f95 Community Game Idea

[barronsat]

Hey everyone,

Wondering if any initiative like this has been done before - took a search through posts but couldn't find anything yet: has the f95 community ever grouped together to develop a game together? Would any people be interested in trying something like this?

The thought would be to pool together the skills of anyone who would be interested to make a game that had input from the community. It's impossible to please everyone of course, especially since there's so many niche things that one could get into, but the hope would be to at least make something that the general public here could feel like they contributed to and get something from. Note that this isn't a "looking for devs/artists for my game idea" thread - only poking to see if there would be enough interest to try this.

Of course, as we see from the hundreds of games constantly being developed, it's often the case that games just get abandoned over time, as it's hard to keep consistent progress and keep the work going after awhile. So what would I propose?

Start small. Start with something very small to test if a team could even functionally work - make a single test level of a game. And see if that game would work from a technical standpoint, have decent temp artwork, and more importantly - see if the process was hell or not.

On top of that, I think it's hard to make an original game from scratch without resources. So I think it'd be better to try basing it off an existing game. By no means does it have to be this, but as an example - GoRepeat's classic " Sakyubasu no Tatakai" was pretty popular back in the day. What would be the benefit of this? The game would have an established framework already to follow, so the test would be more to see if a team could successfully create the existing framework while updating it to modern standards.

Bringing in the community factor in, the idea would be that those involved in the game would collectively be able to decide how the game should be. Via polls or discussions, suggestions from people, etc.

Anyway, this was just a thought that had popped in my mind. Curious to see what people think and if anyone would be interested in trying this out. Or the idea could be ridiculous too!

EDIT 9/15: If you have any potential game ideas you'd like to explore, please suggest it here on this Google Docs!

You must be registered to see the links

 

[Winterfire]

Aside from sounding like a design hell (unless someone takes lead and can actually manage a team, but at that point it would simply be a normal team seeking input from a community which is quite common), I am sure most devs are busy with their own games/ideas already.

If anything, your idea could be a funny way to start developing a game and perhaps find people to begin a team with.

 

[barronsat]

Aside from sounding like a design hell (unless someone takes lead and can actually manage a team, but at that point it would simply be a normal team seeking input from a community which is quite common), I am sure most devs are busy with their own games/ideas already.

If anything, your idea could be a funny way to start developing a game and perhaps find people to begin a team with.

For sure, I agree that it could be a hell of a process. I imagine that a core team would need to be established to take lead of organizing things before just opening things up to free reign from everyone here.

And agree, most devs are likely on their own projects already, so this would be more of a search to see within the people that are available (maybe people who are taking a break from existing projects or have finished recently a project, or people who are new) that would be interested in this experiment.

I guess maybe I should have made some kind of poll or area to sign up on to gather numbers on who would be interested. For now I'll see how the response is to this I suppose!

 

[Deleted member 1536527]

Lol, that shit would never work in a million fucking years . I remember the blenderartists.org forum tried to do something like this back in the day when the blender game engine was a thing. Needless to say it didn't work out, like at all. Very few people are actually interested to begin with, and even the ones that are, none of em' usually care enough to take the lead.

I think the closest you can get to a "community made game" is if a dev creates a game by themselves for themselves, and then makes it very easily and extensively moddable, to the point where you don't have to have much dev knowledge to mod it, so regular folk can jump in as well. That's about it and that's something I can actually see happening.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I tried something similar a few years back.

I wasn't having a hard time finding teammates, the issue I was having was no one could stay interested for more than 2 weeks or so before they wanted to relax, stop, and or move to a new project. What I tried to do was work with this limitation, a lot of users wanted to know what to do, go right to work, but then didn't want the burden of continued expectations. So I would essentially post 1-time assignments. 1 character or drafting of a particular mechanic. I would then work on piecing things together in the background. The issue often became 1 of 2 issues.

1 Either due to the range of user diversity, there was little to no quality control. 1 image would be digital manga style, one image would be crayon and a poor photo, another a 3D render. Code, while I tried to set up a good foundation, a sort of backbone or scaffolding others could use as a starting point, everyone had vastly different philosophies and skill levels. One would code in python and rely on inherent pass by reference behavior in code (without understanding what that meant), another would code in C and just use global variables and polling to track system changes and relay information, another wanted to use game studio which I wasn't gonna touch, one used trigger systems in unity (the buttons) but didn't understand event trigger in code.

2 everyone wanted to do something different, and something big (something they certainly couldn't finish in 2 weeks, and most only worked a day or 2), so while I pointed in a direction, it had no real shape.

Now, I still believe it is possible, and I firmly believe that if it is to be possible to do a community project, there has to be one person who basically does 95% of the work [but often none of the major break throughs] (think of it as the one guy/gal who was working on Godot engine or the blender engine for 4 or 9 years, taking suggestions and adding them in). the minecraft community often has similar examples, such as the seed breaking teams that figure out the seeds used for different images (Minecraft main screen image, default .pack image), where there needs to be 1 person there to keep hope alive.

