There are lots of people who'd like to make their own games, below is some advice that you might find useful if you wish to start a project of your own.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
It's hard to find people over the internet who will be willing to help you with your project and spend as much time on it as you yourself would. These people have nothing to guarantee that you will actually finish this project of yours and who wants to see their work go unused? Besides, they're often busy with other things as well.
If you do get people to help you, don't put too much workload on them, because if they can't finish it your project will be in trouble. Try instead to do as many things as possible by yourself. If you can't program/script, try learning it. Most freeware game engines use a scripting language that's easy to learn and there is often a community that will help you get started.
Regarding graphics, well, a game doesn't need great graphics to be good. If necessary, make the game with simple placeholder graphics, and if the game's gameplay qualities shine through then there will most likely be people willing to help you make the real graphics. One thing to keep in mind, whether or not you spend lots of time on the art, is to keep the art consistent. Don't use photos for backgrounds if the player character is a pixely blob. If you must use graphics from another game make sure it matches the art in your game. Do NOT use Bryce and Poser art, because it's cheap, horribly ugly and it's so obvious what it was made in. Old 2D graphics are often charming, but 3D hardly ever ages well at all.
There are things that you shouldn't hesitate to ask people for help with, such as sound, music and writing dialogue. There are those who love doing this and yet there are very few requests for it. Lots of people seem to prefer using music and sound from other games which can be annoying if you already associate the music with the game that it was taken from. Regarding dialogue, Pleurghburg: Dark Ages' dialogue is rather weak when it comes to that because hardly any time was spent on it. As a result, the characters hardly have any depth. I'm sure I could have gotten help with that and it would have resulted in a better game.
Be careful when starting a big project, working on a project for too long will get tiresome. If you keep working on graphics all the time you might be too tired to implement it and script the game. If you have someone else making the graphics, you will get tired of waiting for this person to finish them, and you will most likely stress and annoy whoever is making them by asking for more graphics all the time. Developing Pleurghburg: Dark Ages went very smooth. Because there was a nice balance between the time it to took to make the graphics and scripting the game, which meant it kept progressing rather fast all the time.
Keep in mind that almost all commercial games today are being made by large teams who get paid for their work, it can take them years to finish a game. Even classic old games were made by fairly large teams. So before starting a big project, make sure you are willing to spend that much time on it and make sure the people helping you are as motivated as you.
|