Godot Version
4
Question
Good morning. I am on week 2 of developing my first game. I am running into a few questions I would like to pose to the community for help. I sincerely appreciate it.
To provide context before my questions:
I am learning coding in Godot 4. I am learning LMMS for music. I am learning Asesprite for pixel art. That is all going well. However, after 2 weeks I only have one characters sprite sheet, a few environment sprite sheets, and a lot of practice code. I am also writing the novel that will accompany the game. I have a loose story outline, ideas for characters, character development, etc. Last weeks progress shown below. I have a lot more I did this weekend, but I don’t have screenies.
That all being said,
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Should I, if even, or when, try to put together a team of people to assist in the project to speed up development and increase quality? E.g. coder, artist, sound designer. Recruiting this early seems potentially premature, or just a pipe dream. I would like to think there are a few skilled people out there that would enjoy hoping in Discord every night to work on this together. I believe the story and gameplay concept will make a fun time.
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If so, how would I do that, and is there any intellectual property rights I should consider? I would.love to share all of concepts, art, story, and ideas, but I dont want them to be stolen. Am I just being paranoid?
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Is using community CC assets considered taboo? It would speed up development at the cost of assets being potentially unoriginal. I am already refusing to use any AI in the project.
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I do want to release this game on Steam at least. So, are their requirements I should consider when building this game? In that same light, should I set up a listing for it and when? This isnt for money, but I want to make sure people can play this. As I will also be releasing a full length novel alongside it, I want to make sure people understand they are meant to go together.
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Is there a world where I should be raising money for development with a website, patreon, gofundme, YouTube, etc. It would be nice to help pay the team, if one gets built, bit I could also upgrade my educational efforts to blender, C#, and Reasons/Fl Studio.
I want this game to become a reality, but navigating the time sink, lack of skill, and general business scape is something I am not familiar with.
Any recommendations to other communities, resources, people, would be a great help. Even your answers to these questions will help qualm some of the hundreds of questions in my mind.
I will keep passionately pursuing education in the meantime. Thank you!
As far as hiring is concerned, it really depends on scope and the budget you want to spend on it. It’s a pretty individual thing. I personally approach my project like a general learning experience, and I didn’t feel the need to hire coders, writers and such. But everyone is different. If you end up looking for someone to hire, however, I will gladly recommend CastingCall. It’s a recruiting platform for pretty much anything project related. Artists, writers, sound designers, you name it. It’s where I got most of my voice actors from.
When it comes to using Assets, I don’t think it’s taboo at all. For my project, I ended up making over 500 custom assets myself, and it does add a lot of time to the development process, so I understand why people are using them. That being said, even if it is extra work, custom assets can provide a unique look to a project, because they are made to fit into the world that is created.
When it comes to putting your game on Steam - they provide a documentation about the whole process here.
But, at least that’s how I approach this: This is all stuff I’d worry about last. There are already so many things to consider and learn, trying to tackle them all at once is fairly overwhelming. And I would not worry about how long the development might take. Take your time learning and have fun with it. From my experience, the first couple months are the hardest, but the more you improve your skills, the smoother the whole project comes together. I hope this helped a little.
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Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to reply and for the advice.
You can also find people on r/gameDevClassifieds; I found several artists and a musician there for Stahldrache.
If you are going to bring people in, you probably want to be paying them. My experience with volunteer help is that it’s not reliable, and contributions tend to peter out over time. Which is fair enough; if people are doing it for fun and it stops being fun or interferes with something important, they have no obligation to continue. But it does generally mean that with a volunteer-based project you have the additional concern that people you’ve built your schedule around may just wander off and not come back.
Paying them also means you can establish some contractual terms, which means you’re less likely to have a problem later with someone who (say) thought they were contributing to a for-profit project with revenue sharing.
Personally, what I do is work on everything myself, and as the project gets going I look at the parts I’m worst at and ask myself if I need help there. You can get a long way with placeholder assets, and the great thing about placeholders is you haven’t wasted money or someone else’s time (or both) if you realize later that you either didn’t need that asset or it needs to be fundamentally changed somehow.
I have been in projects where (for example) we realized mid-development that the models were all going to need to be re-rigged.
Much as @mac_deth says, I’d suggest you work on this yourself and not worry about bringing in people, whether cc assets matter, or steam compliance just yet. You can deal with all of those things later.
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This is great advice, and I like the idea of place holders to move things forward. I appreciate the insights.
