Project Genesis indie game project seeking concept art
I must be crazy for posting a request for help on a commercial project, on a forum for open game projects.
TL;DR: We're making a game to make money, but we don't have any to start, so we need some free help to get off the ground. Artists, mostly.
Have a copypaste from our teaser trailer description:
In the year 2112, scientists of the Genesis Mars colony find remnants of extraterrestrial life during a surface expedition. They take samples back to the lab for reconstitution. Less than fourty-eight hours later, the colony goes dark, leaving nothing but a grainy mayday transmission. Anyone left alive is completely on his own, for help is a month's rocket trip away.
Project Genesis is an upcoming indie survival horror title from the North American startup, Form and Function Studios. This game has ambitious endeavors to compete where other titles have done well, and shine where others have fallen short.
The developers have no formal training, and will more or less be learning as they go, relying heavily on the miracles of volunteers and open source software along the way. They approach this momentous task with an introspective philosophy: to never be happy with flat, boring, glitchy, or buggy gameplay, and to listen to the players.
And an outdated teaser trailer: http://youtu.be/AdgbZHCWSVM
As you can tell, we're really hurting for artists of all kinds. We really could use some concept art for marketability, but texture artists, modelers, animators are all welcome, too.
Powered by the Crystal Space engine, a free and open source 3D framework. http://www.crystalspace3d.org
We're all about open source works (partly since we're probably going to be bumming off them for quite some time :P), but we really do hope to contribute back to projects we've utilized, like Crystal Space.
Since this is a commercial game, if it sells well, there might be some good money in it for those involved. I AM NOT GUARANTEEING ANY FINANCIAL COMPENSATION, TO ANYONE. EVEN MYSELF!
Sorry, I have to make that disclaimer so there's no misunderstandings in the forseeable future.
Have a facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/projectgenesisgame
Drop me a line at cybergeek94@gmail.com if you're interested.
We also could use some coders with experience in C++. Sound designers and voice actors in the future, but not right now.
You're not crazy for requesting help on an indie here, but it might be a good idea to give some more information about your openness to FOSS licensing of contributed assets. I think people here will be more interested if you are fine with at least some assets made for you being released under a FOSS license.
Another thing you might want to elaborate on is the level of experience of your team. You said you arent formally trained, but lots of devs arent. Do you guys have game-making experience? If so, linking to a past project would be a good idea. If not, this project is likely to be seen as too ambitious and likely to fail (which ofc makes it less appealing to artists).
Anyway, good luck.
We have yet to agree on how much we're allowing as FOSS, at least for the game itself. We've been discussing letting artists keep the rights to their work, but that can get iffy. We might end up using quite a bit of CC/public domain art if we can't get our own.
Since Crystal Space is LGPL, we can keep our own source code closed, which we'll probably prefer in the long run.
I'm going to be honest. We have zero experience making games—only playing them.
As head of engine and logic, I've been coding off and on for about seven years now, barely more than trivial bits of code written up on a whim, in a smattering of languages.
Our art head has no experience or qualifications besides being able to model better than I can.
We're both recent high school grads.
We have a business major doing the paperwork and crunching the numbers, but he hasn't even graduated college yet.
And he had this response to your reply:
"To me, it makes no difference if we fail. I'd rather fail, and find out what we did wrong so that we won't make that mistake next time. As my business profs say, 'failing forward'."
We're always looking up, and we want people with the same kind of mentality. If people think we're likely to fail or too ambitious, then they have no place with us. You gotta start somewhere, right?
good luck :P
""To me, it makes no difference if we fail. I'd rather fail, and find out what we did wrong so that we won't make that mistake next time. As my business profs say, 'failing forward'."
...You gotta start somewhere, right?"
You do need to start somewhere. A big, ambitious 3D project is, however, probably not the best place to start. Starting small is important for a number of reasons, including those he mentioned. You will inevitably be making mistakes, probably major ones since it's an unfamiliar field. If you start small, those mistakes won't end up costing you huge amounts of time and work, not to mention stress and drama.
Regardless, this probably isn't the stage to be looking for outside artists. If you really want to go forward with a big project, you really should start out using placeholders until you have a serious (if potentially unshiny) demo to show that you are legit developers and your project has a good chance of success. There are few things more frustrating than putting a lot of love and care into a project and watching it go to waste. As it is, your chances of getting external help at this point are probably pretty low.
Technus, your friend sounds a little... combative. I'm not sure what they're teaching your friend in college, but I think it might help to tone the rhetoric down a bit when looking for free help.
