Looking for Pro Business Partner, creating a Game Engine co., Have working product

When you say your looking for a business partner, you might want to specify any hard and soft skills you imagine this person having.

The main issue I see, is you already build something, you just need someone to do all the business end, that your not good at and assume you don't have time for. The issue is, they need to feel invested in the product, the engine, the game.

If you approached me about it, I'd be concerned, because, while your doing all the technical stuff, I'd be the one selling your product and getting people to adopt it, what's my motivation to do that? This person would be doing all the leg work for a product they had no hand in making.

Why is this engine better than unity unreal godot game maker, etc. etc. What can it do?

I'd personally write up a story document, that details your skills and motivation to spend 20+ years of your life making this engine. Really sell you and your story to me. And any prospective business partner. Since your giving this engine away for free, how are we making money?

Is it just you right now?

What are your short and long term goals?

Do you have analytics of how many people are currently using your engine? what games they made? how successful they are?

What country are you located in? How will the business be taxed? What % of the business are you willing to part with? Is there already a company formed, or would we need to do that? Does,/ can every game we want to make be made on this engine?

I'd think about all these things, and prepare a document.

I probably can't do it myself, because I'm already “the business guy” for my LLC, and I am not fully satisfied or qualified for it, but I'd thought I'd lend my perspective.

Had a brief look into your comparsion page and it feels like you're overstating your product.

Zero Known Bugs

Yes. Even if bugs appear they're always fixed ASAP and in 99% cases within a day.

How many dev testers do you have to proof every aspect and combination of your software is 100% bug free?

How can bugs be fixed within a day if you have your goal of being a competitor? Unreal Engine has over 7 Million users at the moment so to become a competitor, you'd have lets say 3.5 Million users and those may report 10.000 bugs a day on avarage. How do you consider to fix 10.000 bugs a day? How often do you plan to make stable releases?

Super Optimized

Yes, every single part of the Engine and Editor has been written with highest performance and minimal memory usage in mind, there were no cut corners. All of this results in fast startup, load times, compile times, responsive Editor, which can be verified on this page.

Hoe can you give a guarantee if third-party libs like PhysX make use of STL?

________

I'm sorry, I really honor your work but you don't feel trustworthy enough for any busines partner to get together. What is your motivational driver to run this project, what do you want achieve?

If you just want to make tons of money and “play with the big guys”, this isn't enough for todays world of open source projects and GitHub communities. Epic Games has more money to spend each month than one of us will earn in an entire life and employees have more accumulated expertise than a single person can ever have.

My suggestion, don't do this with focus on making the big money, do it for your own pleasure and if your product is that good, show it by making a AAA quality game

Just a side question. Your page says “unlimited size worlds”. Does that mean it supports 64 but coordinates?

Hi and thanks for your messages everyone , I will reply and clarify everything soon ?

OK So first let me start that I wrote a much bigger post over here: https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/711027-story-of-a-game-engine-creator-cold-hearted-epic-games-megagrants-unreal-marketplace-deletes-reviews/​​

Where you can read more about me, and what I did in my life, and why I did it.

GeneralJist said:
you might want to specify any hard and soft skills you imagine this person having.

Anything that will help in achieving the goals/tasks that I wrote in my first post.
Someone good with business/marketing/with people, a people's person, a magic man, a salesman, being able to sell a refrigerator to penguins is a good start ? That's just joking of course. I don't want to comment on skills, because specifying skills are not important, what's important to me are results, good attitude, and being fair, no lying/cheating or stuff like that. Someone that can make things happen.

GeneralJist said:
while your doing all the technical stuff, I'd be the one selling your product and getting people to adopt it, what's my motivation to do that?

How about building a great product, help game developers, and a chance to turn it into a job and get paid for it? But I can't tell you what your motivation can be, that's for you and you only ? I'm not trying to brainwash anyone, I'd like everyone to have their own opinion/motivation.

GeneralJist said:
Since your giving this engine away for free, how are we making money?

