I strongly suggest to produce a document explaining your game first. If the game is "extremely complex" do not even start. The game must be well understood and "compact" at least in your mind. I suggest to start producing a game design document.

Me and a few friends have come up with a great game concept. However, we have no clue where to start. The game we want to build is extremely complex and is a over all huge game. We are not planning on doing this on our own. We are planning on hiring people to work for us and help make the game.

I really do hate to have to say it, but this is simply unrealistic. If you have zero experience making a game you are utterly ill-equipped to make a game of substantial size, even if you managed to get the _millions_ of dollars necessary to hire experienced engineers, artists, musicians, voice talent, producers, and so on necessary for an "extremely complex" and "huge" game.

One of the biggest things to learn about how to run a project is _scoping_. There is a realistic limit to what you can do. Tim Sweeney or Ken Levine or Cliff Bleszinski can likely pull together the finances and talent to pull of a large and complex project. You cannot. Period. Figure out what is _already_ within your resources (financial resources, skills, etc.) and then start brainstorming things that are at least close to within those resources. Aim high; just not absurdly high.

Questions like "is Foo software good for games" are the kinds of things you had darn well better be able to answer yourself by having actually made a _simple_ 3D game first. See what works and what doesn't. Get an idea of what you need out of your tools. Have a solid grasp on how you're going to build at least the scaffolding of your ideas before you start trying to commit to those ideas.

You're not likely going to have any luck pitching your idea to another team and getting pulled on as a creative director or the like, either. _Everyone_ has ideas. There is practically not a single developer that doesn't have 50 ideas for some amazing huge game. Whatever idea you've had has probably been had 1000 times already, honestly. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution and proven talent is what gets people on board, not ideas. Likewise for acquiring the money to hire people. Large and complex games typically have budgets in the 10's to 100's of millions. No bank or publisher is going to back you if all you have is an idea and no history of your ability to execute on the idea.

Go back to the drawing board. Look at other successful indie games and their size and complexity. Find an idea that is within your reach. In the meantime, start learning by building small and simple games so you have the experience to realistically judge and execute your bigger ideas.

Sorry if this is discouraging to you as well, but this is how your idea will be seen by others in the industry:

Me and a few friends have come up with a great game concept.
We all have a general understanding of C++, C#, Java, and Python. However none of us are absolutely fluent.
We all have a background in management and really think we can handle building this game.
However, we have no clue where to start.
The game we want to build is extremely complex and is a overall huge game.
We are planning on hiring people to work for us and help make the game.
We are also in search of financial backing.

Translation: A group of amateur (risk #1) game-designers/coders with no experience in the industry (risk #2) has an idea for a massive AAA game (risk #3), which they want to develop into a game. They want to create an entirely new development studio from scratch (risk #4), but also don't have enough money to start this business themselves (risk #5).

Finding people willing to drop tens of millions of dollars onto that amount of risk is going to be a very tough sell. You're basically going to have to find a way to show off your whole design on paper to the public/investors, so everyone can realize that the concept is so amazingly great that it's absolutely worth risking their money over.

We are not planning on doing this on our own. We figured around 50 people in development alone.
Also what other forms of staff do we need other than development as far as testing goes? I think we have the design down for now...

50 people is a good sized studio capable of making large games in fairly short time schedules, assuming they're talented and work well together. A brand new studio of 50 staff that's just popped up overnight is quite risky, whereas a studio that's slowly grown to 50 people while continually producing results is a solid bet.

You also need all the business support types, such as HR, legal, finance, etc, and you probably need at least one great IT support guy. For testing, you want a QA manager and a team underneath them. The team can be extremely small at the beginning, ramping up to being quite large at the end of the project.

To run a business of this size, you're looking at somewhere from around $8M - $60M a year in expenses. That's an extremely serious business you're trying to create.

Seeing it's a brand new team, you'll probably plan for the game to take a year, and then it will actually take 3 years to complete. Then when it's finished, you'll want to spend about an equal amount as you've already spent so far on marketing and distribution...

As far as software goes we would like to use unigine as our engine. Also using 3ds max and zbrush for our modeling. We would like to use BBEdit for coding and reason 7 for sound. Is this good software for a 3D game?
Equipment wise we would like to go all apple. Is this the way to go or should me go windows?

Those are questions for your programming and art leads / directors. The software packages and workflows should be decided by these leaders when you produce the technical design documentation during pre-production. The right decisions will be different from team to team.
That said, Windows is definitely more popular than Apple in the industry (excluding iOS developers).

If the sound advice of SeanMiddleditch and Hodgman didn't sink in, take a look at TomSloper's site and read the numerous FAQ's.

http://www.sloperama.com/advice.html

Also, not to poo-poo your game idea, but from the brief description I heard, it sounds like it's a game about driving to work, and working. If people weren't getting enough of that in their lives, wouldn't they pick up a second job? :) I had too much of it myself and so I demanded full time work from home. And got it... /breakdance

- Eck

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution and proven talent is what gets people on board, not ideas. Likewise for acquiring the money to hire people.

I echo that.

There is talent for ideas, however it is overshadowed by the talent for execution of ideas. Substantial, objective work is more telling than abstract, mental language thought processes.