However, in my case, I wasn't having any fun with the project (I think I lasted 3 or so months and then just stopped). A lot of the things I felt I could do myself much faster and at a higher quality. But now here I am years later, stuck as a perfectionist with nothing really to show. But I'm still slowly trying to work around bad perfectionist habits, only going one step at a time, avoiding making any large/longterm plans, talking regularly with a few users as we bounce ideas.

 

[DaClown]

It is possible to do this kind of thing. It generally needs a few highly motivated amateurs (those who do a thing out of love of doing it) and possibly a few well compensated professionals. The biggest problem every time is policy and organization.

We wouldn't want a centralized dev team setup for this kind of thing because that is single point failure in what needs to be a distributed and decentralized network collaboration.

Authoritarian dev team organization just ends up meaning that those devs dictate the content of the design which invariably alienates huge swathes of those who might otherwise be interested in participating in the design and development process. Interpersonal politics and squabbles end up destroying these kinds of projects for good reason. Often the people who try to take control of the project and become the lead mods or devs are simply the loudest or most abusive and power hungry; they are often among the least competent people.

It is one thing when a dev decides to start their own project for their own reasons or because some number of people have basically commissioned them to do so. But when you have a democratic design project and a person decides to go for head dev then the motivations are vastly different and generally based more on political control than on communal interests.

Any kind of attempt at this kind of project immediately requires a cut of a certain percentage of the possible participants. I'll refer to this as the Nazi Inclusion problem. If you try to include literally everyone and cater to all possible content desires then invariably the Nazis move in and take over and promote the extreme content that they want to the exclusion and alienation of everyone else. Before long you have typically less than a dozen people that control the whole thing and everyone else has fled or be chased out. This kind of problem effects forums, clubs, bars, political parties, parties, festivals, conventions, and many other kinds of social organizations, functions, or networks.

Which means the earliest policies have to decide in the affirmative who does not get to participate simply on the basis of trying to ensure the largest possible compatible and prosocial congress. For a design and dev project this means outlining in no uncertain terms what content will not be included. Not included at the outset. Never included in the future.

All of which presupposes political processes for generating valid, relevant, and prudent social policy. Which tends to be the bootstrap problem in ad-hoc social organization like large scale group collaboration projects like game design and development.

For a successful development venture of this kind, we're not looking at a single dev team. We're looking at a process of distributing the delegation of tasks and limited political power to specialized volunteer teams with redundancy. We have to plan on most individuals and teams offering their contributions to fail to deliver or fail to deliver in time or fail to deliver with sufficient quality and documentation. The teams can not be strictly linked in hierarchical dependency where one team has to wait on some number of other teams before proceeding; there will be natural systems of dependence which develop in the process, but the organizational structure has to be fluid and adaptive to route around such dependencies in general to keep overall development progressing.

[...] makes it very easily and extensively moddable, to the point where you don't have to have much dev knowledge to mod it, so regular folk can jump in as well. That's about it and that's something I can actually see happening.

This is the correct framework for conceptualizing this kind of design process.

Invariably this kind of organization is going to need to handle money and commissions and contracts and intellectual property rights. This is where we encounter some of the most difficult organizational problems to resolve. And this is where a bunch of people will be attracted to the organization and positions of privilege where they are likely to abuse the trust of the organized people. Some entity/entities has/have to handle the bank accounts, revenue, tax obligations, and legal liabilities in some jurisdictions. There are crowdfunding and crowdsourcing models for this kind of distributed incorporation.

Now, I still believe it is possible, and I firmly believe that if it is to be possible to do a community project, there has to be one person who basically does 95% of the work [...]
However, in my case, I wasn't having any fun with the project (I think I lasted 3 or so months and then just stopped). A lot of the things I felt I could do myself much faster and at a higher quality.

This can not be the case for the reasons cited. This is another form of single point failure. It results in highly predictable burnout for the single person relied upon and is highly stressful to the point of breaking the system of development. It also results in significant failures of delegation of tasks such that either there are absences of needed developments or it results in a failure to sort and organize the delegation of tasks as appropriate to the stages of development.

Saki_Sliz has the right kind of broad idea, but the issue is mixing concept design stage parts into a finish stage development. We need to sort the contributions according to their qualities. Art done in "Crayon and a poor photo" would obviously and generally not be useful for a finished piece of art but can be useful for developing a concept through delegation to dedicated artists that can take the concept and turn it into a more finished draft for production artists. (See also

You must be registered to see the links

)

Something really common in these kinds of proposed projects is the lack of documentation. Triple-A game development practically requires several layers of development process documentation of all scopes and scales of the typically corporate organization. At the least a game design needs the Game Design Document. Often for practical purposes the Game Design Document is just one part of the overall Business Plan, Budget, and possibly the Articles of Incorporation.

Game design documents are something that are not consistently used or taught in my experience. They are analogous to the documentation used for creating movies. You have cinematic scripts which depict how the cameras should shoot the scenes. You have actor's scripts which include the dialogue and cues for the actors playing the characters. You have the screenplay which generally describes the overarching views of the story. You have the storyboard which is a comic-like depiction of the sequence of events in interchangeable concept art frames. You have technical scripts which document what technologies are needed to realize the different scenes including specifications for various tools like cameras and harnesses or green screen work.

