Hello,

So my name is Eric, and I've been in the space of game dev for the past 10 years. and I'm finally officially in the industry. You can learn more about me and my background at my company website.

But in short, I have a psychology background.

As a free service, I will come into your project, conduct interviews with all members of the company to find out what if any improvements are needed.

I will write a report for leadership after my findings.

The only thing I ask in return is you remain connected via LinkedIn or email . And you share your knowledge and resources.

I DO NOT WORK WITH LONE WOLF DEVELOPERS. if you are one of these people, I'm sorry, but unless you want advise on how to not be a lone wolf anymore, we have nothing to talk about.

As an added bonus for anyone who accepts, I will freely share my company's "management resources"

This offer is especially for hobbyists, Rev share moders etc. anyone who has big dreams, but could use support to get there.

Only contact me if you want an unbiased psychological lens on you, your leadership/ management team, and by extension your entire company/ organization

I will NOT ENDORSE, BUY or any way support financially, your product, if that is your hope, be up front with me, and I'll judge weather your product should be shared with my connections.

I need:

1. org name
2. org size
3. project name
4. communication platform
5. Rev share or all volunteer
6. Real name.

Lets make this industry better, and figure out which projects should live and which should die consolidating talent to the projects and leaders that truly deserve it.

If you have money now or later, as a representation of your appreciation please go Donate on my website.

I have a mutual NDA we will need to sign.

GeneralJist said:
I DO NOT WORK WITH LONE WOLF DEVELOPERS. if you are one of these people, I'm sorry, but unless you want advise on how to not be a lone wolf anymore, we have nothing to talk about.

Too bad. Reading your offer, i was certainly interested an your report, as my army of artists (which is me) never agrees with tools provided by my tool programmers (which is me), so our work conditions are quite toxic. Plus, my male dominated employees (which is me) are concerned we might not have enough females on our project to represent a properly varied team as modern standards request. Finally, my employees constantly get lost in details and never finish their main tasks as i tell them.

Just joking. But now i'd seriously like to know what - in your opinion - is the problem with people who work without company? Why should i hire some more cooks to spoil my booth, raging about crunch and harassment on twitter, replacing innovation with stale state of the art, caring more about their hairstyles than making good games?

Congrats for ‘making it into the industry’, if that's what you wanted. But i don't think that's reason to look down on others which go their own path. Which is my impression you do from some recent posts and capital letters.

Well,

There is nothing wrong with going your own path, and in most cases your paving the road. But the thing is, your doing it alone. And I've seen too many people and projects fail when ONE GUY IS GOD AND DOES IT ALL.

I don't mind talking to you, but if you or any other lone wolf dev wants my help, I'll need to take a book from Tom Sloper, and not give private game dev advise. I understand why he does this now, for a variety of reasons, prime among them, he understands by helping one you can help all. And you need to risk being faced with inconvenient harsh truth, like I did with Esenthal

From the info you posted, you need discipline. It's easy to have discipline when your alone. But when your with others, there're expectations. Like it or not, they will judge you. And you will need to learn from them.

Doing gamedev alone in my opinion defeats the entire purpose and potential of game dev.

If you, God of your game, sat alone, and made everything then you know everything, no surprises no social contact no team work, no training for a real company. Sure you have the control, sure you have the experience and knowledge but with no one to share it with that made it with you, with no one to talk to that understands your struggle in detail its rife for loneliness and mental health issues.

Together

Everyone

Achieves

More

If you want my help on your specific issues make a thread, and link it to me.

And if your concerned about paying people, there are people you can get for free, you just need to ask in the right place, in the right way.

A key lesson I've learned. if you can inspire another, you've not only done your job, but you've gone above and beyond.

GeneralJist said:
Doing gamedev alone in my opinion defeats the entire purpose and potential of game dev.

Disagree, because that's the roots of gamedev: One dev did the whole Atari game. And it went on quite for a while. IDK, but i guess games like Another World, Prince of Persia or Ultima still were the work of individuals.
And this work now is the foundation of the whole industry, as current games are still the same, and their only progress was to mix genres.
It looks like the larger the teams become, the larger the promise, but the larger the final disappointment. The industry invested all their money into more and more content - motion capturing Hollywood stars, making great trailers, etc.
But they forgot to invest into better algorithms and tools instead, to keep their budgets low enough so small teams could still make state of the art games, which are actually good.

