Any Volunteers

The Chicken and the Pig

The fable of the Chicken and the Pig is used to illustrate the differing levels of commitment from project stakeholders involved in a project. The basic fable runs:

A Pig and a Chicken are walking down the road.
The Chicken says: "Hey Pig, I was thinking we should open a restaurant!"
Pig replies: "Hm, maybe, what would we call it?"
The Chicken responds: "How about 'ham-n-eggs'?"
The Pig thinks for a moment and says: "No thanks. I'd be committed, but you'd only be involved."

He already did the hard part! Why won't you lazy fucks implement his great ideas?

As a software dev who's participated in a couple of game jams and several group projects,

I'd say that anyone that claims to be a designer but has no programming experience is typically incompatible with any project
- and it's due to the disconnect of understanding just how difficult it can be to translate certain design tasks into functional code

Oh god have had people try this exact thing with me before.

It's got some real scientifically based dragons vibes.

No joke, I once met a guy like this in an indie game developers meetup, and on top of that he was extremely vague about his idea because he told everyone he once managed to get a coder on board and "that rat wanted to take advantage of him and his idea", literally.

There are probably a ton of incredible banger games out there that don't exist because the person who thought of it just doesn't know how to code

Y'all remember that post about the "science-based dragon MMO" that topped the gaming page of...that other site...? If not, I'll include the title and image below, because it's got the same energy as this post.

Dear internet, I'm a 26 year old lady who's been developing a science-based, 100% dragon MMO for the last two years. I'm finally making my beta-website now, and using my 3D work as a base to create my 50+ concept images. Wish me luck, Reddit; You'll be the first to see the site when it's finished.

The comments were surprisingly constructive considering she basically pasted zsphere sketches over a generic background and announced she had been solo developing the most ambitious dragon fucking game the world has ever seen. It's been 12 years, I wonder how she's doing?

As a person that has a lot of ideas and no coding or art knowledge, it sucks because I know I can't expect someone else to do it for me and I don't have the time or mental capacity to learn. I guess I can just have AI do it for me now /s

I would volunteer... for money

fuck idea guys. an idea is worth nothing until you actually put the work in

Put it on GitHub and some tryhard will do a bunch of free work on it. Source: am tryhard

Sure as long as you donate 100,000 USD a year to my bank account.

I've had game and software ideas swirling around in my brain, but for the longest time I couldn't program them. But now, I have enough knowledge to build parts of my grand deckbuilding game idea: An arcade style deckbuilding game with strong meta-progression. It's playable at superspruce.org.

As for some other ideas, including the simple idea of a weighted shuffle music playlist where each song has its own weight, they are still currently out of reach, mostly due to trying to access the filesystem and whatnot. Better than a month ago, where within the last month I found out how to make the browser play music

I once read an article about a guy, whos just doing this. He is selling gaming ideas to studios. But to be fair, he did develop some indie game by him self. He just realized, that he is not good in developing and the hates the whole programming and design part. He only has good ideas.

MY TOWN IS IN THE NEWS!!!

If you're this guy, You've gotta be a really good writer and you gotta write it first.

Lol I was legit surprised to find it's an actually written (satirical) article! The other ones had me rolling too, like John Cena coding "Banjo Threeie" LOL.

i mean, provided you actually want to put in effort that's called "being a game designer", it's perfectly valid to not write code or create assets.

Great idea, how about you describe it in so much minute details it bores your goddamn mind? Can't do it? Sorry, then you're not cut for being the idea guy, you're fired.

If the fucker can't do the above, he's what programmers call a client: an asshole who thinks too highly of himself and his ideas and will annoy everyone every time he changes the goals.

It ws only like a decided ago when I had multiple amazing ideas for games and other software, only to have nearly none when I actually started to do some programming for fun.

I think there's only one game I would like to try making where I see it may have some success, but the idea is very vague and devil is in the details and execution I guess.

This reminds me of a legendary thread in the forums of the German gaming magazine GameStar:

https://www.gamestar.de/xenforo/threads/world-of-warcraft-2.337502/

@JPDev Then again, that's how a few free software games actually work

Funny thing is, it's actually not that hard to get additional volunteers for an ongoing project if you're competent enough, only recent issues are YanDev messing up a lot of things (both his game and life) which might create some skepticism towards indie devs looking for such volunteering, and people not understanding how solo indie development works and fetishizing successes without truly understanding them.

I actually wish this mentality kindof existed for hobby projects (although it doesn't seem to, but please prove me wrong), like "looking for a programmer for X project to do Y" type posts where us programmers can more easily find projects to participate in (and they can find good people too) that we have a great interest for, rather than hunting sites like up-for-grabs for single feature requests to fulfill or starting completely new projects on our own.

My first thought was, "Have you talked to the Fallout modding community?" They're huge masochists and love being shit on, even though they create such amazing things and deserve nothing but praise and monetary rewards...

Sounds like most AAA games we where promised but never got

After success with my senior project, developing a real game with a team of 15 that we're releasing on Steam, which I feel really good about, I crave the experience of working in a team to develop a game. But of course, my hobby project is a nonprofit endeavor so I can only expect volunteers, and even though I feel I can get the coding down mostly on my own, I feel like I might be asking too much by hoping for an artist or few to join with me... maybe I just need to change up my approach, and offer equal shares of creative control, that way it's not "help me make my game" so much as "join me and we'll make our game."