Elite Team

How does one form an elite development team without any money?  I’m probably taking the most dangerous and ill-advised route of them all…

Asking your friends to work for free. (Don’t try this at home!)

The problem with this is that people will pour an enormous amount of time, energy and resources into a game which never sees the light of day.  Most game projects simply die an ignoble death and spend eternity in “game development hell.”

So, to help curb this and because everyone’s time is important, I am first making a graphically simple game shell.  And only once the game is pretty solid will I ask for help making the art assets.  This is pretty much the same method that Jonathan Blow used for his game “Braid.”

Yeah... My art looks just as ugly.

Once I know I have a rock solid (but ugly) game.  I’ll be hitting up a couple artist friends to help me reskin the sucker and put some lipstick and mascara on the pig.

I learned my lesson from last year when I asked for art before I had a game.  A friend of mine, Jonathan Stuart, was creating art for our game before it was even fully constructed or technically tested.  We came up with a very beautiful but completely unusable prototype called Space ROX.

Beautiful Art! Technically unsound.

The game looked beautiful even at its fifth prototype iteration.  But under the hood, there were huge performance issues already arising from my liberal use of particle effects in Adobe Flash.  And while I was clonking my head in solving these technical issues, our interest and motivation fizzled and life events happened which ultimately nixed the project.

There have been countless other game projects you can find all over the place that have taken much more time, energy and effort that have come to nothing with no compensation for the time and energy wasted.  And those contentious projects can end (and sometimes have ended) friendships and ruined reputations.

Thankfully Jon is up for trying again, and he even brought along a friend: Scott Brown, who is a brilliant pixel artist as well (see top).

But this time, I’m going to finish the game first before asking for their time in making it look pretty.  No need to waste time with creating a beautiful dress, if there is no princess to wear it, or even without knowing if the dress will even fit because you have no measurements.

And to make things simple and because I have no starting capital, for our first game, we’re going to work for royalties, percentage based on number of hours spent.  So basically, we’re all working for free, but for them it’ll be working on something practically finished rather than vaporware.

Will you ever trust me again?

As for resolving Space ROX’s massive technical issue and performance limitations of Flash?  Well, not only did I figure out how to increase Flash’s performance, but I believe that Flash has the technical capability of being the gaming platform for the next decade…