Pre-production of a game development is generally a much larger part of game design than most people are aware of. In large part because almost all of what is developed in the pre-production stage is never seen by the majority of people including almost everyone in the credits of the movie. This does not make the work that is done during that stage any less important because it makes or breaks the production. Pre-production concept design work ends up deciding whether or not actors break a leg on stage or not. Whether there is a stage or not. Whether the mechanisms for stunts and special effects are properly designed and tested or not. Whether you have scripts or not. Most projects fail at or before this stage.

So first step in a community game design (one might refer to this as a unionized game design) is documentation and pre-production work. The pre-production work is the test for the viability of the project. Significant failures at that stage should result in the project being aborted before significant investment or buy-in has occurred and before people are likely to get stuck in sunk cost fallacies. It is preferable to

You must be registered to see the links

.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

agreed, currently trying an approach of just documenting and roughing out prototypes of different game mechanics, documenting them, but not actually building a game. Just kind of making lego pieces, so that in the future after there are enough lego bricks, an idea could be suggested for a project, and the fundamental proto mechanics are there. But now it's just an issue of trying to reduce notes down to something more friendly (instead of a 14 page wall of text and diagrams). You brought up the fail early fail often concept, aka avoid building in a vacuum, and the basic way to do that is talk and share ideas with others, but still I feel like I fail to deliver my point and worry sometimes having working demos is the best option, but then those take time.

 

[DaClown]

agreed, currently trying an approach of just documenting and roughing out prototypes of different game mechanics, documenting them, but not actually building a game. Just kind of making lego pieces, so that in the future after there are enough lego bricks, an idea could be suggested for a project, and the fundamental proto mechanics are there. But now it's just an issue of trying to reduce notes down to something more friendly (instead of a 14 page wall of text and diagrams). You brought up the fail early fail often concept, aka avoid building in a vacuum, and the basic way to do that is talk and share ideas with others, but still I feel like I fail to deliver my point and worry sometimes having working demos is the best option, but then those take time.

Working demos are not the start of a game design process but actually very very far into the production stage of development. A rushed demo is worse in a lot of ways than no demo at all especially if you're doing a Patreon-like project or a Kickstarter-like project.

A lot of projects that I play test suffer from the

You must be registered to see the links

. The devs make what could politely be called an alpha, but they polish it and optimize it prematurely to rush out a demo that then becomes the actual basis of their "finished/complete" game.

Way back when CoC was Unnamed Text Game, I warned Fenoxo that he would need to implement a formal model for his paper dolls to keep transformation effects consistently extensible and manageable into the future. He chose at that time not to stating that it wasn't that big of a deal and he already had all these systems developed to handle it, so it wasn't that much work to keep adding things. CoC was ultimately abandoned because the root system that he developed was unable to handle the library of character transformations that got coded in and the text generation/parsing that was required to make the game react sensibly to unusual or even moderately common but unsupported player anatomies; the development cost of refactoring the code after having been arbitrarily patched for a couple of years became so overwhelmingly massive that starting a new engine was cheaper and easier than fixing the mess he created when it was Unnamed Text Game and got rushed to become CoC. TITS resulted from the programming, community management, and project management lessons he learned in the development of CoC.

A bunch of these Patreon-like games would be better served by creating rapid prototypes and alphas for play testing and parallel development rather than "

You must be registered to see the links

". Not enough devs learned from the Civilization Series or from the Doom to Quake to Half-Life to Team Fortress community development graph. Which is to say iterative or parallel or mod-based development; the Civ series has been highly successful and the game development studio relatively stable because they keep republishing the same basic game but they keep re-engineering the same basic game engine and refining the game mechanics. The history of the modding communities from Doom to Steam is well worth learning about as well.

Waiting on a workable demo to be developed before progressing on community design is generally a death knell to a community developed game. This is also one of the reasons that such projects should not pivot around a single person or a single team's development; it means that any time that that person or those teams have to complete a task or a production then the generally much larger body of contributors has to halt and wait which is frustrating, boring, and wasteful of the creative inputs of those people. Better to have messy scribbles and half implemented ideas than to wait for a well-polished demo to develop without the myriad of throw-away prototypes.



Every game development involves constructing or aggregating libraries of assets and tools. Most of these libraries we never see or get access to because they are internal to the developers, and we only see what they deem to be acceptable for "finished" publication. For a community game development project, this kind of internalized secrecy is generally detrimental to any kind of distributed collaboration, so open transparent libraries are generally necessary for games created from the commons for the commons by the commons. However, the creation of vast swathes of middle ware is not sufficient; almost all assets and technologies for game development are designed for specified purposes; it is not generally possible to make an arbitrary number of abstracted assets and technologies and just fashion that into a game design or model.

Deciding and communicating common purpose is one of the major purposes of the

You must be registered to see the links

or the Standard Reference or the

You must be registered to see the links

. This focuses efforts from library making without purpose or objective to some set of constrained developments; they function as constraints for

You must be registered to see the links

or

You must be registered to see the links

or

You must be registered to see the links

or

You must be registered to see the links

. This is important to mitigate the adverse effects of the

You must be registered to see the links

Most problems that can be expressed in formal languages like programming languages can not generally be solved or satisfied in those same programming languages; they are either

You must be registered to see the links

or

You must be registered to see the links

. Also, tool development in absence of definite constraints will generally be divergent rather than convergent; it is unlikely for a library of abstractions to converge "spontaneously" into an assembled workable game.



