Log In  

As I've gotten older, I've learned to be honest with myself in acknowledging my strengths and interests. There was a time when being a one-man-band was the norm. Graphics? Got it. Music? Sure. Programming? Absolutely. But these days, I have to pick my position and roll with it, delegating the rest to others that are much, much better than me. I've made peace with that but...

The trick is, how do you find and attract those people?

I feel the "make a prototype and then see who wants to help make it nice" method rarely works. I figure most people want to be invested in the game they're working on from the start, not just "hired" like a merc after the fact for their skill...or maybe they do?

For those of us that have ideas for games but may only possess 1 of the 3 hard skills needed to make it a reality, what's the best way to assemble a team of collaborators?

What has worked for you?
What hasn't?

P#21348 2016-05-25 14:55 ( Edited 2016-05-26 01:27)

Pico-8 is a great opportunity to socialize the "here's my unfinished game help me make it better" technique. Everything is small*, so it's relatively easy to pick up a cart and start poking at it, especially when doing something like adding music to a cart that doesn't have any. If I were an artist, I'd find it attractive to collab on a game with demonstrated playability where I can mostly just replace the spritesheet.

I can see the desire to contribute to early game design, and hopefully any collab would involve a willingness to tweak all aspects of the product, vs. assuming the artist/musician will just finish the cart. I can also see wanting to be more involved early on, especially for a large-ish project. (*)I think we're still figuring out whether Pico-8 games are large enough to qualify.

Personally I'd love to see more pick-up-and-run collaboration on the BBS: "hey here's a thing: xxx" "I have an idea here's a new version of your thing: yyy" "wow cool what about this: zzz" "fixed your shading: xxx.2" This would be greatly enhanced if we could clone and edit carts directly on the site, or further integrate the BBS with the Pico-8 app. Make the BBS more Github-like (and/or just integrate with Github). I don't know how compatible this is with Lexaloffle's business plan but there's huge potential for innovation. I don't think other code collab sites (e.g. Scratch) have really cracked this yet.

P#21350 2016-05-25 16:15 ( Edited 2016-05-25 20:15)

-- Sorry, I didn't fully answer your question about finding collaborators. I haven't done any major collab with Pico-8 yet so my perspective is limited. But it's an area I'm excited about.

P#21351 2016-05-25 16:17 ( Edited 2016-05-25 20:17)

Maybe the best way is actually to just be as vocal about it as possible?

My life has largely been a failure in finding collaborators so far, so my opinion might not be the most valuable... but I do believe in the "do rather than don't" principle. As in, posting here like you did instead of not doing so because of the slim chances of getting a positive reply. :)

P#21354 2016-05-25 16:49 ( Edited 2016-05-25 20:49)

@dddaaannn - I agree with the open source mentality of game. Would be neat if we would do a "pick up game" of P8 coding. But yeah, you'd need some sort of check out system. On that topic, I have wondered what the best was is to version control a P8 game. I guess it's small enough, just commit the whole thing. Not sure how that would translate into multiple people...

@pedroavelar - I am one that likes to play around and prototype things, that's where most of my projects usually end up. Thankfully, so far the P8 forums are full of "projects" as well as finished games so there's no shame in posting some half baked for input and improvement.

P#21362 2016-05-25 20:50 ( Edited 2016-05-26 00:50)

Yeah, .p8 files store in source control just fine, as long as you're careful not to clobber the delimiters. Even the sound and music regions diff pretty well on a line-by-line basis, so you can (carefully) merge contributions.

The single file thing makes me think forking carts directly in the BBS could be interesting. Even without an in-browser editor, an "attach a cart" button in the post editor might help. (Right now uploading a cart is a separate flow and requires copy-pasting a tag.)

P#21366 2016-05-25 21:27 ( Edited 2016-05-26 01:27)

[Please log in to post a comment]

Follow Lexaloffle:          
Generated 2024-03-28 08:24:24 | 0.012s | Q:15