There are many ways to monetize a game engine: license fees, royalties, donations, paid support, paid adding features, asset stores, making advertisement platforms for mobile games, getting grants/sponsors/investors.

Since I've made the engine free, the better way is to exclude license fees and royalties.

GeneralJist said:
What can it do?

Does this help?

https://esenthel.com/?id=what_it_can_do​​

https://esenthel.com/?id=feature_list​​

GeneralJist said:
Is it just you right now?

I'm the only developer.

We have a small community https://esenthel.com/forum/​​ of people using the engine for their projects, it's not anything massive but it's not a ghost town either.

GeneralJist said:
What are your short and long term goals?

First I'm going to finish my game: https://www.facebook.com/EsenthelDungeon​

That will take a few months, it's near the finish line already.

Then I plan to keep on working on my engine and my game https://www.facebook.com/EsenthelWorld​​ until I die.

I think to have a game studio and work in a team could be cool with the right people.

GeneralJist said:
Do you have analytics of how many people are currently using your engine? what games they made? how successful they are?

No analytics, it's a small community.

Some of the games - https://store.steampowered.com/app/218640/Lucius/​

https://store.steampowered.com/app/867290/Crossroads_Inn_Anniversary_Edition/​​

Those 2 developers, I don't know the exact details, but I know they got good money.

I've made my own small game too - https://store.steampowered.com/app/366810/Dungeon_Hero/​​

Keep in mind that all of those games used older version of the engine, so the graphics don't represent the full potential of the engine, for latest version you can check here:

https://www.facebook.com/EsenthelDungeon​​ - this is a remake of my Dungeon Hero game
https://www.facebook.com/EsenthelWorld

GeneralJist said:
What country are you located in? How will the business be taxed? What % of the business are you willing to part with? Is there already a company formed, or would we need to do that? Does,/ can every game we want to make be made on this engine?

I was born in Poland, lived in New Zealand 5+ years where I've got my 2nd citizenship. Now I have a home, wife and baby and live in Thailand. Have time to work 6 days a week. % are negotiable. Company would have to be formed. Yes any game (within normal reason) can be made.

GeneralJist said:
but I'd thought I'd lend my perspective.

I appreciate any comments, thanks ?

Shaarigan said:
How many dev testers do you have to proof every aspect and combination of your software is 100% bug free?

You are missing the important word “known” bugs ?

Shaarigan said:
How can bugs be fixed within a day

I'm not saying that I guarantee that all bugs are fixed in one day. What I'm talking about is what has happened throughout the history of my engine. When people reported some bugs, I checked them, if there was a problem indeed, I've made a fix, and uploaded it. Easy. And in around 99% cases that was done within a day. But to be more precise, I've replaced the "99% cases" with the word “most cases”. Because I haven't calculated it mathematically, that's just a guesstimate. (Also I don't count any potential bugs in third party libraries or GPU drivers that I'm not responsible for)

Shaarigan said:
Hoe can you give a guarantee if third-party libs like PhysX make use of STL?

Sorry, I don't quite understand what you mean.

Shaarigan said:
I'm sorry, I really honor your work but you don't feel trustworthy enough for any busines partner to get together. What is your motivational driver to run this project, what do you want achieve?

Trust is something that can be earned proportionally to amount of time and interactions between 2 parties. If you're looking for more info about me, you can read the new posts that I've made.

Shaarigan said:
If you just want to make tons of money and “play with the big guys”, this isn't enough for todays world of open source projects and GitHub communities.

Actually that's not what I'm looking for. I'm perfectly happy to have enough money just to live a healthy and happy life.

Shaarigan said:
Epic Games has more money to spend each month than one of us will earn in an entire life and employees have more accumulated expertise than a single person can ever have.

That's part of the problem, big companies are too powerful. They have power to both create and destroy. Big companies are also focused on big money - big customers and don't care about small developers. They spend hundreds of millions on PR, Marketing, waging tech wars. That's a complete waste. That money should be spent to do good in the world and help people, fight air pollution, climate change, poverty, etc. It's a very bad approach to put all money in one company and make them super rich and powerful, that's just dangerous to everyone. The more reason there should be more competition, you'd have more fairness and innovation.

