A few questions:
1. How big is your dev team? Is it just you?
2. Are you working with friends? People you met in a game jam? People you hired? AI?
3. Who owns the game? If more than one person is working on it, how do you determine payment?
4. Who controls the content? How are decisions made? Do you vote?
Figured I'd reply. Trying to build rapport on this site. I'm no game developer extra-ordinaire but I'm a writer who happens to code stuff on the side.
1: Just me. Depends on the project. Sometime's it's me and a close friend but for my projects on this account it's just me.
2: Yeah as I said in No. 1. I don't know anyone personally who is using AI and I don't think anyone SHOULD be using AI for their development. Period.
3: Well if it's me and a friend we split it 50/50. We don't have an LLC or anything (which is a good idea and you should do that but we're jackasses) so if it ever got any profit I assume we'd split the earnings evenly.
4: If it's me and a friend we would usually refuse to get anywhere until we agree. But we usually follow the same mental wavelength so we avoid tough problems like this. My advice to anyone trying to lead a project with someone else is to ALWAYS be close friends with that person. If you both understand each other you understand the ideas, and you understand their thought processes. It's easier for them to make compromises because you trust each other. And it can save time by avoiding arguments and creative differences.
1. Just me.
2. Sometimes during a game jam I'll have someone create music if a musician requests to join a team. I don't actively hire. No AI.
3. My games are 100% free. I gamedev for fun and don't want the hassle of burocracy from making money. Could change if a project gains massive popularity.
4. I do what I want whenever I want. But I do listen to feedback.
For me, keeping the team small has made things much easier. If you're working with other people, it's worth deciding ownership, revenue sharing, and who has the final say before development gets serious. A simple written agreement can save a lot of headaches later, even if it's just friends working together.
One. It’s only me by default. I collaborate with different people on projects, but there’s no established team.
Two. Who with? People I casually met on social networking sites: character artists from Mastodon, Neocities, and Pillowfort; a programmer from Mastodon, and a translator from here so far. Plus, there are people offline I talk to about concepts and playthroughs when we’re already talking.
If I had money to spare, I’d commission sprite artists. I don’t really enjoy doing that work all myself, and many amazing illustrators with much more advanced skill and knowledge than I have are asking for work.
No “AI”, ever. I’m currently working through removing backgrounds in a couple dozen photos with cutting and color-fill tools because the sites with “remove background” features have completely lost my trust with how they’ve participated in the development of an abusive industry the past ten years. Every time I feel annoyed about the slowness, I remember my seething at what&s been done to people and the resources we relied on.
Three. Who owns the game? I do, mostly.
There are collaborative games my art is in, and the organizers have the rights to the games themselves, while I retain rights to the sprites I made. At least one of those big projects made money. I was surprised the organizers made no attempt to pass any of it on to contributors, but that was on me for not asking about intentions in writing beforehand.
So far, the only payments I’ve received for my games are for a solo project. I’ll be sending (small) voluntary payments back to the stock asset makers soon. My collaborators to date haven’t wanted to deal with the messiness of splits, so I haven’t dealt with that yet.
Explicit contracts for games are complex, combining different types of publishing terms I’m not used to, and it’s especially difficult with the current problems with payment processors, politics, and telecommunications. Will I know where an artist will be in year to send on royalties? Will they know how to contact me about marketing?
Four. The project designer controls the content, yeah? Who that is would vary.
I’ve been easing into gaming through narrative games, because writing is the part of general publishing I’m familiar with. Self-publishing authors quickly learn (unless very unlucky) how to build out from their writing to direct their projects. We are our project’s managers. No one I’ve worked with has seemed uncomfortable with that.
Work styles vary– one artist can run with vague descriptions and another prefers as many details as possible. That’s fine by me. It’s not I’m going to draw or draw exactly as I imagined it, either. Some programmers don’t mind texting code snippers in microposts and some expect advanced version tracking.
When I made game art, the only say I had was in which characters I chose. That’s it. The game mechanics, subject, schedule, sprite specs and everything else was decided beforehand. There was something like 50 contributors on one game? Maybe three people were actually making decisions about how the game itself would work.
I guess if I were asked to contribute writing or interface elements to someone else’s game, I’d prefer a commission over ownership. There’s a game designer in a multi-year scuffle with a bullying co-designer who decided to take full credit and try to push their perceived competition out of the local game community, conventions and everything. No one needs a chronic headache like that.
For context: I’m very new to all this. Half my games have not been released in any way, and just about everything I make is accessible for free.
