So I've been doing some research and found that building a game obviously can't be done with just one developer, at least a 3D game.
That depends on the game, and the skill of the developers. Many one-programmer games have been made, using procedural or non-photorealistic graphics, so that the need for an artist is reduced.
A recent example would be Antichamber, made almost entirely by Alexander Bruce, and a composer and sound-designer who I assume were contractors.
So I'm wondering if anyone has been in my position where they need developers to get their project going with little to no budget. Obviously I would be willing to give equity in the company, but as I have also read, many developers don't go for that anymore. So, has anyone on here had to raise money? And what did you have to do?
You're looking for someone in the same position as you -- who wants to start their own games company with no money, and is looking for partners. You can probably find a few people like that in the classifieds section here. However, to be equity partners in the business, you need to trust each other and have faith in each others skills and talents, which is hard with internet randoms... You'd probably want to draw up a detailed shares schedule, where small portions of equity are handed over at agreed upon milestones, when agreed upon work items have been completed.
That requires you to do a whole bunch of project planning up front though, and then to also spend a bunch on lawyers to sort out those contracts...
Personally, I found an artist in the same position as me, with the same ambition while working in the industry. We'd both worked together in the past so we had a good idea of each others skills, and got on well as friends over pizza, beer or whiskey in the past too. In that situation, it was pretty simple for us to agree to being equal partners based on trust.
Due to us both having worked for a bunch of different large studios, we've also got the network in place to be able to contact a lot of different professional devs that we trust who might be willing to work for either equity or cash contracts. Without any contacts, everyone is a stranger, which makes things a lot harder...
On the other hand, if you want to raise money, you can draw up a detailed business plan (including a production schedule, required staff, potential team-member resumes if possible, development costs, a market/competitor analysis, ROI estimates, etc) and take it to venture capitalists, who'll buy up equity in exchange for large sums of cash. This is very involved though -- you'll be booking flights all over the country to make the same pitch over and over to different investors, often walking away empty handed, which is expensive. You also need all the legalities worked out, so there's lawyers expenses to begin with too. Then once you've got the money, you'll be required to have monthly board meetings, write up lots of detailed reports explaining how you're on track to make that huge profit, field random calls from worried shareholders and reassure them that their money is safe, etc, etc...
I usually work remote from home, so I'm not against remote work, but I don't know if that would be possible if they need to use the PS system to debug.
If you set up a VPN, so remote workers can 'dial in' to your home office, they'll be able to connect to the dev-kit... though you and them would want to have very fast/reliable Internet connections. They might also occasionally require you to physically push the power button on the dev-kit for them.
Every programmer on the team needs to have a devkit.
If you don't also have a PC version of your game, this is true.
However, generally you make your game work on both PC and on the console. Most of the time, you can develop locally using only the PC version of the game, and occasionally test your work on the dev-kit. Often I've had to work with 1 dev-kit shared between 2 or 3 people, which is ok as long as your game also runs on PC.
I don't really have time to learn all about gaming development, (although I may be able to help out on easy stuff), so I would like to find people to drive the coding and creativeness, while I do the not so fun stuff, like project manage, marketing, legal, etc. I have an MBA, so that stuff is not foreign to me.
You've got to make this a good value proposition for any collaborators.
You don't have money, so you can't pay people... That means you pretty much have to pay in equity, which makes your staff your partners. If someone is a coding pro who can utilize a PS dev-kit to make a game, they're deserving of a very large salary (by joining your start-up, they're foregoing a huge amount of money that they could be earning with a job elsewhere). On a large-team, project management is a full-time job, as is legal and general studio management, but on a small team, not so much.
If you're only working part-time, and have a less rare skill-set (to be frank: lots of people have MBA's, but less have MBA's and games industry experience -- an industry veteran business manager is rare, but a generic business manager is a commodity), then your other staff probably deserve to hold more equity in the company than you do... and if they feel that way, they probably won't sign up, because it's not good value. You need to demonstrate that your skills are equally important to theirs -- that you can schedule their work well, that you can get your Sony/PS contracts, that you can deliver valid equity agreements, etc, etc.
