Finding the Right App-rotunity: Hunting the Wild Coder

[hustlertwo]

Cutesy title aside, I'm hoping y'all can provide me a little direction. Last year I got hit with a bolt out of the blue, suddenly thought of a RPG/SRPG mobile game idea which could prove quite entertaining and potentially even successful for some extra money. Problem is, I do not know the first thing about programming. I train card fraud reps for a financial institution, which is not a very programming-centric job. And with two little girls at home even if I had the inclination to try and learn it'd be tough from a time perspective. I have researched some and seen there are coders you can pay by the hour to design apps, but I can't afford to shell out $40 an hour to someone, especially since it could be quite a big job. So I am curious: is there anywhere to find programmers who are willing to partner up with someone, preferably with little to no money immediately but a large piece of the pie for when it hits market? It can be someone like me, who just does this sort of thing on the side. I'm nothing but patient; if it takes a couple years to come about, then it does. Visuals are also not a concern; everyone likes retro graphics nowadays. But tell me straight: is this just too much to expect? Is everyone capable of making apps already creating their own ideas, and thus uninterested in working with someone else?

I've also got a couple children's books I've written and notions on a few more that I've always wanted to publish, and digital might be the way to go. However, I'd need an artist for that, so that may be a separate thread with another equally smarmy title.

[Chen]

Best to try and get people from schools. Any experienced coder probably isn't going to want to bother with the risk, especially since Apps are very hit or miss, with more in the miss category. Even people from schools, many will be wary its some sort of scam since you're not putting down any up front money.

[Trekkin]

But tell me straight: is this just too much to expect? Is everyone capable of making apps already creating their own ideas, and thus uninterested in working with someone else?

Frankly, yes. To anyone with the skills you need, your proposal is going to sound like the many variations on "I have an idea for a novel. I'll tell it to you, you write it, and we'll split the money 50/50!" That's just not competitive.

There are several reasons why, too: even a large piece of a hypothetical and uncertain pie is still zero pie today, and anyone who does this for a living is going to know that. Then, too, programming to make something as subjective as an app work and look and feel like someone with no coding experience thinks it should is an absolute screaming nightmare. That you expect them to take care of the art is another red flag; that is not what these people do, and it comes off as glaringly unprofessional to expect them to handle major tasks well outside of their skill set just because you don't think they're important enough to hire someone else to do. Then, too, retro art is not easier to do well than other kinds any more than haiku are easier to write well than sonnets, and "everyone likes retro" is certainly not grounds for utterly dismissing visuals wholesale.

I'm not saying this to shut you down; for all I know, your idea is awesome. But it's just an idea, and ideas are cheap. If you want real expertise on this, you'll need to bring something more demonstrably valuable to the table. Money is generally the default.

[hustlertwo]

Well, not zero upfront money. I do have some savings I can use for this. But like them, I am loathe to go too far in on something (or someone) that might not pan out. Parents do not get the luxury of chasing their dreams with reckless abandon.

I think that is a bit of an oversimplification, Trekkin. Writing the full script for a video game is not especially easy, especially in such a dialogue-heavy genre, and not every coder would or should do so. I have seen enough RPG Maker games to know that. So it is not as if I am expecting to get half the profit for nothing more than a single inspiration. I can write, beta test, and market. Not half the work to be sure, but hardly a deadbeat. Still, I agree it will not prove attractive to most of the people out there. Perhaps students are one way around the issue. Someone to whom just a few hundred guaranteed dollars would have a strong appeal, though not necessarily up front because Ma Hustler did not raise any suckers.

[pendell]

On the other hand, this does sound like something you might ask a college student to do as a co-op project. Find a local university, talk with the uni computer science department, see if you can set it up so a student can work on the project and get course credit for it. You'll still have to pay them, of course, but you can get some work done and it's valuable experience for them. You'll both learn something.

If you want a professional coder you've got to be ready to pay for it.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Chen]

I'm not sure a university co-op would work. Those usually have some appeal because they have some company linked to it and the experience, regardless of what is actually being done, looks good on a CV. Writing a game for some random person doesn't have that appeal. Might as well just code some game for themselves at that point.

App or not, you're wanting to make a video game to presumably sell later and make a profit on. You need to pay employees to do that if you don't have the capability to do it yourself. Your comparison to a children's book that lacks an illustrator is pretty similar here. You'd need to pay an illustrator. The other note about graphics is also a good one. Coding the guts of the game and making a graphical engine for it is not really the same thing. It may take two completely separate people to do that.

[Trekkin]

Well, not zero upfront money. I do have some savings I can use for this. But like them, I am loathe to go too far in on something (or someone) that might not pan out. Parents do not get the luxury of chasing their dreams with reckless abandon.
[...]
Perhaps students are one way around the issue. Someone to whom just a few hundred guaranteed dollars would have a strong appeal, though not necessarily up front because Ma Hustler did not raise any suckers.

Your reasons for your unwillingness to pay competitively are immaterial to the attractiveness of your offer, and being defensive about it won't encourage anyone to sign on.

But on to the larger point that everyone on this thread seems to have missed: students are not slaves, and (EDIT: Like Chen said) university computer science departments are not in the habit of hiring out their students for "valuable experience" working for people with no computer science credentials and learning nothing about their field that they cannot teach themselves. Internships with established companies are one thing. This is quite another, both in terms of the legal complications (and their ability to hold you accountable) and in terms of what their students would stand to gain; there's no point in students getting employment experience with someone who will not employ them when better offers from actual employers are on the table. "A few hundred guaranteed dollars" at the end of an indeterminate amount of work will not change that, and acting like it will is more likely to insult anyone with the skills you need. We know what we're worth.

