Adventures in Royalty/Post-Launch Compensation Projects
polycounter lvl 7
Currently helping a small team get a project off the ground. I've worked on a few royalty projects in the past, though before I'd never involved myself much in laying the groundwork for development or in the recruiting process.
Below are a few questions for those who have worked on successful royalty/post-launch compensation projects. Feel free to answer only one or two, any experiences or insights you can share are appreciated.
Below are a few questions for those who have worked on successful royalty/post-launch compensation projects. Feel free to answer only one or two, any experiences or insights you can share are appreciated.
-What did you do to attract and retain 2D and 3D artists throughout the course of development?
-How much time typically elapsed between posting for a specific role and bringing on an artist?
-Did you recruit locally offline as well and if so did you have more success than recruiting online?
-How did you handle morale and workload challenges resulting from sudden departures from your team?
-How did you communicate with your team throughout the project? Did you use specific collaboration platforms like Trello or did you rely on simpler methods like email and google docs?
-How well did you know the members of your team? Had you worked with them before on previous projects and had you met/worked with them offline as well?
-How large was your team and how much did the number of team members change throughout the project?
-To artists: what things did you look for when deciding whether or not to work with a particular team?
Replies
So my advice would be, be honest with yourself. Is your project something that has a legitimate chance to be a real product? Have you done market research that supports the viability of the product? Do you have the sort of professional production and management experience required to see a project through from start to completion? If so, use your savings to put together a prototype aka vertical slice, get a business plan together and consider getting a loan to get started and/or going the kickstarter route.
If you can't or are not willing do any of the above, you're not serious about it and/or have not really thought it through. In this case you should not pretend like you're making a real game. Start your project and make it very clear that it is for fun/experience, do not treat it like a job. Do not make people sign NDAs, have them do weekly tasks, or fill out time sheets or anything else like it is a job. This will kill all of the desirable aspects of this sort of project for anyone has the sort of talent required to create something compelling.
The best thing you can do to recruit for this sort of project is to have a compelling idea / style / hook of some sort. What is it about your project that is cool? Why would someone care enough to want to devote their free time to your project rather than working on something that interests them personally? When you have a good answer to these question, recruiting and finding people is the easy part. If you can't answer these questions, you need to go back to the drawing board.
Keeping the scope very specific and very small is a good way to approach these sort of projects as well. Nobody wants to work on a freetime project that is impossibly complex or overwhelming.
For instance, are you really trying to make a commercial product?
or
Are you looking for a chance to work in a more structured way with a team or group of people who will help to push your quality of work to a level where your portfolio would be good enough to get a job?
These are two very different things and should be approached in different ways.
Personally I've had better luck with contract work limited to the scope of individual models. For that reason I never
involved myself much with design or management of others' projects before. The royalty projects I've worked on in the past suffered from scope creep and got shelved or else development was put on hold.
After thinking about it, I may be overstepping my personal boundaries if I involve myself in the project too far beyond my capacity as an artist. In my first few projects, some of the project leads/clients didn't have a background in 3D or development so it took me a few years to reign in my "I can help out with this too" instinct and admittedly, I still have a ways to go. The design groundwork for this project is still being laid right now so as an artist there's little for me to do at this point, though maybe that's for the best.
I think that's the key -- that the project helps you in ways that you want. If you get involved with a project and you start having to do stuff that you know you won't use again -- as soon as you lose faith that other people aren't putting out, or there's a lack of leadership, or whatever, you're going to start feeling like you could be using your time more wisely.
Tried to work with a couple of other groups, and it just doesn't work out for a million reasons. Without money and structure, it's unlikely you'll get anything meaningful done.
However, working on an actual game has been the biggest learning experience for me as a beginning artist thus far. I'd highly recommend it. So, like already said, getting involved with some modders might be a great idea if you want to do something a bit more than personal portfolio projects, but not get invested in something that will waste your energy and leave you feeling cynical.
When it gets to recruiting and putting together a team and all that, that's usually a red flag.