i can code a little, but i mostly code html, so i would prefer a different job, if you have one that is particularly necessary, that no one, or minimal people have been given

I think there will be the greatest shortage in coders and graphics designers. Coding is actually fairly easy. Especially with an open source project such as this you can peek at what others are doing and copy/paste relevant bits.

For graphics, I don't know if the game will be sprites, vectors or 3D models. Any way there will probably be two groups of people. The designers and the spriters/model makers. The first group makes the concept art, drawings of how they visualize everything should look and give this art to the second group, who try to recreate it into game graphics. There could also be a third group of animators, who take the graphics from the second group and animate it. There need to be a lot of graphics, from backgrounds to scenery to interactable objects to characters and most of these also need one or multiple animations. I think this will take up most man-power of the parts.

Music and sounds is far less intensive. You generally only need a few bits of music for small games like this and the sounds shouldn't be difficult either.

Then there is the think tank, who will come up with concepts, but this takes pretty much no effort at all and can be handled by everyone as they perform their other tasks.

There is obviously also management, but that only needs to be done by a single person who is already experienced in projects like this.

And finally playtesters, but we shouldn't worry about that for a long time.

So basically we need:
-1 manager
-Several coders
-Many graphic designers, divided into concept artists, graphics makers and animators
-A few musicians

I think that is it.

I think this is too ambitious for a first project.

How so?

Also, I can probably get us a website for about $10.

I'll do graphics and MAYBE music, and I could help come up with a story, too.

Graphics! Yes!

Now that I think about it, I could definitely help with ideas and layout, stuff like that.

oh ya, i would also like to help on story ideas

I recommend you start off with something very, very simple. Like a word game or something. Then once you've proven to yourselves that you can complete a software project together, maybe consider something a little more exciting.

Making a crappy, half-finished game is really easy. I've made plenty of those myself. Making a good game and actually finishing it is incredibly challenging, especially for a team who are relatively new to programming.  

Jebby, what if we first make a text adventure game (that we shall write up) and add drawings and animations, so it is much more interactive.  And then for our second project we can do something a bit more high maintenance (just nothing amazingly hard to develop).

Also, Jorster, we could instead just have an admin with root access to the wesite make a subdomain and use a .tk domain with a great storage host, so then it would be a free website, and a free project hosting website, but we would have to pay for the storage.  In my opinion this would be much more practical, because we don't need a handful of website running your bank account dry.  So maybe games.interguild.org ?  Or what about projects.interguild.org ?  And then for the .tk domain, what about interguildprojecthosting.tk ? or iph.tk (if it's not taken)?
or, of course, interguildgamehosting.tk ? or even igh.tk (if that is not taken either)?

What do you guys think on both issues?

Also, if you do not know coding, I did say we also need writers, musicians (or anyone who could make a few songs), and artists.

I would be willing to volunteer my own site, subdomain included, for the cause, if need be.  Depending on the level of complexity this site requires, I am also willing to code/help code it.
As for the name of the domain/subdomain, I'd recommend developers or development in there somewhere to make it sound more important. =P

What's the URL?

I'd suggest projects.[BmwsuURL].com

projects.adjectitious.com is what it'd be, if projects. was decided upon.  I could even ask Thomas to help me create a fancy login page to be able to see the stuff inside. =P

That would be awesome

A text adventure game would be a reasonable place to start.  

I think it would be better to start with something that at least requires graphics and animations, even if just to get some experience with it. The coding isn't the only aspect of a game that we need to get experience with. A simple puzzle game would probably best.

I'm great at word jumble, scrambling.... and other things too!

Jell, I said an animated text adventure game, so basically we make a text adventure game, and then we animate it with graphics.

A word of warning: this quote involves a lot more programming than it seems. That being said, I have a framework setup for just such a thing already if you guys want it. It's in python using the pygame module. I've already separated everything using the Model-View-Controller pattern and made everything very object oriented, so networking becomes possible in the future.

I think this is an awesome project! But I do have a few comments:

(1) Jebby's right.

You really should start small. One of the biggest mistakes with Aeon was that it was this crazy ambitious game but it was also our first game. One of the best ways to keep your project's scope small is to set clear deadlines:

(2) Set a super short deadline!

How about you try making a game in a month? This means you'll have no excuses and that you'll definitely have to get to work right away. It also means that whatever you decide to make should be possible in just a single month. In other words, you're definitely not going to make a Mega Man game with 10 levels in that time. If you're lucky, your game will only have one level in it.

(3) Have a small but dedicated team

Your idea seems to be to have the project be open source where anyone can add stuff to it whenever they feel like it, but you'll never get anywhere unless you have a small number of people who are doing more than 95% of the work in the project. Ideally, this small group should have either two or three people in it. Any more and you'll start having to deal with management problems. Any less and you'll find it hard to get motivated to do all the work by yourself.

Plus when you're in a team that small, a lot more is expected from each member, so you better make sure that you're working with reliable people (and you also better make sure that you're a reliable teammate yourself). When you only have a month to work with, shrinking your team size is the best thing you can do to increase your speed. I've done this before on some of the game projects I've worked on ( Magnet Ball ), so I can say from experience that this really works.

(4) Don't spend too much time learning how to program

The best way to learn how to program is to start programming, and so use this game as a way to learn how to program. Don't spend too much time trying to learn everything up front before starting to make your game. Instead, try learning as you go along and don't be afraid to make mistakes. You'll be making tons of mistakes as you make your game, and you'll only be working on the game for a month, so it shouldn't be such a big deal if you do make a mistake.


But yeah, good luck with this! I'd definitely be interested in following this game as it goes along. I just hope that this project will get off the ground.

That's a good point. If too many half-involved people are into this, the whole thing will seem a little too spread out; a team of five or six max would work out, in my perspective. So maybe I shouldn't be in on this one.

This makes what you told me earlier so much more Clear...

The funny part about that to me is that no one understands the reference.

This is totally correct, I'm entirely clueless.