10 tips to attract team members

So you have a great idea for a game. Or maybe you don’t but you’d like to work on one anyways. How do you recruit team mates? When should you recruit them? Well, there are many variables to consider:

1) A lot of game lovers think they have the best game idea ever, they won’t be won over that easily to work on yours. If you don’t have an idea you really really want to work on, or if you have little experience, consider joining someone else’s team.

2) Choose a reasonable goal. If you have extravagant and unrealistic goals, it will turn off all potential team mates who have enough experience to know it’s unrealistic, you will end up with team mates with as little experience as you do.

3) It’s easier to convince someone to work for free if they see that you are working as hard (if not harder) than them. You have to do something valuable in the team, be it programming, art, audio. Game design, unless you have a lot of experience in it, isn’t valuable to the team. Planning, having a vision, doing the website, are not usually considered like really valuable to the team, because you are not going to do a sizable portion of the work. You may join a team and do these, but don’t expect programmers and artist to join your team based on your having a vision of a great game and the website to go with it. To lead a project, you have to pull your own weight.

4)It’s easier to convince someone to work for free if they are getting something out of it (experience with how games are built, a working demo to put in their portfolio etc.) If you have skills they don’t have, you can team up for great portfolio building projects, or you can even barter. Trade art for code (exemple, you can code the php back end of the artist’s gallery in exchange for some models.)

5)Your team mates have ideas about gameplay and design too and they appreciate that their input be considered (which is harder if they come in at the very end.) They can also spot problems you wouldn’t have seen (acting as a second pair of eyes.)

6)If they do this for free, they are not going to do it full time, giving them time to work is essential. Depending on the scope of your game, it can range from a few weeks to several months.

7) Search teammates where they are, go to sound forums to search audio artists, go to places like ConceptArt to find 2D artists. If you post on a forum and don’t get an answer, don’t get disapointed and DON’T BEG. Keep posting progress shots of your project and someone will take notice. Don’t get agressive if people suggest you should pay for the work. Present what the potential team mate would get out of the deal.

8 ) Offering a share of the revenue is a huge gamble for your potential team mates, unless you have a great track record, they have no way to know how much money they will get out of their work, or if they will get any money at all. Revenue sharing is often the same as working for free so to get worked up if it doesn’t attract too much attention.

9)  Don’t go nuts with the NDA’s. Ideas are a dime a dozen, if you present a lot of clear and well formated information, it will be easier to show that you are organized, realistic and hard working. Don’t overwhelm your potential team mates with 2 pages of narratives about the backstory in the body of the forum ad. Bullet point lists with features and key informations, compensation, teams structeur, aim for the revenue model of the game, your contact info and URL. That’s about enough.

10) Don’t take the first teammate who replies out of fear that no one else replies. Take time to chat with the person, see what their level of skill is, if you have the same goals, if you get along. Maybe do a sample tiny project before jumping into something bigger.

So, you are the one who decides when and how to recruit, considering all the variables, because you know your own project. Be ready to coach your team mates them in how your art, code or audio assets should be formated. Be ready for comments about gameplay and design.

Starting to search early shouldn’t hurt since then you would have less pressure to find the right person right away.

I hope this works.

If you have any questions about this or other topics, feel free to ask!

ShellRunner update

I finally added a semi playable demo of ShellRunner on www.shellrunner.com it does a good job of showing off the parallax scrolling which I find gorgeous. We should be doing a website overhaul soon too because it was made in less than a hour and I find it pretty ugly.

So you found an artist, what’s next?

