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| Credit: http://www.pixelprospector.com/ |
Lets look at a simple first person online shooter like Counter Strike. Really successful and always one of the most played games on Steam, it's a money spinner. Any half decent developers out there could clone that, in fact there may be a few people reading this who know they could probably do better whilst off there face on acid. In fact in one of the first Unity tutorials I took it was actually to create a one v one multiplier shooter. Maybe there are developers out there now ready and waiting for Unity 5 to hit so they can do that and take advantage of all the new features unity has to offer? Remember the concept of it is quite simple, team a try to defeat team b in a number of ways such as eliminate one another, defuse the bomb, rescue the hostages or something like capture the flag. You have some decent coders each with a unique set of skills, get some digital artists in and some sound specialists and providing everybody is singing off the same hymn sheet and there is a good team leader you have yourself possibly the "new" Counter Strike. It isn't hard to include rewards (hats!), achievements and such either.
All this can be done, online with people who never meet face to face. Unless of course some are from the same area but you get my meaning. And the best part is I'm doing this right now myself and everything looks promising so far.
Grand Theft Auto five cost a few hundreds of millions of dollars to make, in fact I think the only movie to ever cost as much as one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films and you have to wonder sometimes whether that's way more than what they should have actually spent on it. Over 900 people worked on Assassin's Creed Black Flag, was that a bit excessive to have on the the payroll? I've never worked for a AAA Developer studio so I wouldn't know, I don't have first hand experience in developing a AAA game but at first glance it seems excessive. Do we really care if it's a celebrity voice or done by a professional actor? For Has a celebrity voice over really been a selling point for a game? For me it's always been about whether it sounded good, and whether the emotion of the voice was fit the situation perfectly. There are voice actors out there prepared to work for peanuts just to get there name on the credits and have something for there portfolio.
Lets be real about the situation however, it's not just about getting a bunch of random people together. If you have a team of five and all five of you are coders then you aren't going to get very far.
Team Leader / Project Leader
Every team needs a team leader, that unique individual who isn't scared of calling the shots. They need to be realistic and have the unique ability to make everyone want to work for them, and to be able to inspire everyone to work to his or her vision.
Coders
You will need a bunch of skilled coders and it's always worth bringing on someone new and enthusiastic, put them under the wing of a more experiencing programmer. You never know you might be the one to say you discovered the Gable of ten years from now and a brutal truth is sometimes, it's who you know which gets you to some places. If you have trust and give opportunity to others, who knows one day maybe they will do the same for you.
Digital Artists
Do you want to be looking for actual artists, not coders who know a bit about it? Perhaps the other way around being artists who maybe know a little bit about coding but that's not really essential; in other words coding is not there job just as much as the animation and artistic side of the project is not really anything to do with the coders. It's very rare you will find someone who is masterly skilled in both. Those people are normally veterans with many many years and games under there belt. You will most likely need more than one artist, depending on the size of the game. If it's a 2D platform then one skilled artist who could make assets is all you need. On that note the developers could also use free assets but I'm not sure if other developers would look down upon that, I mean it's better to show that you have created your own assets right? Or at least as much as possible. But if you are talking some kind of 3rd Person or FPS or anything really that's going to require lots of models then two or three artists skilled in software like Maya would possibly be needed,
Sound?
Who cares if it's Tom Hanks or Dave the assistant coder, as long as it sounds good and fits the emotion for the scene who cares right? Chances are you can get audio assets from the web, but as your team builds someone will generally know someone by now. Hell the coders themselves may even pick this one up.
Marketing
So lets say you almost have your game complete after months and months and months of hard work, design and implementation. It's at the point now where the team leader can look at the progress of the project as a whole and make a decision of when the game could possibly be released, perhaps an earliest release date so how would you go about doing this? One of the most popular options at the moment is Steams Greenlight, you show off your game and sell the idea and if people like it then steam will publish it and and take something like 30% of the profits but don't quote me on that. Who knows maybe you could end up with some high success like Hotline Miami or hey maybe it won't be a success, or maybe by the time you've paid everyone you'll have made like $50. But at least you have something under your belt. Then again maybe people won't like it, ie if you've created yet another zombie game.
Do you really need a social media manager? Everybody knows how Facebook, twitter and all other social networking works. And if a games developer doesn't then they should so regardless between the team everyone should be able to bang there heads together a few times and come up with a marketing plan.
If your development team are really smart game would be compatible on apple and ios devices, this could improve your chances of getting the game green lit on steam. Obviously free to play will greatly give it a better chance of a large scale exposure, then again 69p isn't a lot of money either and people will buy it especially if it's marketed well.
Kickerstarter - It's also a financing option, but at the same time you're marketing your project. But at this stage the development team really have to be able to pitch the game well. Possibly playable demo, solid promotional video. They have to make the person on the other end want to invest money in it and sometimes these can go very well but I'll do some more research into this at a later date.
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| Games by Indie Developers are played more than the big guns. Source: www.entrepreneur.com/article/224735 |
The point is, thinking about it we now have all these perhaps thousands of game studios popping up now, and we now have the ability to easily publish our games digitally on a world wide scale. We don't need to fund costs for packing and media and the thousands of copies to be made. If we make a game that can be played in a web browser we could publish it for free on our own domain, a free to play game that gets paid by advertisers (i'm looking at you flappy birds). A skilled developer could knock up a flappy birds clone in just a few hours, and that's a team of one. Gamer's from around the world are now getting together, they are using the biggest teacher tool of them all and that's the Internet to learn, and for every gamer out there they probably have an idea inside of them that they think would be awesome for a game and chances are a bunch of other people think the game. They get together and they start making that game, it doesn't always work and that's just natural for a number of reasons, such as lacking that team leader. It could even be a case of getting half way through and that then plain and simply realize the whole project is shit and even though, you look at what you learned, gather up the resources you are left with and move on.
It's happening now, i'm currently working on a large scale project for an online game, and we are all from America to Europe to Australia. And if it makes release in which I'm very confident it will, I look forward to the feeling of hopefully seeing my name on the credits. To me it'll be "That's me, I was part of that team that made that game". I hope it's a success (royalties!) and I hope the majority of it is invested and we work on a new project, but I also accept that there is, for me at least a very small chance that it won't and that reason because be something as silly as 'right game, wrong time'. But even so, my name will be on there and I look forward to that proud feeling and hopefully it'll be the first of money to come *cough* I mean many.
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| I'll just be honest i'm too lazy to fix this image |
