Re: audio-based medieval virtual world
Especially since this game is intended to be free, I don't think hiring programmers is going to work out.
It will make me unpopular to do this, but I'm going to share a few tips to help give this game idea a reality check, to hopefully help it move forward. I waited around for about a week and a half to see if it would happen on its own. I really hope no one thinks any of this is meant to be mean. Sometimes the only way to help is to say something that a person doesn't really want to hear.
When working on something, it is important to remember what it is. I might have to stretch a bit to come up with good examples, but I'll give it a try. If you and some friends are planning out a board game, in the excitement of coming up with ideas you could easily forget that you're talking about a board game. New things being day dreamed could be great for a computer game but not work for a board game, and if you're too caught up in the excitement, you might not stop and say "Hey, that is not what we're trying to make." If there is no clear idea of what is being made, when someone eventually decides this will be a board game, huge portions of the ideas will have to be thrown away. The sudden loss of those ideas might ruin the whole project for everyone.
If you and some friends were going to start up a small lemonade stand in your front yard, it could be easy to have everyone get carried away and start imagining making millions of dollars. It is fine to joke around and day dream, but the danger is when people forget that they are just day dreaming. It leads to massive disappointment, unobtainable goals, and projects fall apart before they are finished. When little Timmy breaks out of his fantasy and sees he'll only make $15 on lemonade, he might just quit and walk away. He would have normally been happy with $15, but he let his day dr eam get out of hand and can't drop back down to being happy with reality.
If we take a minute, we can think back to all of the most hyped games in this community that never turned into anything. Loads of games showed up as forum posts with a developer listing all of the amazing things that his/her game would be. The thing that all of those had in common, was that they were really only day dreams being typed out and shared. These unfortunate developers never understood the difference between planning out a real project, and just daydreaming.
When you can toss out any cool idea that crosses your mind, almost in an instant a game can seem like the greatest game idea that anyone has ever come up with. Well that makes sense, because it is a fight between real and imagination. Real games cannot compete with imagined ramblings, and never will.
I really really don't want this to sound like I'm putting anyone down from this threa d. From a developer's perspective, this thread is a collection of day dreams being written down. I haven't run across anything that would make me think this is a real project, yet. A real project will have organized ideas that are realistic to the abilities of the people on the team. When a project is listing ideas that they have absolutely no idea how to make, and are searching for people who do, you are almost always dealing with a day dream situation.
I've been recruited to help on these types of projects over the years. Sadly each and every one fell apart before anything came out of them, and luckily I was always the first to walk away once I saw the situation for what it was.
I know other developers see the same thing I've seen, and that's one of the reasons this project is having a hard time recruiting programmers. The people who have been developers for long enough, see this as a huge red flag, and they don't want to board a sinking ship. The other problem is that developers who are capable of doing all of the crazy things this game wants to do, would build it on their own as their own project. Why would they wait until they had joined a "team" of people who can't help with any of the work? It wouldn't really make sense.
The point of all of this, is to help everyone on this project to understand that currently it is a daydream and not an actual project plan. Now that is not a terrible thing, so please don't get me wrong! Day dreaming is a way to start gathering together ideas that you will later boil down into a realistic plan. The sooner the people on this project understand that they are still in the daydreaming stage, the sooner they can start shaving it down and shaping it into something that might really be built.
Some people will point out that this current game idea isn't unrealistic, and I� 39;d agree. There are absolutely developers floating around in this community who can make a massive open world game. None of those people are non-coders who can only try to help write story. A simple side scroller game is just a day dream to someone whose abilities limit them to making "guess the number" games. It's all relative, so the line of what is realistic and unrealistic depends on what skills and experience the team has.
What needs to be done, is the current team needs to figure out what they can all actually do. Based on what they can do, boil down their ideas so that they can actually do them all. If you find yourself saying, "well we can just find someone else who knows how to do such-and-such", then you're walking back into the realm of day dreaming. Handing work off to other people just turns it into their project, not yours. There is this crazy (yet popular) thing going around where pe ople label themselves as the "idea guy", and think they can just recruit people do to the actual work. This is a fantasy that does not work well in reality. If you yourself are running a project (and this is being generally said to everyone), you need to be capable of doing all of the things the project needs, or at least be capable of doing the vast majority of it. You can recruit people to help you do things, but not do the things For you. There is a huge difference between those 2 things.
I do hope a game comes out of this team, and I hope I have not ruined anyone's fun. Unless the team gets themselves out of the daydreaming stage, the project is doomed to fail just like countless projects we've all seen year after year. There is always a place for daydreaming, and it is loads of fun to do, but we can't keep doing that and ever expect to get things done.
I'm sorry I had to be the "bad guy" and
say any of this. I was waiting around hoping someone else would so I wouldn't have to, hahaha!
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