How to Form a Development Team

[BulbaMander]

I love programming, and making games has always been a creative outlet of mine. I don't have any friends with the skillsets needed to assist me with creating game assets though; as a result my games look like trash if they have artwork at all. Most of my ideas rot away as markdown in my ideas folder since I lack the abiliity to deliver the visual experience I'd like to.

Can anyone share their experiences forming or working on a development team?
Does anyone know other game-dev oriented communities?
Does anyone have any tips at making friends in online communities in general?

[Xii]

Stop wishing to deliver something you can't make, and start delivering things you can. People will notice your skills. Look at other people's work, and find someone who's good at what you like. Then ask them, personally, if they want to collaborate.

Your biggest asset is having something to display your skills. It doesn't matter if it doesn't look as good as you'd like. What matters is that it reflects the specific set of skills you do have. If you're good at programming, make something that demonstrates that.

The beauty of prototypes is they can be ugly.
If you already have a viable game built that works, but lacks graphics, it's much easier to find someone to fill in the gaps.
"Hey everybody I made this game, programmed it myself, it just lacks an artist! Anybody wanna team up to finish it with me?"

[BulbaMander]

Stop wishing to deliver something you can't make, and start delivering things you can. People will notice your skills. Look at other people's work, and find someone who's good at what you like. Then ask them, personally, if they want to collaborate.

Your biggest asset is having something to display your skills. It doesn't matter if it doesn't look as good as you'd like. What matters is that it reflects the specific set of skills you do have. If you're good at programming, make something that demonstrates that.

The beauty of prototypes is they can be ugly.
If you already have a viable game built that works, but lacks graphics, it's much easier to find someone to fill in the gaps.
"Hey everybody I made this game, programmed it myself, it just lacks an artist! Anybody wanna team up to finish it with me?"

This is good advice. Thanks a lot.

[CogentInvalid]

I would look into game jams; there are billions listed on itch.io, as well as Ludum Dare and some other ones. You might be able to find some people interested in collaborating there.

Generally the smaller the game, the more likely your team will be successful; you need really good incentives to get people to stick to development for the long haul.

[Ross]

I've been on a couple online teams. One that completed a game and a couple that failed. Stay away from larger teams working on their first project—they're probably large because half of them are inactive so they brought in new people. 2-5 person teams are good. Stay away from people with ambitious projects who think they're going to make a hit. Stay faaaar away from "idea men" with no skills who just want to "manage" the project.

My advice for teams: communicate! Even if you have a text chat, schedule voice meetings at least every week. It really helps everybody motivate each other, in my experience. 99% of the time you're going to have team members that lose motivation and just fade away. They slack off and then feel bad about it, so they either hate it and eventually explode or just quietly vanish. Don't be too resistant to switch projects or disband if it's going badly (of course there's always some drudgery that you have to persevere through).

For other communities, you can look at the tigsource forum. It's for general-purpose gamedev, so it's much larger and more active than here, they have a board for collaboration requests. There's also some Discord groups I think, like the Game Dev League, probably others. There's also some subreddits (like /r/INAT) though reddit tends to get a lot of unskilled newbies dreaming of glory, in my experience.

If you want to have people to interact with, go start interacting with people. Make nice comments, ask people about their projects, ask for help with your own projects, help out other people, etc.

If you have something working and want concept mockups or cover art kind of stuff, feel free to message me. I'm way too lazy to do sprite animation though, so I'm very unlikely to commit to a full collab.

[BulbaMander]

Thanks you guys, some more good advice. I'm definitely going to checkout tigsource.

I've done a few game jams in the past, and like Ross some went well and some went less than well. No partnerships that I was interested in continuing though, which maybe you have to be lucky to find.

[eliddell]

A couple of other options:

1. If you're looking for artists in particular, you can check places where artists hang out (DeviantArt, pixel art related venues like Pixelation and Pixel Joint). Many of them also have forum sections dedicated to collaboration and hiring, although I admit you're likely to have a better chance of getting someone good if you approach with a sheaf of cash in hand.

2. Scrounge from OpenGameArt or similar places.

3. Learn the missing skillset yourself. Yeah, I know, we're talking about years of grinding, but it can be done.