I think one of the other underappreciated aspects of game design is the different between generative design and development processes vs editorial design and development processes. Generative design is very much "Yes, and..."; it is important for general criticism to be absent during such processes and for almost all ideas to be documented at the time of generation; you want close to a pure additive process within relatively open constraints. Editorial design is where people need to get critical and start applying closed constraints on bodies of previously-generated designs; this is where you start subtracting out things to try and reduce from

You must be registered to see the links

or from feasible to practical and actual. A lot of patreon-like games development projects are more generative design than editorial design such that they build and build and build upon unfinished or infeasible concepts till they catastrophically collapse.

These distinctly different processes are particularly challenging in community collaboration projects where generative design is significantly harmed by criticism or misapplication of the editorial design and editorial design is critically harmed by the absence of material to edit.

Finally, I think there are significant problems in the need to educate communities about actual design, development, testing, quantification, play testing, engineering, documentation, editing, organizing, and contracting practices and operations; this is related to people thinking just because they like eating bread that they're going to enjoy making bread or farming the materials to make bread. Any community collaboration for a game development project is going to be mostly educating people on what it actually means to participate in such a collaboration; it requires that there is widespread acceptance that the vast majority of people will contribute very little, won't contribute at all, or will drop out sometime after they learn through experience and experiment what is actually entailed by game design practices.

 

[Praisejesus]

A collab game is simple enough

Pick an engine create requirements and setup framework that allows creation of multiple stand alone stories

Engine: RPGmaker MV would be best suited for collab efforts, takes very little time to setup and create and link independent stories, once the main core of the game is built you just upload the project files and outline how people submit content.

art style: would most likely have to be 3D either through daz3D or blender


Example?... quick mock up of a game design, that would allow multiple people to contribute

Spoiler: Example Game

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

Anyone who wants to join picks a character who isn’t in current production, puts in a requests to join the dev team and submit example renders and a basic story layout for that character

 

[DuniX]

You still pretty much need one guy running and making the whole thing with or without the community.

It's just a question of being Open to Contributions by making things easy to add Community made Content.
You could also make things open source and accept patches and over time more programmers can be integrated.

 

[DaClown]

A collab game is simple enough

Pick an engine create requirements and setup framework that allows creation of multiple stand alone stories

Engine: RPGmaker MV would be best suited for collab efforts, takes very little time to setup and create and link independent stories, once the main core of the game is built you just upload the project files and outline how people submit content.

art style: would most likely have to be 3D either through daz3D or blender


Example?... quick mock up of a game design, that would allow multiple people to contribute

Spoiler: Example Game

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

Anyone who wants to join picks a character who isn’t in current production, puts in a requests to join the dev team and submit example renders and a basic story layout for that character

What you're talking about there involves a lot of simplifying assumptions about what is meant by "collab game". You've posited that someone makes arbitrary foundational choices about what everyone will be using for the rest of the project.

Then you set some standards for an art style and dictated some tools that would be used without any feedback from potentially contributing artists.

Your mock up immediately sets forth a number of content requirements which may or may not be of interest or acceptable quality or standards of people. It treads a thin-line of being an IP violation of the Pokemon series which may or may not open

You must be registered to see the links

. Involves characters that are canonically underage in virtually all legal jurisdictions and would be illegal to pictorially or graphically represent in US publication. This makes any possible commercialization of the project for the benefit of any of the contributors difficult to impossible and

You must be registered to see the links

.

Capped it off with the assumption that people making art that takes real time, work, and education would contribute that art without any agreements or legally binding contracts to protect them or their intellectual property or to fairly remunerate them from their contributions. Or that would protect the project from arbitrary withdrawal of critical assets by contributors like what

You must be registered to see the links

.

So we have someone that takes charge of what is supposed to be a community effort. Appoints themselves the effective executive of the project, head game designer, and art director.

It's a kind of a collaborative game development project but not one I would contribute to or participate in. Maybe that's a selling point for some people. Maybe not.

 

[barronsat]

Hey all, thanks for the replies and discussion! Lots of good info here.

Reading through the examples of past failed attempts, I definitely agree with the hurdles that this type of initiation (or really any game being developed faces) would face. Based off of that, I think the key to making something like this work is to - something that DaClown mentions - focus on pre-production first before committing resources to the game engine and art creation aspects of it.

I totally agree that pre-production is an often overlooked aspect of projects. Coming from working in the movie industry, it's something I'm familiar with and very much respect how difficult but important it is. So I think that might be the first step:

See if we have enough interested people to form some type of base team. Then break into a pre-production phase where we essentially map out the entire theoretical timeline of development. And make key decisions via voting and discussion from the START, rather than running into arguments later.

For things such as art style, types of content, types of gameplay, etc. Basically hash out any potential questions that could lead into disagreements later at the start and to document it all down first so that we agree to the plan from the start. Figure out a road map that would bring us to somewhat of a completed game, before anyone commits time into development and thus burns themselves out or gets bored over time.

