Tips or sites for recruiting? Thread

This isn't exactly the best site to find a team. None of my friends are interested or have no experience with game development. Do you know;
1. Any sites that are mainly designed for game development recruitment or have a bigger more active recruiting community than this thread? Mainly where I, a newbie can get someone who is looking for free work and or get them to officially join a team.
2. How to get my friends interested or anyone at my school interested in helping me out with game development. Think more of middle school to high school than college.
3. How or a good way to show my idea and concept art to an indie group that already develops games and have them work on it with me?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

1. You're fighting for attention with every other team out there. Wherever you go, you'll have the same problem. Talented people like to work with other talented people, so the handful of skilled, willing people looking to join a new team will rightly favour working with a team that's already productive.... or just start their own project and add to your competition.

2. No idea. It's a tough gig, so if you don't feel the call you're unlikely to have the determination to stick at it long enough to get anywhere. Again, personal initiative may help - if people see you making cool stuff, it might inspire them to try the same. No guarantee though - to get anywhere it will take over most of your life for awhile, and that's a big commitment.

3. See first answer.

In short, no one ever says getting into games dev is easy. That's what makes it so satisfying when you get there

I've decided to go from the idea guy to the, making it happen/programmer guy.

Decide on what engine you're going to use and use that company's team recruitment forum. If you're building an engine by yourself then go to programming forums and look for volunteers. Once you get the core of your models or engine mechanics written, then you can head to more generic Mod team recruitment forums, show off your models, and hopefully impress people enough to build a bigger team.

can get someone who is looking for free work and or get them to officially join a team

I think this will be a problem on any site you go to. Gibberstein nailed it with #1. And seriously, if you do move yourself towards the "making it happen/programmer guy", it would be one of the best choices you could make. Ideas are a dime a dozen, so its harder to get people interested in doing yours for you. But if you actually work towards creating something yourself and have something to show others, it'll make it a whole lot easier for people to take it seriously and want to help out.

This isn't the best site to find a team? Seriously have you tried our job board? Everyone has to start from somewhere, perhaps you should join an existing team, and build up your contacts and relationships that way?

Maybe more graphical job ads would be preferred.

The category icon (e.g. programmer / modeller), the subcategory icon (e.g. Maya/Max/Blender, C++/C#, etc.), the company image/icon, and a custom title of the job "Searching for new blood to implement pathfinding!" etc.

Edited by: feillyne

feillyne wrote: Maybe more graphical job ads would be preferred.

The category icon (e.g. programmer / modeller), the subcategory icon (e.g. Maya/Max/Blender, C++/C#, etc.), the company image/icon, and a custom title of the job "Searching for new blood to implement pathfinding!" etc.

It can look as pretty as you want, but unless there's substance behind it, nobody will care. period. Blurb style job ads only work when there is $$ involved, which accounts for approximately 0.0001 % of what you'll find on moddb.

Edited by: AJ_Quick

Tell that to a visual learner. The current wall of text seems to say less than a couple of appropriate icons that could tell one everything after a glance.

Every modeller will recognise e.g. Max icon. The actual textual representation takes a bit of time to not just read, but evaluate the given job (the less concrete one, the less valuable one - how's it possible that somebody looks for e.g. a "general" programmer? O.o).

The current wall of text seems to say less than a couple of appropriate icons that could tell one everything after a glance.Every modeller will recognise e.g. Max icon. The actual textual representation takes a bit of time to not just read, but evaluate the given job

That's not the fault of the text itself compared to buttons, but the time the author put into writing their job description. There are plenty of informative adverts out there that communicate effectively and efficiently with text alone (every game company I've seen seems to have well-written job descriptions).

The people who can make things happen don't want to give away their time pissing in the wind for somebody who can't. In my opinion, read up on how Alex put together Killing Floor. Joe's old article Moddb.com is a great start, and I remember that somewhere there was a pretty illuminating post-mortem that I felt summed up a lot of information on how to get a project from the realm of ideas to the realm of reality.

Nothing wrong with the text itself, IMHO, graphical represantation would facilitate finding the proper job when digging through the whole job board.