Shaarigan said:
don't do this with focus on making the big money, do it for your own pleasure and if your product is that good, show it by making a AAA quality game

Yes, exactly, that's what I'm doing ? Except I don't focus on the “AAA quality” part. What I'm doing is trying to make a great game, and I give it my best.

https://www.facebook.com/EsenthelDungeon
https://www.facebook.com/EsenthelWorld

Gnollrunner said:
Your page says “unlimited size worlds”. Does that mean it supports 64 but coordinates?

Initially I wrote unlimited because there are no strict limits for the world itself, but there are however limits related to memory and processing power and floating point precision issues. So I've clarified that by changing it to “Huge Sized Worlds - The only limits are related to floating point precision and what your computer can handle”

BTW. I do have support for 64-bit float (double), but only for rendering part, but not for the built-in game world manager or physics engine.

There are two ways to start a business based on a product idea:

1. Build it, and then try to figure out how to sell it
2. Figure out how to sell something, and then build that

Unfortunately, option 1 is generally not very successful, because what the market is prepared to pay for frequently surprises those who know how to build things.

Things we build and think are great, the market shrugs its shoulders at. Things that we might think are no big deal, can be the seed of a billion dollar company. The market moves in mysterious and people-driven ways!

So, the first thing you might want said business person to do, would be to figure out what the path to success would even be. What are the holes in the market that you solve, that others don't? How do you identify the people who are suffering from that hole? How do you reach them so they even know about you, and then make them trust you to the point where they're willing to base their own success on you?

When it comes to game engines, the road is littered with dead projects, each of which was probably great in its own way, but it just didn't manage to fill a hole that's big and deep enough, to compete against all the other better-supported options that already exist. Godot has many more tutorials than you can ever write. Unreal has fancier graphics and simulation than you can ever write. Unity has a bigger asset store of ready-made content than you can ever provision. “very large levels” is not actually a problem most developers have, unless they are, like, Rockstar, and I don't think they are looking to switch engines… because when you build a “very large” world, you also need to build “very much” content, which in turn means it's a really big, expensive, job, where a small, single-developer engine really isn't a reasonable choice. (It's more likely they'd offer you a job to collaborate with a bunch of other developers.)

Alternatively the OP could look for a publisher to partner with, but you'd still need a business guy on your side to make sure your not getting screwed.

oh, another good question:

How much money have you sunk in this so far?

Do you have a way of supporting yourself and your family if this never takes off, or takes too long, or whatever reason fails or doesn't achieve the Hight of success your looking for?

In Game dev the analogy is much like your building a house, and you have to do everything.

But you've taken it a step further, and built an engine, which is like crafting your own tools and, cutting down your own trees to make furniture, instead of going to Ikea and home depot for those things.

I commend your effort,, but at the end of the day, most people buy tools and furniture., now your responsible for literally everything. If the tools break, you can't call someone for a warranty, or buy replacement parts you'd have to recrate the tool.

And although all of this speaks to a sense of independence and determination, it could also be a sign of anti social tendencies and the inability to work well with others.

It's also a judgement call thing, sounds like you spent 20 years working alone doing everything. Is there a reason why you never asked for help on this and other issues before? It's also a time management issue.

Put it another way,

Your a single dad, raising a kid for 20 years, all by yourself.

Now that it's essentially a young adult, you go out into the dating market, telling people you are looking for a wife to help parent your kid, and take him to the next level, and fund his college tuition.

What's our motivation to consider you and your son?

Why would we spend our money on his college?

We have no investment emotionally or intellectually, in your 20 year old son, even if he was the greatest son there ever was, and he was kind, empathetic, driven to succeed, smart, beautiful, etc. et. [Insert desirable quality here,] he is still your son. And we would be setting him up for success.

As you well know, if we had gotten in on the ground floor. And helped you raise and shape him, then we would be significantly more motivated and invested. But you chose not to do that, and it was a conscious choice for 20 years.