Praisejesus, your method of a collab game is helpful too. I think this would be incorporated into the pre-production phase so that the core team is in agreement of all the main factors first.

Saki_Sliz , since you mentioned you've tried something like this in the past (but also DaClown, Praisejesus, or anyone else reading of course) would you be interested in perhaps forming a starting team here and try to figure out a plan for a test "level"? I say level specifically so that it's not even a full game at this point, just a single level to test the process.

This doesn't mean any type of commitment at all at this stage - again, the plan is to see how things fare in a sort of casual pre-production phase first. Perhaps a shared Google Doc to kick things off. So anyone is free to join or leave it at this point, open to ideas while in the planning stage.

 

[Praisejesus]

View attachment 816781

What you're talking about there involves a lot of simplifying assumptions about what is meant by "collab game". You've posited that someone makes arbitrary foundational choices about what everyone will be using for the rest of the project.

Then you set some standards for an art style and dictated some tools that would be used without any feedback from potentially contributing artists.

Your mock up immediately sets forth a number of content requirements which may or may not be of interest or acceptable quality or standards of people. It treads a thin-line of being an IP violation of the Pokemon series. Involves characters that are canonically underage in virtually all legal jurisdictions and would be illegal to pictorially or graphically represent in US publication. This makes any possible commercialization of the project for the benefit of any of the contributors difficult to impossible and

You must be registered to see the links

.

Capped it off with the assumption that people making art that takes real time, work, and education would contribute that art without any agreements or legally binding contracts to protect them or their intellectual property or to fairly remunerate them from their contributions. Or that would protect the project from arbitrary withdrawal of critical assets by contributors like what

You must be registered to see the links

.

So we have someone that takes charge of what is supposed to be a community effort. Appoints themselves the effective executive of the project, head game designer, and art director.

It's a kind of a collaborative game development project but not one I would contribute to or participate in. Maybe that's a selling point for some people. Maybe not.

You are on a forum that primarily hosts pirated games created with RenPy and RPGmaker, most of which is rendered in Daz3D.

Most fan art on this forum, once again is created in…. Daz3D

So no I just happened to post the most common example that most people on this forum can contribute with and understand.

Two thirds of this website is an “IP violation”, and last I checked breeding season contains bestiality

Who says a collab project is out to make money? Who says this project should mimic a multimillion dollar game studio? Once money is involved things become a nightmare.

IF a project comes off the ground, the framework will dictate the art style and function of the game.

My example was just that, an example!

A project built using that engine would take less then a week to build a prototype

Multiple contributing developers can come and go as they please, complete the story you want to tell then you are done, consider it like creating your own little DLC.


What example do you suggest then? What engine? 2D? 3D? pixel? The point of this discussion is to explore the idea of what a collab game may look like.

 

[mickydoo]

The arguments have started already just talking about, imagine the shit fight when it gets started.......

Let's say I wanted to contribute (which I don't)

I don't like RPGmaker someone else does.
I'd rather walk through hell than use Blender, someone else loves it.
I make a hot babe, that's to my taste, someone else hates her.
I don't like NTR........

And
She wouldn't say that there.....
Put bestiality in, the main writer leaves.
Don't put it in, artist fuck offs.
Put incest in, don't put it in. I don't mind fucking my sister but not my mother


I could go on but you see the point.

 

[DaClown]

You are on a forum that primarily hosts pirated games created with RenPy and RPGmaker, most of which is rendered in Daz3D.

Most fan art on this forum, once again is created in…. Daz3D

So no I just happened to post the most common example that most people on this forum can contribute with and understand.

Two thirds of this website is an “IP violation”, and last I checked breeding season contains bestiality

Who says a collab project is out to make money? Who says this project should mimic a multimillion dollar game studio? Once money is involved things become a nightmare.

IF a project comes off the ground, the framework will dictate the art style and function of the game.

My example was just that, an example!

A project built using that engine would take less then a week to build a prototype

Multiple contributing developers can come and go as they please, complete the story you want to tell then you are done, consider it like creating your own little DLC.


What example do you suggest then? What engine? 2D? 3D? pixel? The point of this discussion is to explore the idea of what a collab game may look like.

As I laid out in my above very lengthy posts, if you're asking those questions then you've skipped over the pre-production organization and you've already committed to a model that is going to hurt people and likely end in Breeding Season, the million dollar Homestuck game that was never made but which was paid for, DashCon, or FyreFestival levels of catastrophe.

I personally could recommend a variety of tools and engines and methods specific to a target media for game development. I don't presume however to be any kind of lead in any such project or to dictate the terms and conditions of those projects or participation in them. And I am agnositic to what technology to recommend without knowing what values or objectives are proposed to be implemented, by what structures or systems or people, and with what implicit biases and prejudices.

I generally prefer for my own projects to do paper prototyping and extensive play testing long before I ever even start to work on figuring out what specific programming languages, operating systems, game engines, or production tools that would be needed or ideal for implementing my concepts in a video game. Every time I approach those problems it becomes really quickly evident that the bigger problem is making sure that I can commission the appropriately skilled and passionately interested people for domain-specific task completion for asset production or software engineering.

