Sunday, October 23, 2011

Ideas are Worthless

It's interesting that game companies guard their features. Even after a game is released, it's still rare to get a copy of the Design Document for it. I have close to a gig of concept art from games I've worked on that I legally can't show anyone even though that art got turned into 3d assets that have since been released.

I watched an interesting video the other day about game marketing. Game publications, specifically for MMOs, are hungry for anything they can cover. The other MMO I'm working on right now--we get about 1 article on our project a week. I don't even read them anymore unless it's a bigger one like Massively. We keep everything so tight lipped. Why? Because we're(and by "we," I don't mean "me") afraid someone will steal our ideas.

Considering how many people out there work in the games industry and how many of them are highly creative, chances are good, what ever you can think up, there's a whole lot of people that have those same exact ideas but, for what ever reason, they're not implementing them at the time. You know how many ideas I've had that later ended up in a game because someone else had the same idea? In either case, I vote that we post our concept art, our screen shots, our programming milestones and progress, and our game play features... ok, within reason.

It will do two things. One, we'll be able to give credit to people on the team. Like, "programmer so and so has got the chat system working," or "after whatshisname got the human female model rigged, animator so and so completed this awesome run animation and here's the video." Would this make us look less professional? Yeah, it would. But two, it would give followers of this blog and of the project a real inside look into the process. Is it more important for us to look like a cold, polished, well funded enterprise or more important for us to connect with people?

But like I'm saying here, it's not the ideas that have value. It's the skills required to turn those ideas into a game. I will say though, I'm really, really happy about the game play and story ideas we've put together for Dawnshine. And yeah, I'll start sharing them... soon.

For now, I've been able to recruit a couple people, but I'm going to do a big recruiting push soon. It will be interesting to see what Sacramento has to offer. We're a decent sized city with not nearly enough game development going on. That means more talent than opportunities. Let's see if we can change that.

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