That's just how it looks to me personally. No disrespect - they just seem to be off track.
Personally i do not work on a game. I work on fixing those issues, e.g. procedural content creation tools or robotic characters to replace animation and enable new games.
Nobody could help me on that. I take the risk to work on speculative ideas, and if it works out, i'll try to sell it to the industry. If it doesn't work, then i'll become one of the many lone wolfs you have seen failing.
Though, if i succeed, my work will become part of this foundation your industry relies upon. Thus your disrespect isn't justified no matter what's the outcome, imo.

However, that's not why i replied. I ask you as a psychologist: What do you think people assume about you, after you attack lone wolf devs within a noble offer of helping out teams? Notice, as the offer is specific about team management, there would be no reason to exclude lone wolfs specifically. And still you did. So what might people think? ‘Hey cool! This guy hates lone wolfs just as i do - let's network with him!’ or ‘WTF? Why does this guy attack lone wolfs out of a sudden? Was his family killed by a mad lone wolf gamedev? How sad, but… better keep away from him. Obviously he is still busy with his trauma.’
I guess both answers are just as likely. My impression about your offer would be much more professional if you would not had mentioned lone wolfs at all - that's for sure. You do not do yourself a favor this way, imho.

But i'm sorry about spilling noise over your post. I should have used PM instead, and i would be fine with Mods deleting the conversation to clean up.

I think it's educational so keep going.

Well, I know 1st hand how lone wolf works, my former boss and original creator of the project that launched my career was a lone wolf at heart. I'll spare you the tragic details. But what happened is he got diagnosed with Schizophrenia , tried to delete his own project we were all working on with him, needed control and power in his RL, so found it in the game dev, turns out me and him reconnected, and talked a few days ago, and the other dev who did it with us was indeed trying to steal his work and his project,, this guy had to be removed from my company after 10 years of pretending to be nice, he tried a hostile takeover of my company, and I'm preparing a law suit against him as he never turned over his files to the company.

Lone wolf just putts too much on the shoulders of one person, and one way or another, that person's life will break in some way, forcing them to take care of other aspects of life, without others in the trenches with you, it's too easy to see yourself as God, and to love your creation to your death. You all see what happened to Esenthal, I predict he will spiral, and even if he finishes the games and engine he has made himself, he will never make up for all it has cost him, and he will finish his games or it will kill him. I'm serious, that man is the picture of a lone wolf who doesn't know his priorities in life, who refuses to listen to others who are trying to help him. That is the attitude and personality lone wolf breeds. left unchecked, it will destroy a man and now, Esenthal is sacrificing the future of his wife and child. It won't be a while until he realizes just how Fucked up he is, and how he did this too himself.

I don't want anyone to lone wolf it because thinking your God in your own little creations is dangerously unhealthy. And if I had my way, in the future, I'd order someone to study this, so we have some hard data and hard science to point to to discourage people from this path.

It always leads to pain in my experience, maybe people could anecdotally look at single parents? IDK.

Oh, i see. Now having context, i can relate and empathize. But seeing just the capital letters in OP, context is missing, understanding is missing too.
Still, the story you tell is more a team issue than a lone wolf issue? Mad and criminal colleagues - that can't happen to you if you are a lone wolf literally.

Though, at this point i realize - i could tell even sadder stories about my former team experiences, and that's a major reason i didn't try to get work in a company anymore.
Which might explain my lost belief on large teams, but also my current lone crusade, which is both risky and desperate.
I have this realtime global illumination algorithm, which clearly is much better than any industry methods, so they should want it. But making the preprocessing tools is difficult. It will also cause ‘baking’ times during production, and to compensate that i try to get out a procedural modeling and LOD advantage from those tools as well, which might fail. Maybe i should have focused just on the lighting instead of overwhelming myself.
And yeah - i didn't read about Esenthals private fate, but i'm in a similar position if so. If i fail to finish my stuff in the next few years, i'll run out of savings, and getting a job won't be easy then. I can confirm: Being a lone wolf of that kind is no fun, and does not feel great.

I could have taken a different route - taking a job offer regarding rendering tech from a really cool and reputated games company. Taking proper care about my family, as i should.
Though, my wife didn't want to move, and she's fine with the situation.
Plus: Had i taken the offer, i couldn't finish my work on GI. And gamers would need to buy 600W RTX GPUs to get dynamic GI til the end of time. While i know a <100W APU is easily enough for the job.
That's big power savings world wide, beside keeping gaming affordable. Do i act irresponsible? Am i on the wrong path? Only time will tell and judge…

Guess we are fine.
And we feel better now, after exposing our traumas and fears. Sigmund Freud would proud on us ; ) Sorry again for the noise.

np,

It's all educational noise. So I'm happy.