Making a hobby toy game that is of questionable or bad quality is exceedingly easy. When you know what you're making and have adequate documentation for implementation, the programming of a video game is just following a couple million step recipe and a ton of data entry. The problem is invariably that the more limited the labor pool for a project the lower the diversity of the skills involved. Any project that drops below a certain threshold of diverse laborers can have only limited success in general.

A one person dev team still requires a publisher, distributor, business people like accountants and lawyers, and literally thousands of people working to bring their production to an appropriate audience.

So many of the projects here simply pirate or fair-use assets created by other people because while coding is easy artists are always in short supply and rarely properly renumerated for their efforts. Everyone's got to eat. Everyone's got to pay the bills. Everyone wants to get paid but no one wants to pay people what they're worth.

The organizational questions of preproduction are non-trivial and have profound consequences whether it is for profit commercial production, not-for-profit, charitable, or otherwise unclassified. If you jump straight into a project without clarifying what people are qualified to act in what roles or who has permissions to view or alter or delete what then you're courting disaster. If a single person presumes to dictate those protocols and policies and the implicit or explicit organization then that person has already made a major presumptive mistake.

Ian Malcolm principle deeply applies.

The arguments have started already just talking about, imagine the shit fight when it gets started.......

Let's say I wanted to contribute (which I don't)

I don't like RPGmaker someone else does.
I'd rather walk through hell than use Blender, someone else loves it.
I make a hot babe, that's to my taste, someone else hates her.
I don't like NTR........

And
She wouldn't say that there.....
Put bestiality in, the main writer leaves.
Don't put it in, artist fuck offs.
Put incest in, don't put it in. I don't mind fucking my sister but not my mother


I could go on but you see the point.

Mickydoo here understands the nature of the problem.

The problem isn't in figuring out what engine to use or what programming language is best or what art tools to use; all of that is relatively speaking easy. The problem is first and foremost interpersonal, social, networked, and communicative. There's a whole field of study about this kind of problem.

Who or what owns or holds the intellectual property in trust? What liabilities do people incur by participating in the project or adjacent projects? If it is non-commercial how is that codified with legally binding consequences? If the product that the project produces is quasi-legal or illegal in fact then how can the non-commercial codification be legally binding? If the product can not be legally bound and it can be commercially exploited (even if only in the dark web or in underworld markets) then is not the promise that it is non-commercial a con?

 

[Praisejesus]

The arguments have started already just talking about, imagine the shit fight when it gets started.......

Let's say I wanted to contribute (which I don't)

I don't like RPGmaker someone else does.
I'd rather walk through hell than use Blender, someone else loves it.
I make a hot babe, that's to my taste, someone else hates her.
I don't like NTR........

And
She wouldn't say that there.....
Put bestiality in, the main writer leaves.
Don't put it in, artist fuck offs.
Put incest in, don't put it in. I don't mind fucking my sister but not my mother


I could go on but you see the point.

As I laid out in my above very lengthy posts, if you're asking those questions then you've skipped over the pre-production organization and you've already committed to a model that is going to hurt people and likely end in Breeding Season, the million dollar Homestuck game that was never made but which was paid for, DashCon, or FyreFestival levels of catastrophe.

I personally could recommend a variety of tools and engines and methods specific to a target media for game development. I don't presume however to be any kind of lead in any such project or to dictate the terms and conditions of those projects or participation in them. And I am agnositic to what technology to recommend without knowing what values or objectives are proposed to be implemented, by what structures or systems or people, and with what implicit biases and prejudices.

I generally prefer for my own projects to do paper prototyping and extensive play testing long before I ever even start to work on figuring out what specific programming languages, operating systems, game engines, or production tools that would be needed or ideal for implementing my concepts in a video game. Every time I approach those problems it becomes really quickly evident that the bigger problem is making sure that I can commission the appropriately skilled and passionately interested people for domain-specific task completion for asset production or software engineering.

Making a hobby toy game that is of questionable or bad quality is exceedingly easy. When you know what you're making and have adequate documentation for implementation, the programming of a video game is just following a couple million step recipe and a ton of data entry. The problem is invariably that the more limited the labor pool for a project the lower the diversity of the skills involved. Any project that drops below a certain threshold of diverse laborers can have only limited success in general.

A one person dev team still requires a publisher, distributor, business people like accountants and lawyers, and literally thousands of people working to bring their production to an appropriate audience.

So many of the projects here simply pirate or fair-use assets created by other people because while coding is easy artists are always in short supply and rarely properly renumerated for their efforts. Everyone's got to eat. Everyone's got to pay the bills. Everyone wants to get paid but no one wants to pay people what they're worth.

The organizational questions of preproduction are non-trivial and have profound consequences whether it is for profit commercial production, not-for-profit, charitable, or otherwise unclassified. If you jump straight into a project without clarifying what people are qualified to act in what roles or who has permissions to view or alter or delete what then you're courting disaster. If a single person presumes to dictate those protocols and policies and the implicit or explicit organization then that person has already made a major presumptive mistake.

Ian Malcolm principle deeply applies.

View attachment 817034


Mickydoo here understands the nature of the problem.