Still, the job ads have these parameters:
Commercial job? yes/no
URL
Title
Location
Field
Description
How to apply

Could be:
Commercial job? yes/no
A job on site? yes/no (on-site/outsourcing)
Location (IF the job is on site)
URL
Title
Field, and now, additional (sub)categories show up, when e.g. choosing Programmers category:
Programming language:
IDE:
(And for e.g. modellers, what filetypes/programs are looked for, i.e. subcategories that pop up depending on the choice of Field.)
Short description (perhaps, b/c it could make a mess of the job board)
Description
How to apply

There are a couple of unclear job ads titles:
"Modelers in all aspects, Artists in general, Animators, Level Designers and more"
Modeler at Dun Ask Why Team
Character Modeler / Animator at Anonym-Art Productions

Exact model filetypes (programs) that are desired aren't specified in the title. Should be. One can always write in the full description additional info about models wanted, e.g. that sending models in other formats are possible, but still, doesn't a dev leader look for models in a particular format, and alternatives/equivalents are less desired?

IMO:
I don't know about all that. There really isn't enough ads on here to justify such specialized categories and such. Any team worth working for is going to put in the effort to describe what it is they want you to do anyways. Even something like SourceForge has massive amounts of projects and help needed, but their Help-Wanted section is pretty basic, and presumably works alright.

Can't someone set up a beginners guide? Don't we actually have that on Moddb and it just always gets burried in the forums somewhere?

There are really only three scenarios here. One is what Gibberstein mentioned, namely that talented people will look for other talented people to work with. Few people will give inexperienced modders a chance, and from my own experience I can say it's not worth it. So after doing that a couple of times you really get patient and work on your own stuff, waiting for an opportunity to join a working team, instead of building one.

Another scenario is that you work in silence, being the main force to drive your mod. That's like what the guy from Mortewood Plaza is doing, and as you can guess he needs 3-5 years to get his project done; point is he gets it done. If he wanted to, I'm sure he could find all the help he needs now - but that's only after working some solitary years, proving the idea you had can actually be developed.

The third scenario is the typical one. Somebody has an idea and wants to make a game. They write a page, containing the story and some units and that's it. Disregarding the technical demands, knowing nothing about the Engine to work with (except the name) and having no idea about the timespan of the project or the amount of content that will need to be produced. These are people who expect shit to somehow turn into gold, because no matter how good your original idea is it will always stay "shit" in a modding sense when it does not take account of the other requirements to make a project become successful.

Making games is an iterative process - another thing that's usually disregarded (even though all successful mods do it that way). Instead of starting with a wide range of designs to create some choice and variation, most teams will create high poly models of existing rifles and proudly present those in their first, and only, media update. The problem with that is that not only did you determine your design and base it on "reality", you can also not add to it easily, because anything that is sketched and concepted now has to be at least of the same quality. And no artist can paint a highly detailed totally original and realistic vehicle, when the only other design to base it on is an M4A1.

Most projects have no coder from the get go, so they plan on having too many features and too many maps, instead of starting with core mechanics and evolving the game around those. Even if they create all the content by lucky chance, the coder will either drop dead the instance he sees the workload or start taking away features that should have been set in stone in a design document by then. So another big thing is disregard for each other's work. Chaos breaks out when there is no clear concept from the start. A capable mod leader should be able to contribute to the team. It doesn't matter if he earns their respect by modeling or organizing, but the way he does his work reflects on the team, either motivating them or tearing them down.

And finally - the biggest post in the equation - TIME. Making a proper game takes years for commercial companies. A lot of people think they are getting into a development of a couple of months when making a mod. Depending on the project they should be thinking in years instead. At this point any sane person has to ask himself: do I believe in the team and will I be able to go through with it, or should I pass. Since 90% of all mod developments are letdowns and never release, the chance to end up with a project that blows are very high.
You have to be the team at the start. If you have proven you can think of all aspects of development the real team will grow around you. They know what you are capable of by then and that gives them the boost to become better at what they do, ultimately resulting in a successful development.

Edited by: SinKing

XXXCrimsonXXX wrote: I've decided to go from the idea guy to the, making it happen/programmer guy.

It's great to hear you're wanting to make that decision.

A good start would be gathering as much information as you can from these web pages.

En.wikipedia.org

En.wikipedia.org
Gamedev.net
You should definitely get some books or some sort of learning course if you want to learn to program.

Edited by: NGS616