So looking for artists this early on was a mistake. We'll put that on the list.
While this conversation has given my business guy pause on the project (He's ex-Army, probably why his response seemed combative), I still do want to move this forward.
My friend (art) and I, we got together a few months back with this crazy idea:
"Hey dude. You know what we should do? We should make a video game."
We didn't have a concept of an 8-bit scroller or a text adventure game. We wanted to play with the big boys, make another Skyrim or another Dead Space, Amnesia even—maybe another Half Life 2. We didn't have a clue how to make a video game. All we knew is what we thought of those games, where they fell short, what they did well.
So yeah, taking something on of this size is pretty ambitious. Probably immature. The odds are against us.
But all three of us have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this project so far. And all this has done is make it clear that we need to put in a little bit more before we call in reinforcements.
So be it.
Have a nice day.
Combative? I don't see where you're coming from with that. It is strong, yes, but if you want to get anywhere in the business world, you need to have that strength. Especially when you're an entrepreneur, starting off with a budget of 0 USD, and are competing against already established and popular developers like Bungie, Id, Blizzard, and others.
The point of the statement is that failure is a part of the business world. It is how a free market economy operates and thrives. Ask anyone that is successful, and you'll find that every single one of them failed, repeatedly. The only thing they have in common is that they learned from it, and became better businessmen/businesswomen for it. I don't fear failure. Rather, I'd accept it as a lesson learned (sometimes a costly one), and move on while avoiding it next time.
So long as everyone on the project can look at it with their heads held high, and be proud of the work that they put in the project, I'd call the trade of time and energy worth it. As another successful entrepreneur once told me, "I'd rather try my best and fail, then avoid failure completely."
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CEO of Form and Function Studios
I'll just leave this here:
http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/765/what-things-should-an-indie-game-developer-never-do
http://madmarcel.github.io
Thank you for passing on this link. I just did a quick glance through, and it holds a lot of useful information.
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CEO of Form and Function Studios
I sugest you use unity3d, you will save lots of headaches from the start, its the most friendly user/programmer engine i have seen so far
We shopped through quite a few game engines, including Unity. Crystal Space met our requirements for a program that is flexible, customizable, mature, and most importantly, has zero up-front costs.
Unity is nice for a commercial project if you have the $1500 it requires for the license, and then another $500 for the team license. We don't. It also requires a separate license for each platform.
We looked at the NeoAxis game engine. It was far less expensive, but also less mature and possibly untrustworthy.
For a long time, we considered the Blender Game Engine. We've been using Blender to model our characters and levels, but the Blender Game Engine is buggy and immature. That's actually how we heard about Crystal Space. The developers of the Blender Open Game project Yo Frankie! used Crystal Space technology in the later versions of the game, eventually completely ditching the BGE in favor of CS.
CryEngine 3 has the same issues as Unity.
Crystal Space has dedicated volunteer developers, some of whom have been working on it since it was launched in 1997. There's daily bug fixes and updates, albeit usually small ones.
CS has also been participating in Google's Summer of Code for at least the past three years, always finishing the program with new features or a more streamlined engine. In fact, I'm looking forward to participating with CS in GSoC 2013. It's backed by an awesome group of people, and I've enjoyed the privilege of chatting with their devs on IRC for the past couple months or so.
Crystal Space's founder, Jorrit Tyberghein, is currently working on a Unity-style "what you see is what you play" editor for the engine called AresEd, which requires no C++ programming. We won't be using it.
One of the reasons for taking on the nitty-gritty, as it were, is to further understand the engine and optimize our game for it; to implement a few features not yet in the engine (features seen in AAA engines like multithreading [CS has multithreading for some parts but the project as a whole is not thread-safe/thread-utilizing; we aim to eventually fix that], antialiasing, SSAO, etc); and finally, to contribute to the development of CS, likely by giving said features back to the engine, for everyone to use.
We don't just want to make our own game and let that be it. We want to make sure the tools are available for those who want to follow in our footsteps, those just as ambitious as we are.
We want to blaze the trail. The trail that leads to a world where indie titles overthrow AAA games, where the power to create a truly immersive entertainment experience is in everyone's hands.
If we fail, at least we'll have learned a few things along the way.
"Unity is nice for a commercial project if you have the $1500 it requires for the license, and then another $500 for the team license. We don't. It also requires a separate license for each platform."
Unity only requires $1500.00 for a PRO license and only requires $400 additional per platform for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. You can still use Unity free under the following conditions:
--Medicine Storm