The problem isn't in figuring out what engine to use or what programming language is best or what art tools to use; all of that is relatively speaking easy. The problem is first and foremost interpersonal, social, networked, and communicative. There's a whole field of study about this kind of problem.

Who or what owns or holds the intellectual property in trust? What liabilities do people incur by participating in the project or adjacent projects? If it is non-commercial how is that codified with legally binding consequences? If the product that the project produces is quasi-legal or illegal in fact then how can the non-commercial codification be legally binding? If the product can not be legally bound and it can be commercially exploited (even if only in the dark web or in underworld markets) then is not the promise that it is non-commercial a con?

so no engine? No art style? No examples?

Want to hurt the least amount of people...

Alright new concept, kept the tag line though, it fits nicely


Engine: RenPY

Art Style: Daz3D gen3 or gen8

Story outline: you are some generic middle aged white guy or girl, you fuck people, basicly being a DIK 2.0

Genre: dating sim, vanilla sex

Spoiler: Preview

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

Key features: 0 coding, submit your artwork and story outline minimum 15 renders.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Working demos are not the start of a game design process but actually very very far into the production stage of development.

I'm talking MVP (Minimum Viable Product), such as if I want to make a gambling AI, I'll write it in python, run 10 million simulations, graph the results and see if the results match expectations. No user interface or testing if playing feels good or not. Note, python's default RNG is absolute garbage! Considering how often I've worked with game projects over the past 13 years in both personal and academic settings, I am fairly familiar with all the points you're making. I think I remember writing a similar wall of text nearly 7 years ago when I found this community. Forgive me for not making a more detailed reply to your well-written comments. I don't mean to devalue what you have to say, I think it is a great collection of notes and references, and I can tell you've been around the community for some time since your familiar with issues such as what happened with breeding season. Just right now I don't want to get caught up in writing a well-crafted wall of text because these comments sizes are already intimidating for anyone new who wants to jump in, and I have to leave to go to work soon.

@Saki_Sliz , since you mentioned you've tried something like this in the past (but also DaClown, Praisejesus, or anyone else reading of course) would you be interested in perhaps forming a starting team here and try to figure out a plan for a test "level"? I say level specifically so that it's not even a full game at this point, just a single level to test the process.

While I don't want to sound like a downer, I also don't want to give false hope.

As it is now, I hardly spend more than 6 or so hours a week derping around with game making and art. Of course, I have more free time than that, but I mostly spend it either sleeping or messing around with other stuff (friends, family, youtube 90% of the time). I've already gone through that phase in my life where I work really hard for my passion projects, working late nights, starting new projects but only never to finish them and instead starting on the next cool idea that catches my attention. I started to feel terrible. I would have a week or 2 of great progress, new code, features, engines, art, etc. but then after that things start to feel wrong. Naturally, the process of creation is slow, it was less fun and cool, and felt more like work or a job but I still wouldn't have much to show (aka dark work), so I couldn't get others interested either to keep myself motivated.

Then there was the perfectionist issues, wanting to share things to help keep myself motivated, but nothing was good enough to share. Then there comes the questions of your own self worth, the practicality of the project, etc. So one takes a break to try not to burn out, to come to it later. I never mastered that last part because either I would make new obligations that took priority so things would go on the back burner, or if I did have tho motivation to work, it was because I had a new idea.

So I don't plan to 'work' on any major project. Right now I am taking a new 'casual' approach: where I work on things, but no real long term goals. Just one mechanic or piece at a time. just work on what seems cool at the time. I balance this with doing all the other things that interest me and keep me spiritually satisfied (ie playing online games with friends, a day with the family, build a small robot), and making nsfw games is just one single piece of the whole picture that is me. As cool as game-making can be, I don't think it works to have one aspect of oneself just take over your life.

So you can certainly talk to me, and we could work on stuff every now and then, but this may be a once in a week or 2 type-of-thing (at least at the rate things are going for me), but you probably won't be able to ask me to do something like 'make a simple title screen' and expect it to be done in 2 weeks. But I'll certainly play around and test things out, make test art, etc. as for complete working code or systems, that takes a lot longer.

Want to hurt the least amount of people...

I could write a whole wall of text just on that idea. Trying to make something for everyone is probably the most damaging thing I think can happen to a project, in terms of the final quality of the project, the amount of work needed, etc.

 

[Deleted member 1536527]

Saki_Sliz Just out of pure curiosity. What's your background? (education-wise and profession-wise), and if you don't mind me asking, how old are you? I've seen you around here a lot and you seem to have often very good insights.

 

[DaClown]

I'm talking MVP (Minimum Viable Product), such as if I want to make a gambling AI, I'll write it in python, run 10 million simulations, graph the results and see if the results match expectations. No user interface or testing if playing feels good or not. [...] I think I remember writing a similar wall of text nearly 7 years ago when I found this community. Forgive me for not making a more detailed reply to your well-written comments. [...]

Naturally, the process of creation is slow, it was less fun and cool, and felt more like work or a job but I still wouldn't have much to show (aka dark work), so I couldn't get others interested either to keep myself motivated.

[...]

