So due to a over active imagination I end up coming up with game ideas but I don’t have the skill or time to gain said skills (let alone the attention span damn ADHD) and am wondering would it be possible to but said idea up for others who you know actually CAN make a game from it? Of course they would be free to add thing and take the main credit (a small nod in like the end credits would be nice but not maditory) and or course they get any profits they game might make from like Patron or whatever
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I think the Game Design Discussion board would likely be the best for theoretical games that only consist of descriptions of mechanics. I’ve tossed a couple concepts over there a while ago.
Be warned, though; it is highly unlikely for a programmer to simply pick up another person’s idea. I suppose there shouldn’t be any harm in posing theoretical concepts for discussion of design philosophy, though.
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ok thanks and I don’t EXPECT some one to pick it up. I do Hope it could happen but its mostly the chat and share and just hope someone with way more skill then me could make something off what I end up coming up with
Yeah, that’s probably better. I forgot that existed.
something else I wanted to ask. this was Idea two for making games. Could I at some point when I actully have money for it commision a game to be made?
While nothing’s impossible, I will say, again, it is very unlikely. I’ve only ever seen one person offer “game commissions,” and even then, that was only for Game Maker 8 projects way back when.
Even presuming all you want is a bog-standard platformer, there’s still quite a bit of work that goes into making a game. Not only do you have to program game logic, you also have to create art assets for everything in the game as well as sound assets. You have to do level design and account for gamefeel, and then you have to playtest and make sure there aren’t any bugs. It’s a lot of different skillsets for a single person to have, and presumably, you could only hire one person to do it.
THEORETICALLY, you could commission all of the assets your hypothetical programmer would need, I suppose, but prepare for an enormous moneysink, not to mention timesink. Plus, they’d be freelancers, which would be basically impossible to coordinate with each-other; unless you only tapped one artist for visual or audio assets, the disparate mess of assets you commissioned wouldn’t look good together. And that’s assuming that you got the artist’s permission to use their work in a project like this. It shouldn’t be hard to find an artist to create a set of foliage sprites and a matching level background for you, given enough money; it’ll likely be a hundred times harder for you to find one that’s okay with their art being put into a fetish game.
It’s not impossible. It’s just expensive… And unlikely. It COULD work; it’s just that I’ve literally never seen it for a project that would come out of a place like this.
Jerkajerk also did commissions for Quest games a while ago. Something along those lines might be a bit more viable.
I have to disagree with @KaptainKQ on this. If you where willing to put up the funds you would have an easier time finding a team to work on a game for you and people are ok with some one being the “idea” person if they are also paying. Its usually when you get an idea person that only wants to be the idea person and contributes nothing else do you see really no one take them up on it.
@Dr-Black-Jack actually does this kind of thing a lot, usually with a small group of investors, to make his games; funding them out of pocket while also providing the writing and project management.
That all being said @KaptainKQ is right that it could get expensive though. In general the cost will depend greatly on the type of game, how complex it is, and other factors like art quality, animations, 2D vs 3D, ect.
To give you an idea on costs if you want an artist full time you will probably be looking at around $20/hr and I have been quoted $15/hr for part time work. Programmers are even more expensive with most contract programmers ranging from between $50-$100 an hour though programmers tend to be more likely to help out on projects for free or cheap than artists, in my experience, if they like the concept. Animators will sometimes charge per frame which I have been quoted in the past of anywhere between $8-$16 a frame which can add up fast considering a simple 3 frame waking animation with a standard N/S/E/W direction (assuming you can not flip the E/W directions) would be anywhere between $96-$192, and then if we say there needs to be 3 sizes that would increase to ~$300-$600 just for that one character. And then there are other skills like sound design, writing, project management, ect.
If you are clever and smart you can find ways to reduce or cut these costs but making games can be very expensive. One thing I would suggest if you really want to consider funding a project is:
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Look for an existing projects that you like and see if you can throw some funding their way. Even a bit can help the devs a lot.
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Try to pool with other investors. This actually is a bit more common then you may think where many people will pool funds to fund a project instead of just trying to fund it all themselves. A few projects we have given dev grants to have actually had between 3-5 investors also helping to fund the project. Willing to risk your own money on and idea usually builds confidence in the project, but you need to be ready to have to spend more upfront if you want to spear head it to build that confidence enough to draw more investors.
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Be smart with how you spend your money. There are many ways you can cut costs if you look for them and it is really about being able to work within your constraints. Identify early the minim of what your game would need and focus your funds around that, and if it is still too expensive try to spread the costs over a longer period (commission work is better for this than just straight contracting even if more unpredictable) or be ready to pivot.
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my core Ideas of like art is. well mostly text based games with “busts” for characters similar to Trials in tainted space by Fenoxo. and a lot of the ideas I do have are mostly rpg managment games with “expaditions” that are a bit liner.
