Implementing a product with a compensated, yet indie dev team?

bryanedds · 2014-06-03T15:44:58

For my part, I am a believer that a person producing / directing an indie game should keep their day job. For myself, I've found that being unemployed as an indie is just too self-destructive and prone to failure. Given that constraint, my plan is as follows - 1) While working my 40 hr week day job, for the game I will be concentrating only on design and team-directing tasks. Though I am a pretty hardcore programmer, I will not be doing really any programming on the game itself. Fortunately, the game engine is done and is a pretty pristine framework for someone else to work on - making the handover of the programming role straightforward. 2) I will hire a part-time programmer who will need to work at least 30 hours a week on the project. I may not be able to hire out of the US or Canada, however, as I can only pay about $12 per hour. Another constraint is that I'm looking for someone who can write well in F# (or can quickly learn). 3) Same for a part-time artist (except for the F# part). 4) When things get hectic at my day job, I may have to also keep on stand-by an assistant director to temporarily take over the project. How exactly I set that up so the assistant director would stay available when needed without paying him too much when sitting out is unclear. All told, this will cost me roughly half my income from my day job, leaving me pretty much unable to save money for myself. A lack of savings from that will foist additional risk upon the project. My general question for this post is - what problems would you all anticipate from this strategy? The strategy seems mostly solid having just typed it up, but I'm fully certain that there are risks and pitfalls that I do not see. Side Note: For the curious, here's why using F# is a constraint on the project - Functional programming is priority #1 for this project. As a developer, I'm no longer willing to use OOP (except in very specific cases), and as a manager or director, I would not generally allow it on my project. Otherwise I'd just go back to developing games professionally for an established company. Due to their insistence on the use of OOP / imperative programming, they can no longer hire me at any price. That is why I'm indie

Production and Management Business

Started by bryanedds April 25, 2014 02:58 PM

9 comments, last by Orymus3 9 years, 10 months ago

Orymus3

18,866

June 03, 2014 03:44 PM

Since you insist on using a decently obscure language you available pool talent is going to be considerably smaller then a company looking for C++ or Unity people. You will end up paying more for an F# programmer since they don't have to compete with the droves of new graduates to find a job.

F# is no longer obscure to be fair. I've heard about it almost nearly as often as I've heard "Unity" in the past year.

Functional programming has a lot of pros (it does have a few cons though, mind you).

Currently, the big problem is that there are very few programmers versed with the inner workings.

Implementing a product with a compensated, yet indie dev team?

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