There are perhaps ways to get this written. Exploiting students is not one of them.

[Grinner]

There is a thriving market in game middleware aimed at non-technical users. I would strongly encourage you to consider one of these solutions.

Assuming this is a 2D game, your options will include software like GameMaker Studio or Construct 2, both of which have Android and iOS exporters available. There's also GameSalad, Stencyl, and probably others, but I'm not familiar with them. I suppose Unity would also work, now that I think about it. Anyway, you will need to do some amount of study using tutorials. Additionally, certain tasks may be made more difficult, depending on the complexity of the game you have in mind, but you stand to save yourself a great deal of aggravation in the long run.

On a personal note, I'm going to recommend starting with Construct 2. There's a limited-functionality demo version which should be sufficient for starting out. I'll also encourage you to look into Unity.

Most of these game engines are associated with asset stores. You should start development (after getting some experience via tutorials) by using placeholder art, but do consider utilizing these. They're fairly low-cost and are much better than any inexperienced artist can do. Mind that you follow the licensing terms, though.

[Erloas]

RPG Maker would actually be a pretty reasonable place to start with something like this. I haven't tried using it, but many of those types of programs are pretty easy to use.

The way to go about it is to build the idea and then sell it to someone. And by sell I mean get someone that can do the parts you're missing to invest in the project and help you make it better. Even if you can't use something like RPG Maker to get a playable version of your idea, you should have very least have a very detailed story, how systems will work and interact even if you don't know how to program that. Get enough of the idea down so that you can hand it to someone else and they can read it and say "yes, that is a really good idea and something I want to be part of." Once you get to that point you can either try to find some people that want to make a game (and making a game takes a lot more than just coders) and work with them to get the idea going or go the other route and try to run a kickstarter type of thing to get the money to hire said people.

The good news is that there are a lot of people that would love to make video games, and a lot of small developers that really are little more than a couple friends that decided to try it.

But the first step is to make the idea more than just an idea. After all your job will be to prove to other people that your idea is a good one. Right now it would be like saying "I'm going to write a fantasy story about someone that is going to save the world" and the end result could be anything between Lord of the Rings and any of the millions of paperback books leveling table legs.

You should have a detailed outline of the world and of the characters and the main points of the adventure. You should have the types of mechanics you want the system to run on already be laid out. The main types of choices and actions the player is going to be taking. And being an RPG you could probably make a table top mock up of it to get ideas flushed out. If you can't make a simplified version work then it probably won't be possible to make a computer version either, after all all they can really do is math. If you want 100 variables to go into dialog trees that might be a bit much to do on paper, but if you can't figure out how to get it to work with 10 basic concepts there is no way someone else is going to be able to program it.

[Grinner]

RPG Maker would actually be a pretty reasonable place to start with something like this. I haven't tried using it, but many of those types of programs are pretty easy to use.

I would recommend against RPG Maker, actually. It is very, very easy to use, but it's also very inflexible. At least, RPG Maker VX Ace is. Aspects of it can be modified, but that requires digging around in the Ruby code underlying it. Additionally, up until the most recent version, RPG Maker MV, I think the series supported only Windows, with a couple odd and completely irrelevant exceptions. However, I've not used MV, so I can't really comment on it.

[hustlertwo]

Your reasons for your unwillingness to pay competitively are immaterial to the attractiveness of your offer, and being defensive about it won't encourage anyone to sign on.

But on to the larger point that everyone on this thread seems to have missed: students are not slaves, and (EDIT: Like Chen said) university computer science departments are not in the habit of hiring out their students for "valuable experience" working for people with no computer science credentials and learning nothing about their field that they cannot teach themselves. Internships with established companies are one thing. This is quite another, both in terms of the legal complications (and their ability to hold you accountable) and in terms of what their students would stand to gain; there's no point in students getting employment experience with someone who will not employ them when better offers from actual employers are on the table. "A few hundred guaranteed dollars" at the end of an indeterminate amount of work will not change that, and acting like it will is more likely to insult anyone with the skills you need. We know what we're worth.

There are perhaps ways to get this written. Exploiting students is not one of them.

I don't mind constructive criticism like the others have offered, but you're quite belligerent. Is there a reason this offends you so deeply? Some personal experience where something like this went awry?

And when I meant students, I never would consider course credit or anything like that viable. I'm not a company, so that would have to seem shady to any reputable institution. When I meant using students, I meant more along the lines of putting up one of those sheets with phone number strips advertising the opportunity at a programming school nearby or something. Perhaps the digital equivalent thereof on a social networking site. And that hardly seems like taking advantage of anyone, given it is A. voluntary and B. a paying gig for people who may have that in short supply. My best friend spent his first year after getting his degree in game creation from a prestigious school living in my trailer mostly just working on RPG Maker games and self-gratification, totally unemployed. If someone had given him a shot at $500 and 50-60% of the future proceeds for a game he'd likely have jumped at the chance.

Speaking of RPG Maker, I poked at it a bit from when my friend lent it to me, and actually post at a forum dedicated to it. But I can't see going to all the trouble to create something in a platform that cannot really be monetized. Creativity is fun but I rather like the idea of introducing another small income stream into the family coffers, like when we started selling on eBay a couple years ago.

