Privately funded company looking to build a game prototype

#1 A little information this project would be nice.

#2 I want to know what is the definition of Looking for programmers willing to work for less pay now?

#3 Caylo, those remarks always make me nervous because it can easily turn into "keep working, you'll get paid later". It's like the tired "free beer tomorrow" signs in bars. For these sorts of projects, I'm only interested if I have a lot of confidence in the manager and my signature appears in the Members Agreement (which means I own part of the company). That hasn't happened yet.

#4 Well, i ask because its silly for anyone from these forums to expect a true commission for programing or game art, being the reason people are here is they are 'independent developers'. If we were making PRO amounts of $$$ we probably would not BE here. That being said, if your offering $ for service, you should just state what the service is worth to you. And in the end, expecting to get a team of 'happy excited' developers together only to 'make the game now, collect the $ latter' is a proven plain to fail. I have been working my project for 2 years, funding the parts of it i needed to contract out privately. I have also offered $ to "independent PRO" contractors and never heard back from them, so money don't always walk...

In the end i figure if i make $10 an hour give or take, thats not bad money, doing something i enjoy doing from my home, on 'mostly' my terms, without a bunch of silly resume and sample work; NDA agreement games. Start with the NDA, and wanting some fancy resume is gonna cost extra! At the same time, $10 an hour is about all im willing to PAY, once more, without the silly games, simple contract pay when your done type thing...

If your expecting much more from independent developers, your taking yourself way to seriously, or you must have a BIG budget, ergo can afford a higher standard (notice i didnt say quality?).

#5 I'm interested in doing freelance jobs, but i would like to know more about your project, please email me your project detail to race_hazard at hotmail dot com, in case you don't want publicly aired the information

#6 Caylo, $10/hr for help on an indie project is pretty generous. That's enough to buy a new game for spending an evening helping.

#7 Nod, i agree, 10 dollars for indies is i think good. Some person started that 50 bucks a hour "standard" and its utterly rediculious. We are independant Developers, not sony, and sure, if you have a investor and 300,000 dollars to spend and maybe a unreal 3 license, or some other high end engine. In which case this isnt the place you need to be. GG is a hobbyiest and indie place. Lets start treating each other as such. But at the same time, we are adults, lets use some common sense and a bit of professionalism. Ill make a example. If im going to hire Tim Aste to do my art work or a piece of art work. I expect to pay professional rates. I might have some room to haggle, but he is a accredited person with several game and art pieces under his belt. If i ask a independant guy that doee not have a published game or while he might be accredited (2-4 years degree), that person shouldnt be charging 50 bucks a hour for work. Its got alot to do with ego and the fact that your work is still being put up through the ladder.

Look through the posts and ads. Its the same thing. You wonder why you dont see alot of games. Becuase as a community, alot of folks are defensive and greedy, looking for the highest wages, when its totally uncalled for. And before you start with but i work as a network analyst for 50 bucks a hour thats how much they pay. Yah very true, those companys make Thousands of dollars a contract and such to pay for your wage. Do you see any kind of income around here. We are independant developers, programmers, artists, and game makers in general. Lets start acting like it.

I think GG should perhaps put some effort into fostering a community effort. Realm Wars was a perfect example of that. Ever so often develop a core game idea. After its done, move to another engine, and create a new community game. TGE, then RTS, then TGEA, and move around the community.

#8 Oh im sorry for high jacking the thread. it just seemed like a good place to make a point.

#9 Set a price-point that you can pay and only work within that price-point. If $10 an hour is a good thing for you, then do not contract anyone who charges more. But there's also no reason to call them greedy if they charge more. The complexity of the project, the requirements that you are pushing their way, and their experience will all factor into the cost. If you are contracting someone who is learning a program and building a portfolio at $10 an hour for a complex model with animations and normal maps and shader tech, then you may end up paying more (in time AND money) than contracting a professional for $50 an hour who is well-versed and not learning as they go. Of course, you might also find an angel artist who will do work for free or inexpensively as a portfolio builder because they've been out of the industry for a bit and need to bulk up their resume again.

