Legalizing my Game

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23 comments, last by swiftcoder 12 years, 3 months ago

[quote name='freddyscoming4you' timestamp='1314816516' post='4856005']
I seriously got negged for that? Wow... someone needs to lighten up.

*preps for another neg on this post. weeeee*


OFF TOPIC How do you even give a neg vote now? I didn't think it was possible. I thought we adopted the 'like' culture.

ON TOPIC I'm not involved in your project and dont know the finer details. However, as an outsider, it feels like you are trying to screwing your colleagues over somewhat. It looks like you have outsourced the work you couldn't undertake yourself and now you want to reap the majority of the benefits and pass on as little as possible to the other contributers. I don't mean to sound like an ass but I think everyone should be fairly compensated. You don't mention any percentages so could I be completely off the mark but saying "[color="#1C2837"]I want to make sure that when I sell this game, all the profits will go to me, then I will pay my 'team' according to their effort" sounds like you will be taking the vast majority. I think you should show more respect to the rest of the team and hopefully you will work on more projects in the future :)

I must also add, congrats on taking a project this far though :)
[/quote]

Well I am not trying to screw them over at all. It just that, I started the team, started making the game by myself. Got a domain name and hosting service then realized that I don't have time to learn web development so I "Hired" a web developer. He is basically doing one job for me, he wasn't in this on the start, he joined just to do the website. And secondly, I am not trying to cheat the other programmer out of anything. I value all the work he has done and I am planning on giving him a hefty royalty for this game. And when I said he was the co-owner, I meant I wanted to hire him as kinda my right hand man, the guy who is running this company with me and sticking with me. He is even considering coming to the US when he turns 18 and moving near me so that we can work in person. SO trust me, I am not planning on cheating him out.

And thank you for the congrats, I probably could have never gotten the project this far without the help of my other programmer.
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Oh I got another question. Do you guys think I should start a company for this right now OR wait and see how the game does and just sell it as a team with contracts? Because I am planning on being an indie developer in my future and I am not sure if you need your own business for that.
First, sorry for replying to an old thread.

I have some thoughts on this issue that I feel might be good for future readers of this thread even if they are no longer relevant to the OP (as his/her situation has surely changed over the past few months).

For the web developer, you should have two servers: development and production.

The web developer should operate only on the development server.

Only trusted sources (you and anyone else you really trust) should be granted access to the production machine.

This protects you and your customers. It prevents untrusted sources from viewing potentially sensitive databases and making changes that may intentionally (or even accidentally) destroy the production system.

Once development changes have been finalized and tested, and you review them, you can promote the changes to production.

This would solve your issue of "What happens if they change the paypal" because you could see the paypal change and choose not to push the changes to production.

As for the code, there is really no way to prevent someone with access to the code from sharing it with others when working online. There would be more options available if you had your own physical office where greater restrictions could be put in place.

I would recommend using source control (SVN, GIT, or whatever you feel is right for your team) if you haven't already. Only people with a definitive need (IE, the programmers) should be allowed access to the source repository. This will limit access to source code and help prevent the number of people who could potentially defect.

Other than that, the only thing you can do is *deter* potential defectors by having a strong agreement in place which can be executed in court if needed.

edit: also how do you even give negative/thumbs down on a post? All I ever see is "like this"


When your rep is higher you'll be able to downvote posts.
[size="1"]I don't suffer from insanity, I'm enjoying every minute of it.
The voices in my head may not be real, but they have some good ideas!

For the web developer, you should have two servers: development and production.

The web developer should operate only on the development server.

Only trusted sources (you and anyone else you really trust) should be granted access to the production machine.

Speaking as a web developer, the only reason I would be willing to work under such restrictions, is if you were paying me at market rate, and your development/production servers are being managed by a professional sysadmin. Pushing to a production server/database is never as smooth a process as one would like, and it will cost me 5x the time in debugging if I don't have access to the production server.

Further, I think you should all keep in mind that when you are forming a team of what are essentially 'volunteers', trust is a valuable commodity, and you should think very carefully before treading all over it - particularly if you think you may wish to recruit other team members in future.

Tristam MacDonald. Ex-BigTech Software Engineer. Future farmer. [https://trist.am]

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