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xyber
17-02-2010, 04:37 PM
I am posting this from an article that NinjaPortal wrote here (http://www.gamedevsa.com/article/read/id/14) in the hope that more will see the idea. I will let him know to come check this post for your replies on the idea.

Here's the deal: I contacted the Guiness book of records to find out if they would consider "The largest collaboration of independent developers" as a valid record for their books. They basically said "Do it and get back to us when it's done" so that is a semi-endorsement right there :P

So this is what I am trying to do. Get together as many people as possible to work on a single title and submit the numbers to the Guiness book of world records. This is why I didn't want to bring all my ideas to the table as everything that I have already done means someone else can't do it and we loose a number or two... or 20...

I figured we need to start from the design phase upwards so the first thing that we will do is start a poll to decide what genre of game we are going to make and then take it from there. Instead of using my stuff, get a story writer to create a new plot, design the characters, the levels, everything, from scratch. Giving credit to all who participate for everything they do and thereby also keeping track of how many people participated.

Now, one of Guiness's requirements is that they be able to measure what goes into their books so to this end I had the following idea:

1. We would all sign up for the project and create a portfolio that includes our skills. 2. The project will be broken down into as many small pieces as is humanly possible and each member can log into the "wanted" database, pick a job, reserve it, do it, submit it, it goes through QC, gets placed in the "done" section and the person get's credit for his work. 3. This way Guiness can easily see how many people worked on the project... 4. Prospective employers can search for staff by sorting the list on a particular skill and... 5. Members can list their participation on their CVs and point prospective employers to the site to see what they contributed by searching by member name.

So, the lure to participate is the fame and the recognition that comes with participation. The benefits also stem from participation. Regarding money, I can't really see there being a lot of money to be made if the project takes off and the monies have to be split by hundreds of people... But, if you would be willing to participate but can't afford to work for free I have come up with a simple solution that might benefit you also...

I was thinking that each profile will have a space for a banner and a link to the member's own website where they can sell their own work or services. I would also create a dedicated section for banners of members and also show rotating banners on the front page so everyone has a chance of being on the front page.

My motivation behind doing this, as I promised I would divulge, is the fact that I am in a country that has 0 impact on the global video games scene. Heck, South Africa is like 5 times the size of the UK but, where the UK has a games studio in every 3rd city, South Africa has 2 in the entire country. We have 1 university offering 1 games related course... Can you imagine how hard it is to find a games related job in this country??? So, I wanted to become the poster boy for South African video game development... :D

I was hoping that if this project takes off and the members start doing the viral advertising and it becomes large enough to get into the mainstream media, perhaps, just perhaps the world will start looking at South Africa and South Africa, feeling the world looking at it, might get a wake-up call... My first major milestone would be for this to become popular enough to get me in the local news (paper or TV) and make ALL the South African game devs aware of this project and getting all of them interested... That would be something worth putting in my autobiography one day!!! :P

It is far fetched, I know, but it is far more likely to happen during a project like this than through sitting around and doing nothing so I am trying...

I have the full cooperation of one South African games dev forum's owner and have also already arranged for a website to be created for us. Our first sponsor! Yeay! Participants number 1, 2 and 3 are out of the way. Who's next?

I was hoping that mentioning we are trying to get into the Guiness book of records would create interest and the first person I mentioned the project to went from calculating the cost to saying "I'll do it for free" when I mentioned the purpose of the site. So my first attempt has seen fruitful results. Hopefully we can find further support as the project goes on. Of course this will only happen if the viral advertising takes off and attracts enough attention.

Since everyone will be working from their own homes at their own pace, there won't really be much in the line of costs, apart from the server hosting, but that I will try to arrange from my employer. So far all the costs will be carried by placing a few banners on the website. There is, of course, no reason why we can't also have a donation system in place or do banner advertising to generate funds to cover any other costs that might arise. Ideally, we will find a sponsor who can do us some fliers but if people want to donate to the cause then we could always use that money to pay for further advertising... But that is something to worry about much later...

The point is, I have already procured interest in certain areas and even managed to get our first sponsor in place. The question now is, are we gonna do this?

One person has said this is "an almost impossible" project. I wanted to agree but that sounds a bit too harsh... I would like to think of it as "a hard project" :) My reasoning behind this is that, if you were to get 3 to 10 people to create an entire game in their spare time with no income from their work, that is a recipe for disaster. What I am proposing is that we get a team of 3 to 10 people to just sit around each day trying to figure out how to break the project down into simple scripts and objects so that the other 10 000 people who are participating in this project can just log in and pick a job and get it out of the way so another 3 to 10 people can fit the pieces together and make the project work.

The sheer numbers involved is what will see this through. If we have 10 000 people who can each do 1 hour's worth of work every month or so whenever they feel like it, we are still much more likely to succeed than having 5 people having to devote all their spare time to this every single day... Again I point out the necessity to get the word out and get other people involved. The only real requirement is that programmers have Unity and now that it is available for both Windows and Mac and free to boot there is no real reason for any programmer to feel excluded...

Let's get this started, let's get the world out, let let the world know about this, let's get more people, let's get sponsors and get the word out some more...

I am under no illusion that this is going to be a hard thing to do and no, I don't expect us to get 10 000 people to join, but is a 100 participants world wide too much to ask for? I sucked the figure of 12 months out of my thumb. If we get a couple of members signed up and they vote for a period of 24 months to get the final project done... is 500 people too much to ask especially when there are screenshots that become available..?

So, what do you reckon? Interested?

BlackShipsFillt
17-02-2010, 07:29 PM
This sounds interesting, I wouldn't mind spending a few hours contributing something to a really big project.