Grinner, I'm going to try to look into that. Been thinking about tapping professional experience from a previous job and trying my hand at a simple trivia game to get my feet wet and then see where it goes from there. Just hope I am less of a technical buffoon than I feel like most of the time. I downloaded Game Salad as a start, hopefully I can find some time to dig into it a bit over the weekend.

Erloas, I don't have anything quite that organized, but it is at least more than the basic idea. Over the course of a few months I wrote about 2,000 words detailing everything from major plot points to game mechanics, class descriptions and a few dialogue snippets. I guess I should try to find a visual example of what you're talking about and then I could shoot for something more cohesive. If you happen to know of one I'd appreciate it.



I do thank y'all for the suggestions thus far. Good to have some potential avenues to walk down a bit and see what I can see. Keep 'em coming, no idea is too crazy. This is the Internet, after all.

[Hiro Protagonest]

But tell me straight: is this just too much to expect?

Yep.

Last year I got hit with a bolt out of the blue, suddenly thought of a RPG/SRPG mobile game idea which could prove quite entertaining and potentially even successful for some extra money.

"Successful" for something like this doesn't mean extra money. "Successful" means breaking even.

I train card fraud reps for a financial institution, which is not a very programming-centric job. And with two little girls at home even if I had the inclination to try and learn it'd be tough from a time perspective. I have researched some and seen there are coders you can pay by the hour to design apps, but I can't afford to shell out $40 an hour to someone, especially since it could be quite a big job.

You have a job, you have kids, and you don't have funds for a professional project.

So I am curious: is there anywhere to find programmers who are willing to partner up with someone, preferably with little to no money immediately but a large piece of the pie for when it hits market?

You're relying on the passion of strangers for your idea, because nobody's going to take that for the money.

Visuals are also not a concern; everyone likes retro graphics nowadays.

...And you need an artist.

Everyone needs to be pulling at least double-duty; the programmer is in the best position to actually design gameplay. IF you can find a programmer to actually design the game themselves, you have to rely on them to be good at it. You also need: writing, art, animation, sound design, and music. And the business side, money and marketing.

If, if you can wrangle everything together, you're praying to break even. On mobile? A lot of people don't want to shell out money at all, they won't consider anything not free. If we're talking about ideal circumstances, we're talking about a programmer who's made flash games. Otherwise, you have no prior game recognition and the marketing becomes much harder.

[tensai_oni]

Sorry if this sounds very critical OP, but:

Do you have anything meaningful that you can contribute to your own project? I know programming is not it, but can you do design, art, anything?

So far it sounds like all you have is an idea. And frankly, ideas are dime a dozen. There's this stereotype of an "Idea Guy", someone who has a lot of (supposedly) great and revolutionary ideas but expects others to do all the work for him while taking the credit. Don't be this person.

Unless of course you have the money to pay others to do this thing for you. Then by all means. Just don't expect them to work for a lower wage, or for a doubtful promise of future profit cuts. That's only slightly better than working for exposure.

[Xyril]

@hustlertwo,

First, with respect, I read Trekkin's posts several times, trying to see them the way you did, but I still couldn't see them your way. From where I'm standing, the only belligerence came from you.

Second, if what you plan to bring to the table isn't just an idea, but also scripting, then that is precisely what you need to do. If you're unable to pay and you're essentially depending on other, talented people to take you seriously and to share your passion, then you need to do the bulk of the scripting before you start approaching people. This serves several purposes. First, you're asking people to contribute their talents. Showing them your work demonstrates that you also have useful talents beyond being the stereotypical Idea Man. You're also asking them to risk their time and labor on a project that might never pay off. Having much of the work done on your own demonstrates that you're willing to do the same. Finally, you're essentially hoping that others will share your passion for the project. It's possible somebody will after merely hearing your idea, but it's much more likely to happen if they're able to see some tangible manifestation of your idea. If they can experience some of the story for themselves--even without art, even without interactivity--they might fall in love with the story and want to see it come to life as much as you do.

Random amateurs and relatively unknown professionals write screenplays, and a decent number of them actually manage to convince people to provide money in order to hire the numerous other skills needed to make a movie. I've never heard of someone getting a movie made with no money and nothing but an idea for a screenplay, except when that person already had a tremendous and established reputation making movies.

[Chen]

And when I meant students, I never would consider course credit or anything like that viable. I'm not a company, so that would have to seem shady to any reputable institution. When I meant using students, I meant more along the lines of putting up one of those sheets with phone number strips advertising the opportunity at a programming school nearby or something. Perhaps the digital equivalent thereof on a social networking site. And that hardly seems like taking advantage of anyone, given it is A. voluntary and B. a paying gig for people who may have that in short supply. My best friend spent his first year after getting his degree in game creation from a prestigious school living in my trailer mostly just working on RPG Maker games and self-gratification, totally unemployed. If someone had given him a shot at $500 and 50-60% of the future proceeds for a game he'd likely have jumped at the chance.

Consider the graphic at http://lifehacker.com/this-graphic-e...kes-1735164869

I haven't dug and maybe the numbers are off, but even if you use some sort of generic backend for the app, the info above is saying an average of 8 weeks (2 months) to get the v1 of the app out. They have the charge per hour for IOS and android apps in North america at ~ $150. Going to Eastern Europe or India drops that to about $35/hour. Expecting $500 and future promises to cover 8 weeks of work seems WAY off, even for a student.

[NichG]

I'll share my experiences with this, because if nothing else it might help give you a realistic idea of what to expect.

I program, my job as a researcher involves programming, and before this point I had made several games of varying levels of quality as a hobby, so I knew roughly what to expect, what the technical pitfalls would be, etc. I also had some experience with making both art and music because of that, but at a decidedly non-professional level.