This post is intended mostly for game developpers but can be transposed for many situations where someone hires a freelance artist. Because the artist may have a very nice portfolio but she’s not going to be able to do what you need her to do without your help.
Yeah I know, she’s the artist, she should know what to do, but here the possibilities are endless, and no one knows your needs like you do.
Ideally, by the time you go out to hire your artist, your game design document should be nice and coherent and you should have done some measure of prototyping to validate your gameplay.
You should know what style you are looking for. Cartoony? Dark? Gore? If you don’t know the words to express what you are looking for, try to find references that you can show your artist. Pictures, movies, comics, other games, everything is fair game. You are not looking to copy, but to better explain. Once you know the style you are going for you will need a detailed list of the assets you need. And I mean detailed.
If you have a naming convention for your files you can explain it to the artist. She should be able to follow it. you will also need to explain the technical details.

For exemple (I’m a 2D artist):

• Sprite for the main character should be 85 pixels high
• There is 1 level of transparency
• The transparent color is 255, 0, 255 (programmer pink)
• My target frame per second (for the animations) is 15
• Sprites are in strips (sequence of images all the same size placed one after the other to create a strip.)
• The walk cycle sprite should be called GameX_Sprite_MainWalk and it should be saved as BMP.

If things need to be a specific size, say it. f there is any kind of game mechanics that affects the art, say it.The artist is not you and she doesn’t know the limitations of the gameplay or of the engine if you don’t tell her. If you have a prototype, having the artist play it is a good idea. That will save you some words.

If you have templates, layouts, screenshots or any visual aids, send them her way too.

Once you have a nice detailed list of all the assets you need, what they will be used for, how they will be named and the technical details about them, you need to tell the artist what are your priorities, what you need first, so she can serve your needs, that’s why she’s there. Maybe the backdrops are not much of a hurry but the animations are. Again, she won’t know unless you tell her.

Keeping her posted your your progress and sending demos or screenshots her way is a great way to let her see what works and what doesn’t and it’s always nice.

Get to work step by step, don’t let her get ahead of herself and validate all the art she sends you, if there is a problem, tell it right away to avoid snowballing. Keep track of what’s done and what remains to be done and meet your payment milestones as well as she meets her production milestones. That will go a long way to insure a good relationship. Be open to feedback, game artists love games too and some of them have more experience than you.

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Article by David Michael Contracting Art for Your Game same subject, different angle

Your website: build it or outsource it? Part 4

There is this guy called Charley Parker. He has a blog called Lines and Colors where he talks about artsy stuff he likes, be it digital or analog, outrageous or traditional. I guess when one surfs the web to find art as much as he does, trends start to appear. Here is an amazing post about portfolio sites and mistakes artists often make when designing them.

The whole site is a gem but if you are thinking of building a website (even if it’s not a portfolio,) you should start by this post:How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web

I have to say that I agree with almost everything he says, it’s really a question of common sense but having it black on white and explained is handy. I’m a bit of a web design old school purist too so it’s good to see that I’m not alone with these opinions. That said, enjoy!

Painting of a b&w cat, using no black or white paint

Here is a tiny acrylics painting of my cat Akasha (6″x12″.) It was small enough to fit in my scanner and I have to say that I like the result of scanning much better than that of photographing, unfortunately, I don’t own a really huge scanner. My normal pieces tend more toward formats like 20″x36″

It was also made without black or white paint. The lights are unbleached titanium and the darks are mostly phtalo green, cadmium red and yellow with bits of ultramarine and burnt sienna. The canvas tone was a phtalo green and cadmium red wash. I like the results, especially for the darks, I might have gone overboard with the shading on the light parts.

Your website: build it or outsource it? part 3: The Flash Rant

Flash is pretty, it plays sounds, makes animation, lets you have a web site with spinning buttons and smileys that sing when your mouse runs over them. So you need to make your website in Flash, right? Right? RIGHT?

Well, not really. There are pros and cons to Flash, for sure so let’s see them here.
Pros:

• Looks the same on every browser.
• Allows for mouse over effects and sounds.
• Everything important in one handy file (can be sent over e-mail.)
• Good to show off videos or animations.
• Can make games and interactive experiences.

