After success with my senior project, developing a real game with a team of 15 that we’re releasing on Steam, which I feel really good about, I crave the experience of working in a team to develop a game. But of course, my hobby project is a nonprofit endeavor so I can only expect volunteers, and even though I feel I can get the coding down mostly on my own, I feel like I might be asking too much by hoping for an artist or few to join with me… maybe I just need to change up my approach, and offer equal shares of creative control, that way it’s not “help me make my game” so much as “join me and we’ll make our game.”
For some reason, I click it, and Google translated it for me?
Hello,
me and my team (we are atm 3: me and 2 school colleagues) started a pretty big project last week. I know it sounds crazy, but we are working on a successor to WoW. Please don’t say we can’t do it anyway, because we are very ambitious and are very experienced WoW players. I’m posting here to find more people for our team. We have a modeler (me), a musician (for the background music and sound effects) and a community manager. We are still looking for a programmer to bring the whole thing to life. If you would like to apply, please post what experience you have so far with game programming and what programming languages you know (we want to write the game in Java because we already learned a bit of Java at school last year).
Our goals/motivation: Wow is now a few years old and Blizzard doesn’t seem to be thinking about a successor. Instead, they create one extension at a time. The graphics are quite old and WoW2 is supposed to look much better (my models are almost photorealistic). The quests should be more exciting (don’t always kill XY, get XY). >There will be epic battles with up to 500vs500 fighters. We have invented two new classes: Necromancer and Hobblings. But I don’t want to tell you everything here and save it for later. I will send a project plan to anyone who is interested. ^We can’t pay for the work, but when we publish it, for example, we share the subscription fees we get ($10 per player).
The OP replied a few time as well, reiterating that this is a serious project. They even uploaded some of the “photorealistic” models, but the pics are offline, sadly.
I don’t think it was ever truly revealed whether it was an elaborate troll or just a spark of adolescent folly.
As a person that has a lot of ideas and no coding or art knowledge, it sucks because I know I can’t expect someone else to do it for me and I don’t have the time or mental capacity to learn. I guess I can just have AI do it for me now /s
I envy you in some ways, recognizing your limits is something I wish I would have done. I came from a coding background, spent like 2 years learning unity, then eventually realized much of the cool stuff for games happen on the art side. So I learned blender… the whole pipeline- modeling, sculpting, materials, animations, each piece had it’s own challenges and quirks.
It’s been like 15 years since I started, I still haven’t released a game… but I do have a collection of neat prototypes that no one has played. I often wonder if I’ve wasted my time with the whole thing. If I could go back, I’d choose one niche, specialize in it and find a team to collaborate with, but there are trade offs with that too like giving up a lot of creative control.
I think it’s probably better to have taken action as you’ve learned a lot, people like the person you replied to and myself “know” our limitations but then we don’t do anything so you’re 15 years more advanced in your knowledge and I’m 15 years stagnant no better than I was from the start.
Yes this is what I tell myself to keep from going insane, I learned a lot. Unfortunately the majority of these skills I’ve acquired are not applicable to “pay the bills” work. By trade, I’m still building web forms and streamlining internal business processes - what would it look like I spent those years on perfecting that craft instead? What if I didn’t block out my evenings and sacrifice time with friends and family? Life is always a series of trade-offs, I suppose.
In an ideal world we’d all be encouraged to take on creative pursuits and have the ability to do so, rather than feel guilty for them. Maybe someday, right?
Nah, call it a mental block or creative fear or whatever, but publishing is an open invitation for criticism and negative feedback. If I’m crossing into that, I feel a need for it to at least be a complete package I’m presenting. This is just my experience, most devs will advise you to get your work in front of an audience as soon as possible and iterate quickly.
Stopped myself before I got in as far as you but realized my roadblock is art. I can’t solve this one: I lack the creativity and patience to do the art, and naturally nobody will ever work for free, nor should they.
I wasn’t really sure how to proceed so I started studying for various tech and cloud certs instead. Might as well put my skills to use somewhere.
Heh I can relate, a proper artist - someone with a creative mind and vision - will still run circles around me. I often rely on references and “copying” previous work. I also never learned to draw, instead jumping straight into 3d modeling. Drawing is basically the quickest way to experiment with concepts and designs and that knowledge gap has become a glaring issue over time. There’s no “fix”, just 10,000 more hours of practice…
You can have someone else do it for you. You just need the money. Give yourself Executive Producer credits, tell them your vision and pay them to make it happen.
Same here, I have one idea for a simple 2D game that I would like to make just so it exists. I even got myself Unity (before they stopped being cool) and tried to do some tutorials, but I just don’t have what it takes.
If you still want to make the game despite that, I’d recommend watching some of Pirate Software’s youtube shorts for motivation. He’s got some great gamedev advice.
I got asked by a team of first timers who have never done any professional coding or design if I wanted to chip in on a competitive MMOFPS they want to make.
That’s not going to happen. Between the rise of cheating, the insane hardware and optimization requirements of an MMOFPS, the general lack of interest in the genre (most have died due to low player counts), and the sheer amount of time and effort involved in designing and balancing the game even after it’s largely feature complete? Forget it, I’m better off buying lottery tickets than hoping for anything to come of that.
I can’t think of any FOSS games that would invite an idea guy to drive the project. They’re made of volunteers, sure, but FOSS game teams still expect tangible contributions. Otherwise it’s just another feature request and will get picked up if the team thinks it’s worth it.
More specifically with FOSS projects, whoever puts in the work makes the actual decisions.
Like, if there’s a change that one person wants and the others actively disagree with (and it can’t be made configurable either), then that won’t happen.
But usually, there’s hundreds of features that make sense in principle. And if someone scratches their own itch, i.e. implements the feature that they’re missing, then that obviously won’t be rejected, even if it’s not the most requested feature.
So, yeah, such an idea guy would need really good ideas and present them so well, that others selfishly want to implement those ideas (and moreso than all their other ideas).
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