At the tail end of my second post-doc and not getting any job offers, I decided to see if I could start a game company as a means of support. I gave myself a very aggressive timeline to either prove that it could work or go do something else - essentially 3 months from scratch to completion - and got together with three friends (who each were working on this part-time alongside another job). They ended up handling the web presence, advertising, press releases, setting up a way for us to be paid (setting up a merchant account so we could take credit card payments), making a trailer, beta testing, editing of the game script for quality and content (massively important in retrospect), as well as writing events (for this kind of game, we needed a ton of modular one-off vignettes, so that was the easiest work to distribute).

First we spent about a week sketching out the game in detail - what would the locations be, how many generic events per area would we need to make it not become repetitive, how many plot-specific events per location we could expect to have, what art assets we would need, etc. This gave us a checklist where we could agree that if everything on that checklist had a check next to it, we could consider the game done. We used this to figure out a development schedule - if we had to write 300 events and had say 60 days to do it, that means we needed to (among everything else) make sure that 5 events were getting written each day.

I spent the first month working on my own to code the game engine, including design of the game mechanics, after which the actual technical programming part of the job was done and we basically didn't touch it except for fixing stuff during testing and a few last minute tweaks. Following that, we spent two months writing out the event logic. That checklist was useful, since without it I would have drastically underestimated how long doing this would take. But I could look at it and say 'okay, I don't get to stop today until I've done my events'.

Nearing the end of the 3 months, we had all the essential stuff done (the game had endings, was winnable, etc), but there were a few zones we had planned that we didn't managed to complete in time. However, we decided they were non-essential and dummied them out of the game, then released. We tried some banner advertisements but the return was negative per dollar spent, so we stopped that. The most successful thing was actually the press releases that we sent in, which eventually got picked up by RockPaperShotgun and gave us our best week. The main criticisms we got were the pricing and the art. The game was based on an HTML5 engine under the hood so that it could run on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android phones, whatever you want without extra programming work. However, that gave people the impression of it being a web game sort of thing, and the expectation with that sort of game is that it will be free or ad-supported. So we got a lot of people playing the demo and not buying.

All told, we grossed $500. After about a month, income from the game had trickled off to zero. Interestingly, when I had poked around indie game development sites, the rule of thumb was something like 'your first game will make $500 if you don't quit', so that ended up being spot on for us.

The reason for that is, until you've actually gone through the process of selling a game, there are certain mistakes you're almost unequipped to realize you're making. The timing of promotion and game release is critical - you need to be advertising a month in advance of release at least. You should be engaging social media as soon as possible and it takes time to grow attention there. Setting up the purchase process to have a good conversion rate (that is, people going from hearing about your product to clicking 'confirm purchase') is actually a bit of tricky website design, and there's a magic threshold where below it advertisement costs you more than it makes you and above it advertisement costs you less (so you can dump $1k into advertisement to make $2k, etc, up to saturation). In addition, your reputation as a game studio is going to be responsible for a good chunk of your easy sales, and for a first game you don't have one. No return customers or group of well-wishers or whatever.

In addition, your sense of professional-level quality won't quite be there until you get utterly smashed on something you thought was okay. I was relatively amazed that people thought our music and writing were good, but the art got a lot of negative comments and also there were little things in the UI design, etc that turned people off. One comment was that someone was playing the game on a 4k monitor and couldn't see anything, because the game wasn't really designed to scale to that kind of resolution. All sorts of things, little imperfections that you don't notice because its your baby. So you need to have that harsh experience once or twice before you start really getting serious about doing everything right, not just the things that you're passionate about.

The story doesn't end here. After that, I decided that I'd gotten the message from that experiment and got another job. Two of my friends used it as resume material to get jobs at a local game company (which admittedly is worth a lot more than $500). And we moved on. Occasionally I'd get an email that someone had bought the game, at a rate of about once every two months or so, but basically it was dead. In a surreal way however, I started getting emails from companies offering to translate my game to other languages, companies offering to help advertise the game (at our cost of course), companies asking if I was willing to license any of my games to use on their portal sites (but no actual monetary offer ever came from any of those exchanges), etc. So the fact that we actually existed as a game studio was slowly percolating out into the world, over the course of about a year. We decided to put $100 of the proceeds of the game to submit to Steam Greenlight as a lark, and basically petered out below the acceptance threshold for a long time. Then suddenly we got a notice that we had been greenlit. That was maybe 2 years after the game's initial release, but hey, not bad right?

So we got back in contact with each-other, discussed it, got a lot of the business side of things squared away with Steam, and figured 'maybe it'd be worth hiring someone professionally to do the art' since we ostensibly lost a lot of sales based on 'looks like some free web game thing'. We proceeded to start on those lines - I found an artist who would work on commission, and was extremely professional and fast in terms of turn-around time on pieces and giving me prototype ideas and things like that. But we also had some people who were sort of kinda maybe volunteering to do art and if we liked it we could pay them or how about a percentage but actually I'm kind of busy this week and... and so things got mired. We had about half the art assets we needed to do a visual upgrade, but the other half were missing due to all of our volunteers basically finding there were more important things in their life. In addition, that was true for us too - money aside, we each had things which were more important to us now than this game, and in order to really get things done we would have had to pull ourselves away from those other things and spend maybe a month fully dedicated to getting it in shape for a Steam release. We couldn't get the kind of focus we had back when making this game was the totality of our life for 3 months, and without that focus it was taking months to do what should have been done in days. And so we let it drop.