Best of luck with your lone wolf crusade.

I'd recommend budgeting a portion of your life savings in hiring at least one person to take the load off of your back,, I'd even be willing to spend some time getting to know you and what you need and are looking for Pro bono to develop a JD for this other person, and once we are done I'll share it with my network to help you finish your project sooner . If you accept pm me with any details you think I need to know.

I need at minimum:

1. your country and time zone
2. how long your project has been in development
3. How much you've spent so far
4. Website?
5. Description in layman's terms

But I only do this under the commitment that you will actually consider hiring someone, if you are on the fence or need more time to think about it, np. I'm in no rush. I'm even willing to help you interview if you want, after I know who you are and what you do.

Don't worry about Diversity hires, all that liberal nonsense is so companies and people can appear more woke.

FYI, at heart I'm a producer, researcher and writer, so I've picked up some stuff along my journey, but I still have much to learn, which is one of the reasons I'm doing this.

I never turn away anyone who is genuinely asking for help because in asking for help, you admit to yourself there is a problem you can't solve on your own.

I have a mutual NDA if needed, or if you got an NDA of your own, I'd gladly review and sign.

As for Esenthals private fate, It is actually all public on here somewhere. You at least seem to be a “Responsible adult” he is choosing to hide his head in the sand of his creation and neglect his real world responsibilities. And I guarantee him and all of you that he will regret it for years to come. I'm not a betting man, And I'm not an immoral banker, so I'm not going to bet on him losing.

Read his fate at your own expense, maybe he will listen to you, another fellow lone wolf. But I find it incurably sad and frustrating. He was even offered to be a co-founder for another engine project,, from a guy who been an engine dev and knows 1st hand his struggles. instead of collaborating he did the lone wolf Hing , and in my mind, spit in the guys face.

God literally presented him a solution to all his problems and Esenthal didn't even pm the guy to thank him for his offer to even see how they could collaborate.

He is going to be a casualty off this game dev revolution and he has picked the wrong side. And years later, he will have no one to blame but himself.

listen, a good music store owner who I've known for 10 years likens it like this. So those guys were digging in Egypt, and found treasure and tombs, the way the typical guy thinks is if I had only dug in the right place I'd be the one famous rich, etc, etc, it would be me on the cover of Time, if only if only.

Well, we are now reaching that point in the games Industry.

And I may be one of the few people with the time, expertise and patience to try and save these people from themselves.

I've prepared a mutual NDA

Ha, so i get the help even i'm a lone wolf. That's nice : )
Then let's spin this further, to provide some example…

1. Austria
2. >15 years, last 5 full time
3. just time
4. no
5. Realtime GI requiring PS4 specs, faster and higher quality than any current next gen or raytracing stuff. Plus - eventually - some other things as a bonus.
   
   

Hiring somebody seems no good idea due to reasons:

• I'd need to pay him, so i'd run out of savings much faster, trading the time i need against help from somebody lacking experience. (All my stuff is new stuff, very different from traditional rendering / tools)
• To pay somebody, i probably should / need to start a company(?) So i need to pay myself as well, from my savings, adding taxes to that money a second time. (I'm currently insured with my wife. She does work, i do household)
• As my work only is research and development, i don't need to do any investments or caring about business. That's really pretty fine for now.

Once i can demonstrate my stuff with a demo renderer and toolset, i'll try to resell. Either exclusive or as middleware. Then i'll eventually start a company before the deal. (Did not care about that yet.)
After that, in case i can still use my eventually sold tech for a small indie game, i'll hire a small team at some point to work on a game. But before that, maybe i'll enter another research period to finish work on robotics to match / beat motion capture.
That's some vague plan at least. Surely it will happen differently. For example, the company buying my stuff might want to hire me for some time to help with integration.

Probably, due to my rural origin, i never really considered hiring or teaming up with others. Simply because there are no other people in my surroundings which work on games or related tech.
But maybe i'm wrong. Once i was applying to a job as animator in a nearby city, and turned out the company makes the biggest porn game on the planet :D And they did all engine stuff themselves.
Still, i don't think it's likely to find good help. Research means a path of failures. Most work i did ended up in the trash bin. Planning ahead does not work, and i would not even know which tasks to out source. It's like saying ‘Can you try that? It won't work, but maybe, with some luck we get an idea of what might work along the way of failure. So please write down your ideas and give me that. No need to hand over the code - just delete it.'

you can do a sole proprietorship.

I sent you a pm.