Hi,

I already have something you could call a "game". But it's unfinished, you can only walk around and jump. There is a randomly generated world, a basic but little buggy collision detection, there are shadows and I have something like an basic UI. And networking works. But I have so many ideas I want to implement, I just have not enough time (and a lack of experience) to do it on my own. And when it comes to the creative part (3D models etc.), I am totally overchallenged with that task. I am a (good?) programmer, but I am not an artist.

So I need people to help me developing the game. But I was unable to find anyone. They are either unexperienced or they already have a job or they are not interested because bananas.

If I just had money, I could simply hire them. But I don't have enough money for that, so it's a little bit more complicated to find anyone.

I really have no more ideas how and where to find anyone who could do at least one task of the mass of tasks that must be done in order to develop the game.

Does anyone have an advice? I would be really grateful.

If I just had money, I could simply hire them.

Get money.

Yeah, I thought about making a game everybody enjoys to play to get some money. And when I got some money, I can just hire people who helps me making a game everybody enjoys to play to get some... wait, what?

[spoiler]I am from Germany, there is no "american dream", for example we just got a statutory minimum wage of 8.50€ in january 2015, but you won't get it when you have been unemployed for the last 12 months, so they can hire you, pay 5€ per hour, fire you after 5 months and hire the next one for 5€ per hour and fire him after 5 months and so on. This is the German dream, you know? And we pay fees to copyright holders if we buy (for example) SD cards, because we are allowed to copy our purchased movies to them, but only if there is no copy protection on these movies... Our government seems to do everything to support big companies, but does nothing for the citizens... They allow companies to "import" skilled workers from other countries for only 32000 € a year (that's the minimum salary they must pay them, they lowered it from 66000 € to 32000 € because they think there are not enough workers). So when I get my bachelor degree at the university, I could be happy to get a job with 40000 salary per year... (Sorry for off-topic.)[/spoiler]

I can see no way to get enough money to hire people for developing a game except maybe crowdfunding. But to be realistic, I won't get much when I am just a single developer...

But I have so many ideas I want to implement, I just have not enough time (and a lack of experience) to do it on my own.

Reading this my first thought is: do you actually need to implement all these ideas? Maybe the first thing is to look at the scope of what you are trying to do and then scale it back.

Otherwise, you're in a situation where you will have to take what you can get. You stated that some of the people you looked at were inexperienced. Well, that's just the reality of expecting people to do work for free. You may have to accept inexperienced help, if you want help at all. And if the quality of their work is not up to your standards, you will have to adjust your expectations.

"I need professional standard work in a skilled area done for free. How can I do this?"

You can't.

Get a normal job and save money from it. You can complain about the "German dream" all you want but Germany is a rich country with high wages. You can definitely do this. There are also other options:

You can scale back this project and release it. If it then makes money you can use this (and the following your game already gained) to release <game_name> 2, which would be bigger, better and more featured.

You can do a smaller project and use the revenue generated from that to fund your larger project.

Lastly, if you think you truly have something great, you can always try getting funding on a platform like Kickstarter.

bananas

You should really investigate this more. People are not joining you because what?

I'm going to assume that what you are offering them is to work on your game? for free?

That's hardly interesting.

Most people will join for money, other for creative freedom. Others yet, because they want to learn from a mentor.

It seems you're offering none of the above, so you should rectify the situation.

Make money OR offer creative freedom OR offer tradeskill exchange and do it yourself?

Or, really, scope the project down and do it on your own. Very useful for credibility when you get back to a project of this level.

The scale of this project is not this big, but it's still much work for a single person. And it's not easy to do everything on my own, because I have to learn almost everything about game programming, including collision detection (which is really hard to understand if you are doing this for the first time), graphics programming, network programming, AI etc.

Sometimes I would be happy to have a person who is experienced in this, just to ask him or her about the best approach to do something... Learning everything on my own is a little bit frustating sometimes. If you google for something, you often find tutorials about the basics, but the really difficult things are not explained anywhere...

