I am working on a game and am at a point at which i will need a few more team members. I do plan on selling this game and making a profit from it (hopefully) . I as wondering what are the best practices when working in a team where money is involved.
For example Which forms to get signed by the other members so that they dont take my ideas and run with them.
Also I am planning to give each team member 10% of profit for contribution, should I get forms signed for that as well? and what kinds or forms. I hope you get the point of what I am trying to say. So if anyone who has done this before tell me what are the best practices I should do, in order to avoid any problems.
If possible, get advice of a professional lawyer. I’m currently sub-contracting some work and I can tell you that you have to pinpoint every single part of your contract to not be bothered by any problems that might occur afterwards. And to make this bullet proof, you have to require a lawyer to write the contract.
This contract not only needs to specify the duties of both parties, but also terms which enable you to break the contract (and under which circumstances), how money is paid and how the 10% of profit contribution is calculated (what are the expenses that converts the money turn-over into profit? When is this due? Is this calculated from day 1 or after break-even? etc etc).
Additionally, you should specify that the work at hand will be detailed by supplementary work sheets that are produced upon milestone/project planning.
For the contract breaking, you should specify hand-over times. This is needed if a programmer leaves the team and the code has to be given to another programmer (or a graphic artist leaves and the workflow/details must be explained to the follow-up graphic artist). Also, who is in charge of the costs of those hand-overs. I usually have a clause in my contracts that IF there is still work scheduled for the contractor, it’s up to the contractor to pay for the hand-over (within reasonable limits).
Well… writing contracts is an art for itself, so I could go on for many, many more lines… but seriously find a lawyer if you are not sure how to do this yourself.
Agreed. Anything concerning legality should be discussed with a legal person, either lawyer or legal assistant. They will point you in the right direction, as long as they don’t have to do any legwork, because they’ll charge.
The accumulated filth of all their models and scripts will foam up about their waists, and all the coders and artists will look up and shout “Collaborate with us!” …And I’ll look down and whisper “No.”
it makes me go Bleh ! I have a coder who I know I dont need to make any agreements with since I know him for like ever. I can model most things, but our games work just fine but are all grey cause no textures .
Work in a really shitty job outside of game development for more than 2 years (I mean really shitty), and you’ll instantly love all of these little things.
Essentially there’s two different kinds of ‘contract’.
Legal documents. This is in situations where there’s a chance of one party suing the other if things go wrong. This only really makes sense to anyone if you’re talking a “reasonably large” sum of money. I was once told this needs to be at least £15,000 (GBP) but your mileage may vary. In these cases you need everything written by lawyers into big fat incomprehensible contracts.
Agreement documents. These are for situations where you just need everyone to agree on what the deal is before you start. You should always have something written down but it should be in plain English so everyone can understand it. For this kind of deal you should never work with someone you don’t trust and you should put time and effort into understanding and communicating with people you’re working with so they understand the deal and are happy with it before you start.
This is just my experience and actually type 2) situations are much the best. Your situation and business environment may differ and I’m sure there are a lot of situations where unless a contract written by a lawyer its useless.
Alright Thanks for the excellent advise guys. For now i think i am going to learn Uving and Texturing myself instead of going through this hassle, but its good to know these things just in case i work with other people