What I meant was that (from my limited knowledge) the term 'designer' means two different roles, the first being artist 'design' and the other being game/feature 'design'.

If you don't mean artwork, I guess that'd be my role as I have a clear idea of what I'm looking for in terms of features/game-play.

Right now is actually a great time to hire the 20-25 somethings. Lots of people just getting out of college looking for some freelance work to keep them occupied and fed while they work on job applications. Which means that you're looking at people who have never been proven, required to be paid before milestones, and are less prepared than their peers(depending on how late in the school year it actually is). So it's pretty hit or miss.

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As for your questions I need to just say something worth being said for these types of questions. If you don't know where to start you're not ready to, you should start by joining another team.

The bright side about joining a hobby/pre-indy team is that most of them will fail in a short while. Meaning you could go through 5 or 8 in a year, which means you get a lot of chances to learn from other's mistakes AND know the most productive people who are willing to work on hobby/pre-indy teams.

Hey Bud,

I won't make the game for you, but I've been programming for 12+ years and doing hobby game development for that entire time. I know enough about all the aspects about game development to effectively run a small project, which I'm doing now for an indie free community project, but I'd be available to hear out your plan and management thoughts and share my experiences to help make it possibly more successful or at least for you to hear the thoughts of a person who has been working on hobby games for a long time.

I'm very realistic in game development and honest so I'll call a spade a spade and won't sugarcoat anything but in a respectful way.

I have a simple mobile game that I made called "My Whacky Moles" for iOS/Android, which has an article in MacLife this month about gaming for a good cause because I donate a portion of the projects to charity, so I took my hobby game development to the next step and am willing to help/share what I learned if you want.

My tip is hire young people.20-25 years old

I just want to point out that age discrimination in hiring practices is illegal in the US. Just saying.

Thanks for all the responses and for not shooting me down, I realise this is probably a very common question.

After receiving some good advice, I'm going to return to the game design document that I started a while back and go from there.

If you don't know where to start you're not ready to, you should start by joining another team.

Thanks for your reply buddy. I appreciate where you're coming from, however in my defence (and without trying to sound too clever) I have already seen a 'reasonably' successful software (non-game) product from design through to launch and I've been a full-time developer for over 15+ years, plus I've been an avid gamer for over 20 years. This thread is my attempt to seek clarification from those who are more experienced in this industry before I start to seek the skill-sets required.

I don't believe there would be a huge benefit in me joining an existing team, unless there is a team of coders/artists out there without a game to develop. Please do correct me if I'm being naive here?

rpiller - Will send you a message

If you can't see a second of yourself being useful... You have a lot work ahead of yourself to prove your usefulness to a team, especially since you said you didn't want to use monetary incentives.

Game design/production really isn't easier to learn than any dozen of other things you don't want to (programming/art/sound/whatever). If you don't believe me when I was looking at Link pushing a boulder in Windwaker I only noticed 7 things going on, someone I'd call a designer readily pointed out 4 or 5 more (and annoyed me the rest of the night with other things they started to notice about rocks). That's just pushing a boulder, sure it's a core+frequent mechanic but it's still just pushing a silly rock. Essentially argument started from my programmer self declaring designers useless in small teams.