#10 Well typed people, many good things to think about!
Also i dont often charge or pay by the hour, its just a starting place when i consider what the work is worth. Knowing how long it SHOULD take to do a task is an important consideration.

And we have wandered away from William Ko's original intention, But i feel like having this discussion every time i see a excited fresh startup looking for helpful members willing to work for $ once the project is published but the sad truth, even in the independent developers market, is you get OUT what your willing to put into it...

#11 David, your point is noted, but lets put some items in perspective. If a 50 dollar a hour person who knows what they are doing is hired to do a job, a 20 hour job is 1000 bucks. Thats alot of money for (ill say 90%) of us here. its quite a different story when you ask someone to do a job. I need someone to do some programming for me. To ask them to do it for that ammount but not knowing how long it is going to take. if it takes them a week to get it working thats 40 hours. Its totally apples and oranges. And alot of folks look for top dollar which is fine, but if i set my price point for 10 bucks a hour. Am i going to get a programmer.. probably not. Do i need a programmer yes, am i getting paid for my own work, no. these are questions most of us here have asked or struggled with. Should we have to break down and pay the 50 bucks becuase if we dont a project gets scrapped? Its a bit one sided. Im willing to put a year of work into a project. Provide some pay, and split profits. But none of those things happen if folks dont work together with thier strengths. I see alot of good ideas from people that have strong art or strong programmer skills but are missing some of the other items, that go to the graveyard, becuase they lack the knowhow to actually do other areas. Example, a 4 year art student, with some basic programming skills can make a simple game, but dont expect them to be doing c++ code changes or similiar items. Its a vicious circle in these community i see it often. We all do.

#12 If you can't afford the $1000, then you can't afford the $1000. You will either have to 1) get funding somewhere, 2) find someone who can do it for less, or 3) refactor the project for your budget. Most likely it will be a combination of the three. One popular solution is to look up coders on open-source projects since they are used to giving large chunks of time to projects for little or no pay. They are also often used to large source bases. They may not like working on a commercial project for a close-source engine, though, but they just might.

I've seen sites come and go with the idea of trying to make a programmer haven like TurboSquid or Daz3D or Renderosity have done for artists, but usually they end up getting it really wrong. They hide the resumes behind registered users or end up turning into contract contact sites ala RentACoder because it is easier to hook people up than it is to advertise code services that may or may not work between specific engines. For example, if you are looking to hire someone to do paged missions in Torque, and you see someone with TrueVision experience...will it mean that they can get into TGE's source and page terrain in your timeline? Even at $50 an hour, they might not be up to the task, even if they have major skills in that area.

I wish I had a solution, but I haven't seen a good community-based solution for it or even bad band-aid solutions. Most are just bad. On the other side of the coin, there are great open-source community solutions, but the model is often not workable in a closed-source community.

#13 Thats probably one of the most honest posts, i have heard from a admin.

#14 Hi all,

Sorry about not posting more information, but this is a serious post for a real game. We do have funding and a budget, but I can't give more information about the game unless a potential candidate is under NDA. Based on resumes and sample work, we will pick and contact the candidates and proceed from there. Please... if you are not interested, it's okay not to reply. If you are, please kindly post a resume and samples of work... you have nothing to lose but to show off your work and maybe have some potential work.

Thanks,
Bill

#15 I would be interested in helping out in code and art for a figure like $10 per hour as a retainer. This would be with the presumption that the $10 a hour figure is paid for by the end of the month/week but within good time.

It would also be under the presumption that being a retainer, I would get buy-in on royalties or the remaining $40 an hour when you got lots of cash ( assuming the going rate is $50 per hour ).

It would also mean that if you never got it off the ground, at least I would have got some money for my time, and you wouldn't owe me any more unless you shipped.

#16 Just to throw out a random data point, the minimum wage in the city of San Francisco is $9.36 / hour.

#17 Oh, wow! Whats the cost of a gallon of milk? Oh and average one room apartment rent?