I guess my point is, if you go into this as a side project, just do it for fun, don't expect anything out of the money side. And if you want to get people to work on it and actually add to the project moving towards completion rather than just adding management tasks for you while not moving things forward, chop up the work into little modular bits so that if they do drop off the face of the earth you can pick up and keep going; and, seriously, pay them up front for their work - you'll get much more professionalism that way, and its more respectful of them.

[Trekkin]

I don't mind constructive criticism like the others have offered, but you're quite belligerent. Is there a reason this offends you so deeply? Some personal experience where something like this went awry?

Oh, dear; I'm not offended, I'm certainly not intentionally being antagonistic, and I hope you aren't offended. I'm simply attempting to communicate an awareness of the magnitude of the task you're proposing to undertake and the many insuperable obstacles that stand in the way of a naive attempt to complete it. In short, there is a lot that you don't yet know that you don't know about this, and that's both inevitable and nothing to be ashamed of -- but unless you go into this fully aware and immediately, intensely cognizant of that, you're going to come off as arrogant and unprofessional to people who will absolutely blacklist you for wasting their time. You've already taken the first step, but we can't specifically answer every question you haven't yet thought to ask but your prospective employees will be deeply alarmed if you can't answer. I can't tactfully express that in a way that I can be confident will get through your cognitive biases concerning the completeness of your understanding (again, inevitable), and I'd rather you end up mad at some random guy on a roleplaying forum than in over your head and wishing you'd never started this.

In short, there's a lot of moving parts to creating software usable by the general public, and a lot more between usable software and an engaging game. In the program itself, one missed symbol can break ten thousand lines of excellent code; this is mostly metaphorically true of software as a project but no less valuable an aphorism. The kind of people with the skills you need will demand a viable plan to bring this project through to completion rather than end in time-consuming and fruitless bickering about specifications and who's responsbility it is to do whatever; they know they need to be perfect, and will expect your plan to be too. That standard demands not only people skills but also technical knowledge that you have already said you do not posess and seem prepared to brush off. Don't do that.

More to the point, though, you need to understand that the people you're looking to employ literally cannot afford to work for pay alone. We understand keenly that our present and future employability depends powerfully on our portfolio, to put it in simplest terms; if there's a gap where we have anything but success to show for our work because someone else mismanaged us, there goes any hope we had of ever making a living wage. Forever. Thus does one navigate the gig economy of perpetual job interviews. You don't have the name recognition we need, nor do you represent any hope of stable employment. You have a career and you want extra money, but your kids don't leave you much capital; the kind of people you want to hire live in a world where bona fide credentialed experts aren't valuable enough to hire full-time, children are literally unaffordable, and people want enough "extra" money to pay for both rent and food this month.

None of this is your fault, and I'm not trying to guilt or shame you. Nevertheless, you must understand we cannot afford the risk you represent as a neophyte entering a literally global market, and you don't have access to the kind of incentives that would mitigate that. If you stick your offer of $500 for eight weeks or more of work for an unknown up on a university corkboard somehow, it will be up on Tumblr within the hour accompanied by an all-caps screed about how this is the kind of devaluation of expertise They wanted out of the gig economy. Yes, you are not trying to scam us, but that doesn't matter. We assume everything is a scam even after proven otherwise --and that's just the overly trusting ones. We live in a world where nothing is forgiven, nothing is forgotten, nothing is proven, and everything is nevertheless damning evidence of something that merits our summary disposal. Do not enter that world unprepared; it will publicly excoriate you by default.

So if you're going to do this, for goodness' sake educate yourself about the depth and breadth of the experience and credibility gap between you and the people who do this for (half) a living. Learn what people in different fields expect about the specifications provided for the job and how they're accustomed to working together. There are a thousand little shibboleths that separate credible proposals from nonsense concocted by the clueless, and you must know them all. Know reasonable numbers for everything from deadlines to file sizes to salaries and be fully prepared to justify them. Know what experience is worth -- and know why that is not a number but a many-dimensional spectrum. Figure out version control and code review and all the other behind-the-scenes marginalia that is nonetheless the difference between a successful project and the kind of meandering, drawn-out mess that NichG is warning you against. Learn until you loop back around and don't think you know anything at all. At a bare minimum, listen to what the other posters here are saying: you need far more than an idea to make this work. You need a specific and detailed script written with implementability in mind and a solid plan for everything else. If this sounds like more work than is worth for a hobby that might make money, you're right -- because it's only a hobby to people who can afford hobbies this time-intensive. To everyone else, it's work, and expectations are accordingly astronomical. We can always find someone else, just like you can.

And finally, if your first impulse on reading honest, well-intentioned (if admittedly intentionally blunt) criticism is to start assuming things on the part of your critic, you will not have a good time with this. Getting good enough for your game to have a realistic shot is much like learning German fencing; you're going to take your lumps every single day until you either figure out what you're doing or leave in a huff. Assuming that frank discussion of your shortcomings is someone else's problem heavily predisposes you toward the latter.

[hustlertwo]

Fair enough, Trekkin. Sorry for calling you out. Some of this stuff I did prepare for, but a lot is news to me. I wrote webcomics for a time, worked with an artist. The whole do the work and split the take mentality worked well; the art might have taken a lot longer than the writing, but the writing was just as important if not more so (as the host comic here proves). The general consensus here that writing the entire game would still be wholly insufficient to qualify as a significant contribution stings, but does make sense. Writing in games in general and mobile games in particular is a lot less important. Many are the titles that flourish with bad scripting or no plot whatsoever.