Something that struck me though is how does one distinguish a very minor development contribution from user created content? A project like Little Big Planet has thousands of level designers and Spore has thousands of character builders. Of course there is a distinction, and I wouldn't describe a Little Big Planet user as a developer, but a project like this may kind of straddle that distinction.

The infrastructure for such a project sounds quite daunting, getting people interested is one thing, but making contribution easy enough for hundreds of casual developers to jump in is quite a challenge. While I would be keen to contribute, I'm not keen to navigate a byzantine source in order to do so, and even signing up, submitting and previewing the work of others has to be made simple and efficient. The bar for contribution has to be set as low as possible.

At first I thought that a reasonable game/genre for this sort of project would be an RPG where different developers, or teams of developers, create parts of the world... but what Xyber suggested at GameDevSa may actually be better, each developer, or teams of developers, creates a mini game within a central game, which could all be tied together in some sort of overall progression and theme (which could still be an RPG, but there is no need for every part of it to be standard 3rd person gameplay).

If it were built out of dozens of little games, each one progressing a overarching story a little, it could evolve to be something quite interesting. Kind of like a mutant Akira monster of a Dev Mag competition 24 (Coherence) entry.

Doing it all in Unity creates as many opportunities as problems... not everyone uses, or wants to use Unity. my understanding is that Unity Server is not a free licence, though there are other ways of version controlling a Unity project. If this is done in Unity it would be a good idea to approach the guys who develop Unity to see if they are interested in getting their community involved, this may be something they would get behind if they see it as being a serious endevour.

It doesn't even need to be as complicated as making a monstrous single project. While assets and such can be shared, it would still be a single game if each game had it's own executable and the only thing the games share are their save games.

Honestly I don't think the people contributing to this are going to be doing so for money, they are going to do so because it's fun and maybe because it exposes them to other developers, but mostly because it's fun (if it's fun, which is why it has to be easy otherwise noone will jump in)

I'm posting this over at GameDevSa as well.

CiNiMoDZA
17-02-2010, 08:29 PM
Ive always wanted to have a world record...Im keen!

dislekcia
17-02-2010, 11:48 PM
Um. What?

Look, if Dave Perry can't manage a collaborative game design project (Anyone remember that? No? Right...) what makes you think you're going to be able to pull that off with no large game design experience and no experience managing a team AND no experience as part of a large, distributed team?

Maybe if the South Africans who worked on Need For Speed: Shift (Didn't know about that either? Hope Google's racking up the learning for ya - Double your SA studio count yet?) were talking about something like this, I might be vaguely interested, but still not optimistic.

I fail to see how this is supposed to raise awareness of South Africa - especially if this is a largely international team, nor how "South Africanism" matters to a game or a game's buyers. People buy good games. You're not going to get a good game via committee design, you're not even going to get a GAME... How are you even going to get a game out of your X thousand participants? The AAA industry can't manage to pull a game from only 75 experienced professionals without resorting to life-destroying crunch times and endemic employee churn. So where are those management credentials and experience heading teams of 500 that you must have in order to be able to do it better?

Make a good game as best you can and then you'll have a CHANCE to get noticed. And what is being on TV or in newspapers supposed to help? I've been on TV 3 or 4 times now for game development, I've been in newspapers and magazines countless times. Every year after rAge I do at least 5 interviews. What exactly was this magic exposure supposed to get, what is it supposed to make easy? Clearly I'm regularly missing my own gravy-train.

This idea isn't even grounded in reality, it assumes that everything is "the easy part". But, sure, let's go ahead and spend ages making ANOTHER website and exhorting people to "join our new project" because that way it's not our own fault when it doesn't make anything happen: The more people who didn't get involved, the more people we have to blame.

Good luck with that. I'll be over here, turning the money I've earned into the best damn game I can afford to make. And if it ****s up, then it's all on me to learn how to do it right next time.

BlackShipsFillt
18-02-2010, 10:36 AM
You're right Dis. We do need more reality based projects and fewer pipedreams.

To be fair Ninja Portal has done a few little games that I've heard of, but nothing that qualifies as experience for this.

I do believe that with enough hard work just about anything is achievable, but I'm certainly not shouldering this one... though if something does manifest, even in a much reduced form, I'm happy to drop a few inspired lines of code.

dislekcia
18-02-2010, 12:31 PM
I think the thing that bothers me most is the focus on other people to do things. Yes, you can do just about anything with a lot of effort, but you have to put IN that effort... You can't just ask others to do a ton of work and then when that doesn't happen (which is not in any way shocking), get upset about it. That's disingenuous.

I mean, when Game.Dev was young, Miktar and I wrote a little WarioWare-like framework for GM. It took an afternoon. We posted it, ran a thing about it in NAG as a tutorial and made some supporting info available. Quite a few people picked it up. 4 minigames got added to the collection... A while back I re-used the framework for a DevLAN in JHB and over 20 minigames emerged from that. There's a ton to learn from something like that about collaborative development, environment, enthusiasm, etc. So I can understand where this idea comes from, but I don't think it's a good one.

Make a good game. Learn to sell it. Afford to make more... That's pretty much it. When you can tell me that's easy, I'll shake your hand :)

(Now I'm off to go "EEEEEEEEE!" about DD being on TIGsource, excuse me)

xyber
18-02-2010, 01:30 PM
Um. What?
Look, if Dave Perry can't manage a collaborative game design project (Anyone remember that? No? Right...) ...


I remember that! Actually thought about it but could not remember where I've seen this idea before :D