For example, I could not find a good tutorial about generating caves in a voxel terrain. I found out that I should use Perlin worms, but what are Perlin worms? And how can I use them to generate caves? I somehow figured out how to generate caves, but I am not happy with how they look. And the performance of the cave generation may be not as good as it could be... I also have problems with collision detection (how to implement sneaking etc.) and so on... I managed to get everything more or less working, maybe I could do it on my own and ask questions in forums if I don't know how to do something efficiently/correct/whatever.

But I still have to find someone who could create some simple 3D models and textures. I need this to be done before I could start an indiegogo campaign (kickstarter is still not available in Germany), because... well... what should I show to the people who see this campaign if I don't have textures? But when is it time to start an indiegogo campaign? What should be implemented to get enough money for making the game and a website for the game? Is a prototype with "good looking" graphics and a little bit gameplay (for example some quests, fights against enemies etc.) enough?

For caves, I'd suggest to look at tutorials to make caves and use them as modular pieces rather than voxel terrain.

Also, may I suggest BlendSwap? You can use most of the models for commercial use (look at the licensing terms carefully) and they're very good for prototyping your game (in addition to self-made assets). Though you would need to make lightmaps yourself and do some technical work to get them up to scratch in your game engine.

Magogan, as other have said, generally you will have a very difficult time finding volunteers ready to work on your game for free...

forget any money sharing schemas, they generally do not work out (people falling out of the project -what do they get? The porject never gets finished - how do you handle this? The project is finished but is not successfull at all - who gets the blame for that?)... money paid later MAYBE is a very weak incentive for people to work hard on a project for weeks and months.

In the end, given you rule out this possibility, you have 3 options: DIY, hire people / outsource work, or go opensource / free.

1) DIY: here as the first option because it is the most reliable, if you don't have heaps of money. You know exactly what you can do and how much time you can spend, and besides time this approach costs you little. Of course, you need to get good at all the disciplines you are trying to fill yourself, and as you cannot clone yourself most probably, there is a limit how large your game idea can be if you go totally the lone wolf way.

2) The most probably overall best, if not cheapest or most reliable option. If you have the money, you can get professionals to do the work for you, either as hired workers or freelancers you are outsourcing work to. Just make sure you are aware of this:

a) Quality paid work is NOT CHEAP! As with anything else, if you take the cheapest offer you will have to compromise on quality. Find good professionals over cheap ones, see if their style and work process mesh with your expectations, make a good deal with them that satisfies BOTH parties, and you will most likely pay less in the end, because:

b) Freelancers and hired workers are NOT you. Sounds stupid, but is important. No matter how exact you describe the work package to finish, the other person will always have an influence on the result.That can be a very good thing, if you would be the best artist out there you might not have outsourced to a professional artist... so most probably this person is much better in coming up with pleasing visual ideas than you.

But it still might be that this persons ideas do not mesh with your general game project, need rework, or maybe need a different artist to work out. Also, the bigger a project gets, the more people are involved, the harder it becomes to unify style and keep a global vision (be that programming or art style).

In the end that means to always calculate in some reserve to spend on finding the right people, and having things fixed that are not satisfying the games style. Of course, the fixing part COULD be done by yourself if you are already expierienced in the topic (see DYI above) and the changes are only small... still, make sure you do not underestimate the cost both in time and money spent just for finding the right people and getting the right output from them.

3) Go opensource / free: as soon as you drop your plans on selling the game later, your pool of volunteers just increased... a lot. People are more willing to work free on a project that will be opensource or at least free. That has many simple reasons, for example people working for free on a project most probably are mostly motivated to get something out there, something visible to as many people as possible (be it because they think the project is awesome and want to see people play it, or as a piece for their own portfolio)...

If something is closed source, and possibly intended for commercial use later on, chances are pretty big that the audience in the end stays much smaller than on a free game, or if the project fails to turn out as intended, it might disappear as people that worked together on it cannot reach an agreement to open source it and let others work further on the project.

An opensource and free project likely has much less such problems, and peoples contribution in this case are much more visible. Code can be freely shown in public without any NDA or some such thing, and so on.