So I don't plan to 'work' on any major project. Right now I am taking a new 'casual' approach: where I work on things, but no real long term goals. Just one mechanic or piece at a time. just work on what seems cool at the time. I balance this with doing all the other things that interest me and keep me spiritually satisfied (ie playing online games with friends, a day with the family, build a small robot), and making nsfw games is just one single piece of the whole picture that is me. As cool as game-making can be, I don't think it works to have one aspect of oneself just take over your life.

So you can certainly talk to me, and we could work on stuff every now and then, but this may be a once in a week or 2 type-of-thing (at least at the rate things are going for me), but you probably won't be able to ask me to do something like 'make a simple title screen' and expect it to be done in 2 weeks. But I'll certainly play around and test things out, make test art, etc. as for complete working code or systems, that takes a lot longer.


I could write a whole wall of text just on that idea. Trying to make something for everyone is probably the most damaging thing I think can happen to a project, in terms of the final quality of the project, the amount of work needed, etc.

You do you. All of that is healthy boundaries. I support people taking care of themselves. No forgiveness needed. No apologies required. We understand each other. What follows is addressed to everyone else.



The fact that game design and development is not generally speaking "fun" in the way that playing games can be "fun" is important to understand. One of my big points can be surmised as "game design and development is a lot of work". It is important I think to be upfront about that and other expectations and requirements of any potential project.

Game design and development is often framed as a frenetic race and everyone has to be 100% invested or not at all. But even minor video game projects take significant amounts of time and effort. Months or years. Well organized, educated, equipped, and practiced game development teams can produce a finished and polished game in something like 3 to 5 years. Many game projects are closer to a decade in the making when all work on them is taken into consideration including the work that went into them before they were ever announced or made part of a corporate or union or academic or hobby culture.

Supporting game devs generally means helping them to sustainably work. This means keeping them housed, fed, watered, medically and socially cared for. Game design and development is an arduous endurance trial. The frenetic race framing of game design and development sets everyone up for burnout, crunch-time, and a lot of failures or escalated costs.

Community-driven projects that are successful are not about including literally everyone or all preferences. They can't and shouldn't be structured like traditional corporate teams especially if no one is getting paid and no profit is expected or allowed from the project. People have entire lives outside of this, and realistically, you're going to get maybe 1 good contribution from each person that volunteers, and it will be entirely on their terms, and it won't necessarily be what you asked for or thought you needed. The project will over the course of 5 to 10 years change hands; there absolutely will not be the same people managing or working on the project at the end of the decade as started it at the beginning.

Which reminds me of a thing. The people who are apt to start projects are not the same people who should produce the project or finish the project. This is a well documented thing in corporate culture. The person or people who start a venture do not generally have the appropriate skills for day to day operation of the resulting corporation or productions. Vice versa. It is possible for operations people to start a venture, but it is a very different skill set and often results in failure.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Saki_Sliz Just out of pure curiosity. What's your background? (education-wise and profession-wise), and if you don't mind me asking, how old are you? I've seen you around here a lot and you seem to have often very good insights.

Why thank you!

I'm actually only 25. To save you from hearing my life story, basically 13 years ago I gained a superpower, and could suddenly build and design circuits and code physics simulation and virtual robots. Soon after I started making video games as well as studying human psychology. I am one of the few who can say, I got a college degree (electronics technician) before I got my high school diploma. Just this summer, I finished my second university (B.S. Electrical Engineering), but along with that I explored learning how to art, joined the nsfw community, did more on understanding human psychology and my own personal spirituality. I consider electrical engineering the center of my universe, my first true love, but I explored many other things, being part of game making teams and classes at my local university, starting and running a robot competition team at my high school, teaching students how to code (highschool and university), and trying to be the best at everything I could (including non-technical stuff such as being able to relate to people and clear communication skills), getting into buisness and helping with startups as the technical lead. Most of my background is just education since I'm fairly young, being poor meant most of my profession was regular blue-collar hard work, quarantine is a terrible time to finish college and look for a job, so now I work at lowe's in their electrical department as a sales associate, nothing fancy. Most of my experience is just from doing things myself on my own projects, not from work per-say. If you think I have good insight, it is probably just because I tried to talk with people a lot, try to learn how everyone lives their lives, tried out everything I could, different lifestyles for example. I can hardly believe what the past 13 years have been like. I could probably off myself now and die happy, but I'm excited to see how far I can go in this lifetime yet to be had.

You do you. All of that is healthy boundaries. I support people taking care of themselves. No forgiveness needed. No apologies required. We understand each other.

Thanks and glad to hear. Sorry, I just noticed your account is new, welcome to the community! Where none of us knows a damn thing, but we like to think we do and try to help out. I found the nsfw dev community to be one of the most supportive community I've ever found! If you stick around, you'll probably meet some of the other regular users, from the Daz users to the RenPy users, I might even be able to make a list now that I think about it...

Which reminds me of a thing. The people who are apt to start projects are not the same people who should produce the project or finish the project. This is a well documented thing in corporate culture. The person or people who start a venture do not generally have the appropriate skills for day to day operation of the resulting corporation or productions. Vice versa. It is possible for operations people to start a venture, but it is a very different skill set and often results in failure.

I've vaguely heard something about this before, but I don't actually know much about the topic, but it sounds interesting!