Cons:

• Content doesn’t show up in search engines.
• Can’t be modified if you lose the source file (.fla)
• Harder to scale to different screen sizes.
• Can’t give anyone the url of a specificpart of the document_
• Some people will hit the back button and leave the page when they just wanted to see the previous content inside the Flash document_
• Visitors have to download everything at once even if they just want to see a small part.
• Third party plug-in, some visitors will NOT see the file.
• Harder to adapt for different accessibility needs than regular html.

Basically, my point of view is to use Flash for things that html can not do: show media, make portable portfolios, interactivity. If you want to have a Flash intro, let your visitors skip it, they will be especially upset if they hit the back button and have to watch your intro twice in a row when all they wanted was your contact info. Have a html navigation to your site as often as you can (or use the options Flash vs Html.) Even if you make Flash games. It’s better to let someone who can’t play Flash files see what they are missing when trying to play the game than it is to have them not see the site at all. If you have someone else build your site, ask to keep the fla file! It’s important and without it, you won’t even be able to fix a typo.

A visit of my studio

I finally got around to taking pics of my studio. It’s a terrible mess but it’s always that way so waiting for it to be clean is a bit futile. We have way too many books.

I also have a pic on what’s currently on the easel:

So you want to make games?

Another shorty, actually just a link that is well worth visiting for anyone who wants to work in the entertainment industry, especially games.

Sloperama

Tom Sloper is very active in game development communities like the IGDA and Gamedev.net. He’s been making games for almost as long as I’ve been alive.

On a side note, I will continue the web publishing series, feel free to ask about any topic you want me to elaborate one.

Technologies used in websites

Your website: build it or outsource it? part 2

There is 2 kinds of technologies to consider when building any site that is more than strickly basic:

Server side

Server side technology happens on the computer that is hosting your website and it feeds your visitors with information that their browser can process. Like, say, you have a shopping cart built in ASP, the user enters the item they want to buy and their zip code and the server returns the amount for shipping. There are many technologies for server side programs but what they have in common is that they usually return standard web language to the visitor, therefor, they have little impact on the accessibility to the site. Languages used for server side technologies include (but are not limited to) Ruby in rail, ASP, Pearl, PHP, MySQL. They are used for sites that involve databases, e-commerce, dynamically generated content (like forums, blogs and myspace) and sometimes games.

Client side

Client side techology happens on the computer of the person visiting your site. It is interpreted or processed by the browswer or a plug-in of the browser. That means that if you use cutting edge tech, you might be leaving out those with older computers or browsers. There are resources on the web about demographics of user computers and broswers. You have to consider who is your target audience. If you sell a shooter that requires the latest 3D card, you can assume that your users have pretty up do date tech, but what if you have an info site about retro gaming? Client side technologies include (but are not limited to) java, javascript, html, css, flash, shockwave, quicktime, vrml, activeX. Additionnally, some users may disable some technologies, for speed or security reasons, like activeX or Javascript. That means they may be missing some crucial part of your site.

While all websites have a server side (minimally: the server) and a client side (minimally: the html) the client site is usually more accessible to new web builders. Also, if you don’t know html, how do you go about generating it dynamically?

Your website: build it or outsource it?

Your website: build it or outsource it?
You might want a website for your portfolio, for your company, to show off pictures or just to talk about your cats. It might be your first web page, or maybe you had one at a time but had bad experience with it. It any case, you want a new one and don’t know here to start.

There are a few questions to ask yourself first:

• What kind of content will you need for your site? Interactive forms? E-commerce? Video or audio feeds?
• Does the site have to look pro?
• Do you change your mind every 2 days and like to change your website about as often?
• How much time do you have to invest in your site?
• How much money do you have to invest in your site?
• Do you enjoy learning new technology? Can you learn fast?
• When do you need your site?
• How much updating and maintenance will your site need?
• Do you want to build a page to LEARN how it’s done? (As a hobby or for future use)?

