Good morning y’all,
I have this game concept circulating my mind right now and to be completely honest, I have little to no experience developing games at all and therefore I have a few questions.
Is it wrong to hire people to create the game for me?
If it not wrong; would I simply need to hire one person or are there a bunch of roles required for game development?
If the answer is the latter option, which roles would I need to hire for?
I do thank you in advance for any response produced. If this topic is posted in the wrong place I do apologise, I usually try to avoid forum systems.
Not at all. In fact, there are multiple members of the community that make a living off of free lance development. I’ve got a couple if games of other people that I’m getting paid to build at the moment. As long as you are able to pay, you will find people able to work.
This depends a lot on the scope of your game. The typical minimum viable team for an indie game includes an artist and a programmer. There are some rare individuals who can do a good job of both, but most people specialise.
The bigger your project is the more people it will require. At the top end if the scale you have AAA games with hundreds of people working in them for years. Everything from specialist programmers, specialist artists, game designers, marketing, management, community engagement, quality assurance.
Send me a call, i can fill many roles. 3D artist/model/texture/rigging/ani, coding, game structure design, and server and database architecture. I also do high quality sound design. Look at my Personal details for more.
So the answer to your question 2. is. It depends what you find and need.
Of course there is nothing wrong about hiring people to help you with a project or hiring them to do the entire thing for you.
I have hired freelancers to do different kinds of work for about a decade now. I still do a lot of stuff myself too including full projects. However, art is one big thing I commonly hire out. Sometimes I just have way more ideas for projects than I have time for. Say I see what appears to be a great opportunity and I am already busy with one or more projects. I can either put the new project off until I have time to begin on it and hope nobody gets there first or I can contract out the work. I am currently contracting out some Unity programming work.
If you have the money to spend on contracting out work then certainly do so. It helps you out by getting projects done faster or better or even getting them done period. It helps out the people you are paying by providing them paid work to do. A win-win!
It’s one thing to have a game concept in your head, it’s quite another to have a fully fleshed out GDD (Game Design Document) detailing exactly what the game is going to entail.
Your best approach is to probably prototype your concept, have a build that captures the core mechanics of the game. Then once you have that fine-tuned, move onto fleshing out the GDD, in which you list everything you can possibly think about the game, such as platforms, features, input, characters, screen wireframes etc. There are a few templates online for GDD’s, take a look at some of those.
But if you’ve never done a game before, start with Pong, seriously. Following the steps I’ve mentioned above will be good practice even for something as simple as a Pong game, and you will learn a lot in the process, which will equip you in the future to be more readily prepared for larger projects.
All responses acknowledged. Thank you BoredMormon, GarBenjamin and Meltdown for the indepth answers and general guidance, I cannot express how much I appreciate it. Mr IronMax, I shall keep a note of your contact details for future reference.
In response to your statement Mr JamesLeeNZ and N1warhead it would more than likely be contracted work, 50% upon starting the project and 50% upon completion. If the desired sales where met I would then offer the contractors a full time position, for maintenance and the production of additional DLC.
Your 50/50 payment split would work well if you are hiring a studio. If you are hiring individuals you’ll probably want more frequent smaller payment milestones.