#18 Which is all the reason why 50 bucks a hour is for 90% of us is a unreasonable amount. If there are people on GG that are making that kind of money to pay a person 50 bucks a hour to produce a game. There would be alot more published games. If someone can come up with a complete list of GG games to prove me wrong. Id love to see it. Granted there are lately been a small rash of them. But How many by the same group of people ect.

@ Andy, 10 bucks a hour plus royalties? You and I should talk, You know me from DGI, Fantasci Hidden War.

@ William Ko
So let me get this straight. you have money, and a great idea. But you cant afford a) a license b) you have no further information to assist folks to join you. This includes.. maybe filling your information slot. NDA asside. You need to get some publicity, and some legality. Unless your not the Lead. In which case who are you. and why after 2 days, 1 thread and 2 posts, do you expect folks to jump on your band wagon. Its gotta be the Next WoW. You want professional programmers, you need to at least have professional presentation. Are you a developer, got a studio. Got a website?

@Orion How much is gas these days in San Fran, thank god we work most of us in cyberspace.

#19 Well I'm just saying that for an indie project to work, you would have to take a pay cut. Most indie projects are "work for free now, get paid later (if it ships)" so getting $10 an hour on regular basis + royalties or the extra pay per hour at ship is much better.

#20 Dear Bill,

Let me introduce you our game development company.

Alivest Software LLC has been in a business of game development since 2002. We are U.S. registered company with three development offices in Ukraine. Our staff consists of around 100 people and would like to offer our game developing skills and extensive experience, together with our excellent pricing policy to our potential clients.
We have been working with customers from all over the world: USA, Canada, Europe, South Korea, Russia and Ukraine.

Some of the games developed by our company include: 3D RTS Left Behind: Eternal Forces (www.eternalforces.com), 3D MMO Smootsy (www.smootsy.com), 3D MMO engine BI3DE (www.bi3de.com); 3D MMORPG Secretus Incognito, 3D Action Social Network All Zzang, 3D MMO Aramchi, 2D Modern Bubble Bobble for the South Korean market; 3D RPG Vognesvit, graphics content development and integration for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, cell phone games (www.stripblackjack.tv) and card games for slot machines (www.gamesworkshop-uk.com) etc.

At the moment, we are finishing up a large MMO project for a German customer, developing Left Behind II: Tribulation Forces and few Flash games for European and American customers.

There is also our own, proprietary developed online 3D MMO cross-platform engine called NGE2. The engine is based on a server (C++) with cluster technology, 3D client (DirectX, OGRE, C++) and oFusion Pro editor. We offer this engine to our regular customers without any additional costs.

We have experience in working with the following game engines: Big World, OGRE with oFusion Pro editor, Renderware, Torque, BI3DE, NGE, NGE2 and others.

We know: all Windows, Linux/Unix, MacOS, Windows Mobile, C/C++, C#, .NET Framework, DirectX/OpenGL, OpenAL, Flash, Shockwave, Java, J2ME, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, PHP, Perl, XML, all modern databases, 3D Studio MAX, Adobe Photoshop, ZBrush, CorelDraw, Corel Painter, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects, SoundForge, Sonar, SVN, dotProject, Mantis etc.

You can find additional details from the following links:

- www.alivest.com - our current web-site (a new version is under development: www.alivest.com/beta/), which contains overview of our business, list of main customers, contacts, list of representatives and associates etc;
- ftp://demos:demos@195.137.203.162/ - link to our game portfolio: screenshots, videos, documents and so on (alternative link is http://195.137.203.162/demos/);
- www.alivest.com/design/ - our non-game design portfolio and some Flash samples.

We give a limited lifetime warranty that covers all our programs. Any bug related to our code and revealed during the product life will be fixed without additional payment.

Please, give us a call on your game project. Depending on developers qualifications, our hourly rates range within $12-15. Once an agreement is reached, we are ready to start working on it immediately.

Thank you for reading and we are looking forward to hearing from you!

Yours sincerely,
Taras Aleksiienko

Alivest Software LLC
Vice President & Co-Owner

vice-president at alivest dot com