Yeah, that sounds like a lot of questions, but choosing to do your site yourself or to outsource is an important choice to make. There are other options that are a mix of the 2, like using a ready made template or hiring someone to build the site and teach you how to update it.
Personnal page option
If all you want is a personal space to put up pics and talk about personnal stuff, you don’t really need to build a site, you can just create an account on MySpace (just like I did) or on any blogging site. You can also create a www.photobucket.com account and put your pics there, from there you can link to your pics from any forums or blogging account. These services are free and ad-driven, but if you aren’t looking for pro-level webspace they are quite sufficient and easy to use and maintain. One thing to consider when choosing a free space is:”will your visitors have to login/create an account to see your stuff?” Having to create an account is a major turn off to a lot of people. I think MSN livespace is like that.

If you are interested in learning to build your page yourself for fun or to put that in your resume even if you only have personnal content, keep reading.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a programmer but I am fairly tech savvy. That said, I have been working with HTML since 1996 and had time to adapt to the newer technologies. My first book was Teach Yourself web publishing with HTML in a week by Laura Lemay. In 3 hours I had a pro-looking (for the time) website up and running, on my hard drive. That was back when websites were in black text on grey background and when you stumbled upon an image you were all excited. Nowadays it’s a little more complicated… But not that much.
DIY option
What does building your site involve? Well, a basic website nowadays isn’t much more complicated than it was circa 1995. Everything web is based on HTML just like it was back then. An HTML file is just a .txt file containing specific codes where you change the .txt extension to .htm or .html. HTML stands for HyperTextMarkupLanguage.

To see what it looks like, there is an option in most browser to view the HTML of the page you are currently looking at. Like in Opera it’s View>Source or CTRL+F3. The difference is now there are many other kinds of technologies that can be used to generate HTML or to be plugged in HTML to give more functionalities. CSS is one of the most used options, it allows you to separate the content of the page from it’s formating. So if your site has 10 pages (10 html files,) you can change 1 CSS file and the colors and layout of the entire site changes.

Other options are Java, Javascript, Flash, Shockwave. Means to generate HTML and scripts are PHP, Pearl, ASP etc.

Having a website also involves having a home for it, do you want to use a free hosting service, (maybe one is included in your ISP service) or do you want full service and your own domain like mywebsite.com. Hosting and domain registry are 2 different services but many providers have bundles with both services together for the same price. Paid for hosting can range from 25$ a year to thousands of dollars so you have to be careful and see what your needs are before choosing.

I will come back in a later post about advises on actually building pages but I will start with some links of interest:

How To Identify Effective Color Schemes

Online tools to choose a color scheme to your website, often a tricky topic.

W3Schools

The most complete online guide I have seen so far about the technologies used to put content online and their proper use. May seem a bit dry but a useful reference.

CSSZenGarden

Fairly advanced site that shows the possibilities of CSS for layout while being compliant to proper web standards.

Outsourcing option
Maybe your want many different kinds of content to your page, like a shopping cart and video feed and you don’t want to go throught the trouble of learning it all. Some designers will build your site, manage your domains and host your site for a 1 time building fee and a monthly service fee. You have to be aware that they will take a profit from the hosting and managing but it may well be worth your time if you don’t want to bother with that stuff. Some will most likely build the thing and turn it over to you for maintenance and management. You have to be clear with them about what you want to handle and what your budget is.

Content with databases (like shopping carts, catalogs, forums, memberships) will most likely require regular maintenance. If you are tech savvy but artisticaly impaired you can hire a designer to build the look and feel of the site and do the maintenance yourself.

In any case, always ask for the source files of your site and keep it on back up yourself, .psd and .fla files are always useful for minor updates and you will hate yourself if you lose them or if your web designer leaves the project without giving them to you.

I’ll have an update with more details soon because I have bitten more than I can chew in a single post.

If you have any specific questions about this post or past post, don’t hesitate to ask!

Edited to fix a broken link for the color tools, the original resource has been removed but I found a new one.