few months. It's everything else I'm struggling with.

Edit: Ok so here's another idea, I'm not opposed to making something for a retro system. I LOVE the Megasis (My name for the Mega Drive/Genesis) and I have an Everdrive so I can work with real hardware. I think my characters would be suited well to those style sprites and Indie games for the genesis really impress me. I guess that would be an option too. I don't know if there are any quick drag and drop tools for development on it though.

Hello. Send me a private message if you like.

Ryanuph said:

Hello. Send me a private message if you like.

And done, It might seem a bit short and vague but it was the middle of the night so..