I’m not entirely sure if you are just talking about the style of TiTS, or the scope. Thankfully it’s open source so we can look at what has been going on. It started development in October 2013, Fenoxo has been working on it essentially full time for six+ years! Along with the other two main contributors they’ve written (or changed) 1.4 million lines of code/text. That is huge.
Another way to look at the cost of commissioning someone to do a large development like a fully fledged game is this: say you’ve a job and you are earning enough to pay your bills, cover your rent or mortgage, run a car, put food on the table, and have some disposable income. If you now want to have two or three people work for you full-time then you have to cover those costs for them as well. Your earnings have to two or three times more than they were - effectively you have dependants!
Or consider a couple of people pulling 18hr days over two weeks for a game jam (resulting in a sort-of-finished, but incomplete game). If you wanted to pay them $20/hr to do it you are looking somewhere a little north of 10k.
There’s a lot of work involved in going from a four line idea to hundreds of thousands lines of code/text and art. It isn’t in the same ballpark as paying an artist to spend an hour drawing a character, or a writer to write a four page scene. It’s those things many times over, and all the coding to bring it together.
Obviously, I don’t know your circumstances, maybe you will have the kind of money it would take to commission something like that. Maybe you have very detailed ideas about the world, the characters, and how the game would work. I think @grotlover2 has the measure of it though.
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I was mostly Talking Style. a mostly text game with simple busts of characters to give a idea what they look like out side the main that does not get one
I was thinking the games are more Managment games with a rpg style short expaditions.
Seems like every corner of the internet is full of guys who are like
“OMG, you guyz, you know what would be cool??? if we made a game where girls gain weight and they’re like cheerleders and the schools mascot is fat so the school likes the cheerleaders when they get fatter and also theres character customization and furries and then theres a minigame where you get to jiggle the girls bellies while students watch and score the jigles while yoyu feed them different kinds of food and theres diffferent tummy gurgles depending on what you fed them and well get voice actors from twitter to voice the grils for exposure since theyre just internet VAs, you know? ALso theres a cool rpg mode were the cheerleaders go out to fight sexy monsters in the city like persona and they get fat too. wouln’t that be COOL???”
TL;DR:
Idea guys are a dime a dozen, so hypersaturated across the internet that it’s basically a joke at this point.
Most idea guys give out half-baked ideas, or come up with some highly expensive, huge project idea that would take entire dev teams a decade to make.
The only GOOD idea guys are ones that actually come up with in-depth ideas, and have the funds (and people-skills) to build a dev team, or are at least decent longform writers who can come up with the whole storyline, all the dialogue and most/all of the game’s mechanics.
Also, trying to sell your ideas to people who CAN make things from it is a bit of a crapshoot, too, since:
- There’s no way in heck you’d be able to stop them from copying your idea and running off with it.
- 99% of lewd ideas on the internet are hardly unique enough to matter anyway.
- Why pay YOU some of their profits when there’s literally hundreds of thousands of idea guys on the internet who will toss their ideas to the wind for free?
- People don’t usually like to make other people’s dream games, let alone PAY for the chance to do it; most people making lewd games are making their OWN dream game.
- Also if you’re going the “pay me when the game’s finished” route, 99.9% of lewd games never make it past v0.2 anyway.
I think the only way you could feasibly profit off of “selling ideas” is to take it one step further and become a game’s writer.
I don’t think anyone expects to get paid from selling ideas
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I think the whole “ideas guy” thing comes from a want to work on a game, but not contribute programming or assets. Now that can sound like you’re not contributing anything, but there are some things you can do that all fall under the general game design umbrella. Level design, stat balance, overarching structure design, pre-planning, these can all be very useful. A lot of games never get finished due to lack of direction, and the ideas guy can help a lot with that. However, there is the caveat that to be a good ideas guy, you will need to get into the nitty gritty and keep the game as a whole in mind at all times, which can sometimes be more work than the programming or art, depending on the scope of the game. Basically, if the reason you want to be the ideas guy is because you don’t have time to do the other stuff, you won’t be a useful ideas guy.
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well thanks for the last three for making me feel like there is no options
that and I wasn’t planing to Make a profit. I want to look it to making the game in some way purely so people can play it.
its lack of skill not time that is the problem. I can plan it while doing other stuff its actually managing to understand programming that is the problem
If you have a good concept, you really don’t need that much skill. I have zero talent in game design and even less in art, but using Ren’py and Daz studio, I’m creating what seems to be shaping up to be a fairly simple, but half-decent game.
If you’ve time on your hands write down all your ideas. Do some world building, flesh out the characters in your game, write some of the dialogue, make a list of the quests they might go on, the items they might find, think about the rules that govern the game world as though you were writing it for a table top game with dice or something. None of that needs programming skills. You’ll need that stuff whether it’s you or someone else that does the coding.
I’ve no idea where people got the idea you were trying to make money; after all you’ve been asking how you could pay someone to do the coding.
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