NichG, what was the game, if you don't mind me asking? I'd be curious to look it up. Also, that was about as comprehensive as it gets. I knew not to expect much in the way or earnings, especially for a first effort. $500 was a bit of a surprise though. Reading Pocket Tactics may have given me more of an impression of low four figures for the lucky few who got some traction and press. I want to avoid the equivalent of the person who forks over a bunch of dough to publish a book in a vanity press where the few dozen copies sold never come near recouping the overall cost of publication. Sounds like that may be a tall order.

Based on this, I think I will mothball the RPG for the time being. If I do learn to code, it would be a long time before I could get near that level of complexity. If ever. And while I technically have money enough to finance it, it seems a sucker bet if even breaking even would be unlikely. Irresponsible, even. I am going to try to cut my teeth on something much simpler, either doing it on my own or with someone else who is interested and would hopefully not be too offput since it should not take near as long. Interactive fiction, trivia, a genre where the writing really is enough of the job to make my lack of other valuable skills. And with less moving parts from a code perspective. If it doesn't pan out, not out as much. If it does, I might bank a few fans to help grease the wheels for subsequent projects. Probably never work my way back to ItCHS, but there could be worse fates.

This does remind me I'm pretty blessed though. I wanted to do this to stretch my dormant creative muscles, but apparently my wife and I made over three times what a normal first-time game brings just in the eBay totals for the last 60 days. Including $24 just while typing this. Suck it, iOS!

Sorry, that did come out douchey. But I love having a hobby that makes money instead of costing it.

[Trekkin]

Fair enough, Trekkin. Sorry for calling you out.
[...]
Based on this, I think I will mothball the RPG for the time being. If I do learn to code, it would be a long time before I could get near that level of complexity. If ever. And while I technically have money enough to finance it, it seems a sucker bet if even breaking even would be unlikely. Irresponsible, even. I am going to try to cut my teeth on something much simpler, either doing it on my own or with someone else who is interested and would hopefully not be too offput since it should not take near as long. Interactive fiction, trivia, a genre where the writing really is enough of the job to make my lack of other valuable skills. And with less moving parts from a code perspective. If it doesn't pan out, not out as much. If it does, I might bank a few fans to help grease the wheels for subsequent projects. Probably never work my way back to ItCHS, but there could be worse fates.

No worries; I was being belligerent, after all.

Going with something simpler actually isn't a bad way to get accustomed to the kind of logistics that you'd need to pull off a mobile game. Theoretically, you could progress to more and more involved projects and find talent you like working with along the way, one step at a time; this would also let you get your name out there and perhaps build fans as you've said. What that progression might be, I don't know. It would depend a lot on circumstance.

Interactive fiction is a good place to start; even the most DIY attempt at this isn't going to be very far off in implementation from a browser. I'd write it to work with XML for schema validation purposes, but that's my bias showing. On the writing end, it means formatting each node in the story with tags (much like a forum post); on the coding end, it means parsing those nodes and displaying the necessary links and so forth. I use something similar as a project in my coding classes mostly because it has built in benchmarks. (once it displays text and you can click around from node to node, can you display graphics. Once it displays graphics, can it add variables as needed to track data as the user enters it. On it goes.) I can't predict a priori how all of those bits can translate into an app, but it's a much more modular task than a full game, at least.

[NichG]

NichG, what was the game, if you don't mind me asking? I'd be curious to look it up. Also, that was about as comprehensive as it gets. I knew not to expect much in the way or earnings, especially for a first effort. $500 was a bit of a surprise though. Reading Pocket Tactics may have given me more of an impression of low four figures for the lucky few who got some traction and press. I want to avoid the equivalent of the person who forks over a bunch of dough to publish a book in a vanity press where the few dozen copies sold never come near recouping the overall cost of publication. Sounds like that may be a tall order.

The game was called Travelogue, and the game studio 'Urban Hermit Games'.

There are more feasible income streams in the game market than what we tried, but they require a big adjustment in expectations. Back when we were doing this, the main success stories we found involved people making a game about once every two weeks using some recycled core codebase with a few tweaks and vector-art resources that could attain a high level of polish with a very fast turnaround, then licensing those games to game portals. Those kinds of licenses could get a couple hundred a pop, and you can license the same game to multiple portals, so people who really knew how to play the system could make a few thousand dollars a month doing this full time. But its a very different way of operating from the kind of passion project that gets most people into making games in the first place.

RPGs are basically the opposite of this - they're high content and the content is stretched out in time. The kind of game that has the best profit chances is basically very front-loaded, where the gameplay is designed to be addictive even if you keep cycling through the same repeated content. That means you spend the most time making the part of the game that most of your customers are likely to see (the first 10 minutes). It's also a very cynical way to make games, and you're unlikely to make anything really deeply interesting that way, but for some people in the game industry that's what they have to do to pay the bills.

[Fri]

The game was called Travelogue, and the game studio 'Urban Hermit Games'.

There are more feasible income streams in the game market than what we tried, but they require a big adjustment in expectations. Back when we were doing this, the main success stories we found involved people making a game about once every two weeks using some recycled core codebase with a few tweaks and vector-art resources that could attain a high level of polish with a very fast turnaround, then licensing those games to game portals. Those kinds of licenses could get a couple hundred a pop, and you can license the same game to multiple portals, so people who really knew how to play the system could make a few thousand dollars a month doing this full time. But its a very different way of operating from the kind of passion project that gets most people into making games in the first place.