What's changed?

Why have you not been looking for someone earlier?

It may sound like I'm trying to rehash the past, but your motivations and reasons to do this are paramount, and any prospective candidate would need to know.

esenthel said:
Anything that will help in achieving the goals/tasks that I wrote in my first post. Someone good with business/marketing/with people, a people's person, a magic man, a salesman, being able to sell a refrigerator to penguins is a good start ? That's just joking of course. I don't want to comment on skills, because specifying skills are not important, what's important to me are results, good attitude, and being fair, no lying/cheating or stuff like that. Someone that can make things happen.

Your basically saying to us that you have no idea of what your looking for, but you know what results you want. That's speaking like a true executive. No idea how to get it done, but you just want it done.

I'd highly recommend you do more research on what business people and managers do, so that you have a base level of understanding.

Even if you were able to find a trustworthy skilled results driven person that matched all your requirements, how would you know they are taking your product in the right direction? How would you know what decisions are good for him to make alone, vs. running everything by you.?

If your trying to build a company, around your engine, maybe you should recruit from your own community? Maybe you should look for more junior programmers to help you with the engine, so you have time to do other things?

Instead of finding one person that can do all the amorphous business stuff that you don't understand, perhaps split it up into multiple roles that work for you, with a smaller equity in the company?

So if I was in your situation, I would write up a standard document, that lists out a lot of what your looking for, and that answers a majority of our questions, kinda like a FAQ. Continue to add to that, and share the doc, with people who meet your minimum qualifications. As of now, you don't have any minimum qualifications. Your essentially just saying “Whoever can get the job done”.

This is to standardize and systematize the process you have for looking for this individual. Across all your platforms, so that way you know what your saying, where your saying it, and an entire approach.

It's been said that business partners are like marriages. You need to be sure, and trust them on multiple levels. And be compatible on similar levels.

Look, I've been working with my current business partner since 2014, and I have 2 prospective BPs that I've been working with for 10 years nd 6 years respectively. Expecting to find someone compatible will take time. I'm kinda confused as to why you didn't spend the past 20 years looking, but it was likely because you were too focused on the building of the product.

Not to mention time zone, that can be a huge thing to consider.

Sorry but it's not a good sign that your just asking now, what were you doing for the past 20 years that prevented you from looking for a BP? It speaks to poor planning and questionable judgement , and an ego that believes they can do everything themselves.

One of the core issues that I see, is the person has to be somewhat technical to understand what they are getting into. But through your actions or inactions, it's clear that they would be stepping on your toes if they had an opinion about the product.

Honestly another way to go about this, is to just recruit people for your game. And see how that goes. That would give you a stepping stone to find the kind of person you need.

Like it or not, we live in a world of specialists, part of the issue that you sound oblivious to, is that sales, marketing, public relations, human resources fund raising management, are all different domains of expertise, most people pick one and go down it there entire life. Finding one person that can do it all, and “take care of all the business stuff” that you ignored for 20 years is going to be really hard.

The main issue, that I can tell you from experience is that these business roles are usually not fun. They have to do a lot of leg work and paperwork They have to have difficult conversations with people, they have to be able to motivate people to perform under a variety of circumstances, they have to worry about hiring and firing people, they have to worry about budgets, legal, accounting and cashflow concerns. It's all stressful, and the trade off must be appealing. it's your responsibility to make it as appealing as possible. As a potential co-founder and business partner, you need to be able to motivate me, and draw a clear line from me around the risks, and to the rewards. You need to walk us down the logic path, and lead me to water. I

esenthel said:
while your doing all the technical stuff, I'd be the one selling your product and getting people to adopt it, what's my motivation to do that? How about building a great product, help game developers, and a chance to turn it into a job and get paid for it? But I can't tell you what your motivation can be, that's for you and you only ? I'm not trying to brainwash anyone, I'd like everyone to have their own opinion/motivation.