RPGs are basically the opposite of this - they're high content and the content is stretched out in time. The kind of game that has the best profit chances is basically very front-loaded, where the gameplay is designed to be addictive even if you keep cycling through the same repeated content. That means you spend the most time making the part of the game that most of your customers are likely to see (the first 10 minutes). It's also a very cynical way to make games, and you're unlikely to make anything really deeply interesting that way, but for some people in the game industry that's what they have to do to pay the bills.

Yeah, I know that game, favorited it in greenlight, and I am/was waiting for the rerelease

[Fri]

Interactive fiction is a good place to start; even the most DIY attempt at this isn't going to be very far off in implementation from a browser. I'd write it to work with XML for schema validation purposes, but that's my bias showing. On the writing end, it means formatting each node in the story with tags (much like a forum post); on the coding end, it means parsing those nodes and displaying the necessary links and so forth. I use something similar as a project in my coding classes mostly because it has built in benchmarks. (once it displays text and you can click around from node to node, can you display graphics. Once it displays graphics, can it add variables as needed to track data as the user enters it. On it goes.) I can't predict a priori how all of those bits can translate into an app, but it's a much more modular task than a full game, at least.

If you're confident with your writing, check choice of games. They're a company that publish CYOA games in steam, android, and ios, and they provide their engine for free for non comercial purpose, and offer to publish your game made by their engine if you want.

They have some really good and popular games.

[NichG]

Yeah, I know that game, favorited it in greenlight, and I am/was waiting for the rerelease

Makes me feel guilty... The problem is it's in a half-upgraded state. We got nice art for the title and menu screens, started in on replacing the text menu for items with a graphical one, then actually getting the item art became a problem. Shoot me a PM and I'll see about getting you the current version if you like.

[Xyril]

Fair enough, Trekkin. Sorry for calling you out. Some of this stuff I did prepare for, but a lot is news to me. I wrote webcomics for a time, worked with an artist.

Aside from the lack of coding, I think the other important difference with webcomics is that the metric of success--and thus the amount of risk--is broken down into smaller packets. Each deliverable is fairly small and self-contained and can be quickly brought to market; feedback (and revenue) also comes in while you still have a chance to decide whether to keep committing to the project. Even if the comic eventually fails, the artist you hire can still point to something and say "I drew the art for this comic for nearly a year; here's an example of my work." For games, you really can't know for sure whether you will be financially successful until everyone on the team has already put in most of the work and it's really too late to back out. Thus, as others have pointed out, it becomes incredibly important to put the project--and the people you'll potentially be working with--under a microscope to try to weigh risk as much as possible.

Without giving away too much about your idea, can you tell us what it is you find so special? Is it a particular story you want to tell, or some interesting new twist on RPG mechanics you thought up? Depending on what you think is great about your idea, maybe it'll be possible for you to flesh out a version of your idea on a small scale while still saving the big surprise for the day you might be able to implement your full game. For example, if the core of your idea is a great story set in some fantastic world, maybe you can take Trekkin's idea and use the free resources already out there to write an interactive story telling a different story (maybe a prequel) set in your world; this way, you can do your world-building, get your audience interested in exploring that world without spoiling the main story before you can create your game.

[hustlertwo]

If you're confident with your writing, check choice of games. They're a company that publish CYOA games in steam, android, and ios, and they provide their engine for free for non comercial purpose, and offer to publish your game made by their engine if you want.

They have some really good and popular games.

I've seen their stuff in the RPG category of the app store. Hadn't bought one, but you're right, I see a lot of their stuff rank high on the charts. I don't care how much of the earnings they would take, being able to just plug into an existing engine would be ideal, and I'm sure they have a promotional machine already in place for their stuff. I am going to buy one, maybe Psy High, and see if I can think of something to do with this.

And Xyril, it is more the story than the gameplay that was the unique factor. Comedic (that tends to be my style, tongue never moves far from the cheek), elements of sci-fi, horror, retail drudgery. SRPG was my preference, but I'd have gone vanilla RPG too if needed. Probably class-based combat either way. In my wildest pie-in-the-sky dreams it was a 3D isometric view a la my personal favorite game, Final Fantasy Tactics. But I never considered that feasible, and I'm too pragmatic not to compromise a vision in order to see it realized. I could do a story for that, but I don't think I would first thing. For the first time out I'll probably do something with my old webcomic's plot. Comic ended years ago but I never really stopped coming up with ideas for it.

Just checked out Choice of Games. Looks like only established writers get to publish under that name, on account of anything on that label gets an up-front advance for a tidy sum. Newbies do Hosted Games; 25% of the royalties, no advance. There is a $5,000 contest I can enter if I complete it by January, though. I would retain IP rights, and if things went swimmingly I could apply for future books to go under the Choice of Games label. Since y'all have helped carry me along this far, what say you: a good deal?

[Trekkin]

Since y'all have helped carry me along this far, what say you: a good deal?

As a general maxim, if it were a good deal you wouldn't hear about it, but in this case I think it might be the best route for you to go.

I fear I've been too circumspect in consequence of your reaction to what I would call perceptibly tutelary pugnacity on my part; when I said above that you might want to make finding talent to work with a general process, it was with the implication that you're not likely to get along with many people who do this sort of thing if you interact with them as you have done in this thread. People do not generally react well to someone apparently richer than them claiming they can't afford to pay competitive rates, being defensive about having expenses their prospective employees can't afford, and then subsequently bragging about how much money their hobbies make, all while leaving an advertisement for their eBay in their signature. I realize that I know very little about you and I hope your statements here belie your professionalism, but people who say the kinds of things you have said here tend to be very unpleasant to work with; they tend to do things like regard nonpayment of their obligations as canny business sense and thoroughly undervalue anything they don't understand and insist on plugging themselves everywhere they can and just...not good things. In short, we've heard this all before, and right alongside them we've heard every single one of the supernally arrogant and singularly odious defenses put forth to explain why we should gratefully work with the combination of overwhelming egotism and grasping myopic avarice deified as "savvy" and "experience" by the clueless c-suite personality cults cheering on our current crises. There's a lot here you don't want to remind us of, because it will get you immediately labeled and shunned.

Again, I hope that isn't you and you have a perfect right to your views, but you must realize that the kind of people with the skills you need have heard the kinds of things you've said before, including your acknowledgement of how bad they sound and your apparent willingness to say them anyway -- and not from people we'd ever want to associate with professionally. You will be judged, and not kindly, though not necessarily through any fault of your own.

Alternatively, do what you've suggested here: go for contests and things where you can work alone and, presuming you can adapt your writing skills to this new format, enter into predefined arrangements. That will elide a lot of potential problems.

[hustlertwo]

Come now, Trekkin. You really think I, or any other sane individual, would speak in the same style with a prospective business partner as they do on an Internet forum they have posted on for nearly a decade? I have a level of comfort here, which is why I chose to posit the question to y'all in the first place.

As for your presumptions toward my character, I suspect if those who know me saw them they would be quite amused. I have a lot of character flaws (which is why I got to take so many feats, of course), but not any of the ones you attribute to me. Save perhaps for my ignorance, which was an easy hit given the nature of the thread, and my predilection for droning on about eBay. I do need to work on that one; it is still a relatively new pastime. Suffice to say if I do find some unlucky programmer to hitch up with, they are about as likely to see me avoiding payment and hogging credit as they are to wake up tomorrow with their head sewn to the carpet. Bonus points to anyone who gets the reference!

Playing through a Hosted Games title shows me this is not entirely what I think of when hearing the CYOA label. My thoughts were along the lines of To Be or Not to Be, that excellent Hamlet spoof from the guy who wrote Dinosaur Comics. Similar to those books we likely all read as kids. But this runs more to the Sorcery series. Still doable, I think, but definitely a challenge. Especially given the contest ends in seven months and it'll have to be at least 100,000 words by that point.

[Fri]

Come now, Trekkin. You really think I, or any other sane individual, would speak in the same style with a prospective business partner as they do on an Internet forum they have posted on for nearly a decade? I have a level of comfort here, which is why I chose to posit the question to y'all in the first place.

As for your presumptions toward my character, I suspect if those who know me saw them they would be quite amused. I have a lot of character flaws (which is why I got to take so many feats, of course), but not any of the ones you attribute to me. Save perhaps for my ignorance, which was an easy hit given the nature of the thread, and my predilection for droning on about eBay. I do need to work on that one; it is still a relatively new pastime. Suffice to say if I do find some unlucky programmer to hitch up with, they are about as likely to see me avoiding payment and hogging credit as they are to wake up tomorrow with their head sewn to the carpet. Bonus points to anyone who gets the reference!

Playing through a Hosted Games title shows me this is not entirely what I think of when hearing the CYOA label. My thoughts were along the lines of To Be or Not to Be, that excellent Hamlet spoof from the guy who wrote Dinosaur Comics. Similar to those books we likely all read as kids. But this runs more to the Sorcery series. Still doable, I think, but definitely a challenge. Especially given the contest ends in seven months and it'll have to be at least 100,000 words by that point.

Choise of Games do all style of CYOA book but yeah, it's closer to "Sorcery" type.

Choice of Robots do all sort of style of CYOA, but I think mostly can be divided between "adventure on a story using your stats" and "start as a kid/student go through the years, end up 10 years in the future, and see how your life turned out to be"

If you're interested in checking what I think are the best in their line, you can check Choice of the Deathless, which I think is by its own is an amazing fantasy novel, independent of it's being a game, and Choice of Robots, which kinda closer to the second type where there isn't much story, but you start as a roboticist that start a revolutionary in robotics and see how society end up in 10, 20 years, from your choices.

[hustlertwo]

Heh, I'm actually trying hard not to check out the best in their line. I don't want to get psyched out by reading stuff from writers who are almost certainly leagues above where I am. I bought The Lost Heir, part 1: it was a Hosted Games title that still seemed to have been at least somewhat popular, so it seemed like about what I would be shooting for as a first-timer. Writing was solid but not exceptionally remarkable and more than a bit generic; I do not know if I can hit that level, but it at least seems possible. It'll be a massive undertaking, since there's still a fair amount of code stuff involved (by my standards, at least) given all the stats at play. But I figure I'll write it first and worry about plugging in the crunch later.

[Xyril]

Come now, Trekkin. You really think I, or any other sane individual, would speak in the same style with a prospective business partner as they do on an Internet forum they have posted on for nearly a decade?

Here's the thing: You already have. Comfort level and community notwithstanding, the moment you posted here for advice, you were also simultaneously advertising to potential partners on this forum or among the friends of those in this forum. It's quite plausible that you consider this identity completely quarantined from your professional identity, and speak in a way completely unlike how you would in a more "real" or "professional" persona. However, it's equally plausible that you're one of the many people who, for various reasons, do not. Some people don't like the idea of having different personalities in different situations. Others might see it as more beneficial to leverage your ten years of reputation online as hustlertwo at the OotS forum than your real life CV.