As said, Your recruiting us, it's your responsibility to sell yourself and the product to us, you'll need to be able to motivate this person, and hopefully eventually a team and company. I'd highly recommend you do some research into psychology and motivation. It's one thing to motivate yourself, it's another to motivate others.

But how do we know your product is great? How do we know your working on something that has potential? It's not enough that your telling us, we need to hear it from unbiased sources and existing users. Maybe make and push out a satisfaction survey for all your currant users? Something that could be like a testimonial? Do you have a feedback section on your forum?

There is always the possibility of making money, Are we talking a Full time job? or a part time job? What are your projections of how long it will take to generate a return on investment? How stable is this possible job?

I can probably say a lot more, but I think that is enough for now to chew on.

(keep in mind, you don't need to answer everything here publicly now, but you need to think and later answer these to yourself and your future applicants.)

Gnollrunner said:
Your page says “unlimited size worlds”. Does that mean it supports 64 but coordinates?

Initially I wrote unlimited because there are no strict limits for the world itself, but there are however limits related to memory and processing power and floating point precision issues. So I've clarified that by changing it to “Huge Sized Worlds - The only limits are related to floating point precision and what your computer can handle”

BTW. I do have support for 64-bit float (double), but only for rendering part, but not for the built-in game world manager or physics engine.

Well that's like every engine then, except for the rendering part which IMO isn't that useful given current GPUs. I believe they are working on this for Unreal Engine, but it's not there yet. It actually isn't so difficult if you do it up front. I do this in my code, but I don't have a full engine. It would be nice if an indie engine supported it

GeneralJist said:
Why have you not been looking for someone earlier?

If you've read my other post, you can find out that I've started my programming journey since a young boy, as a hobby, that has steadily grown over time. There are many reasons why I was never looking for someone before

-I never needed someone else, I was learning at first, doing everything step by step, and all problems I've encountered, I was able to solve them. Yeah of course I went on internet looking for some information if a problem was complex, but never really needed anyone to do some tasks for me, as I was capable of doing them on my own

-so why have to look for someone, when everything is going well, and can grow more and more

-if I had earned much more money than I was getting, then yes I could think of hiring more people, as my employee or something, but I wasn't getting that much money, it was just enough for 1 person to have comfortable life

-also perhaps you're not considering the fact, that you're asking the question now, while we live in a different time, with plenty of engines available / high competition, while I was starting long time ago, when the market was much more open/easier for newcomers. And at this time, if you want to build something like a game engine, you have to do it in a bigger group, but in the past you didn't have to.

-many teams or companies form naturally, by encountering people in life that share the same interest, and they just join you naturally. I didn't encounter anyone in my life that had similar interest of building a game engine

-if you're open or not open into looking for more people, also depends on the experiences that you've had with other people. Example: when I've got some money for my first licenses, I've decided to build a better website for it. I've hired a company to do it for me, spent a lot of cash, but they constantly kept making problems, delays, didn't work well, not as I ordered, PHP code was humongous, bloated, icons missing. It was just a frustration dealing with them, and after they finally finished, I've realized that the only thing usable was just the background graphics, so I had to rip out everything, keep the graphics and write PHP by myself. I would have saved a lot of money and time if I just did that by myself from the start. So it was kind of a story like “If you want something done right, do it yourself”

Ok so I want to mention that like I wrote in my another post, I've decided to focus on working on my games. Anyone interested can still message me, but for now I'm going to focus on finishing my game projects.

Your saying you want someone to work with, but you also feel like you can do most stuff by yourself.

Your saying your going to work alone on your games.

This speaks to an independent mindset, that has issues working with others.

As i said, you should recruit to your game, and if people work out, you can see if any of them are trust worthy and fit your style with the potential of being a business partner.

If your not able to handle that, than your putting the cart before the hoarse with looking for a business partner,

Gnollrunner said:
except for the rendering part

The there.com engine used double precision for coordinates, and just subtracted the camera position to render everything in floats. It did a full earth-sized planet, from space down to the ground. It also did physics in double precision, to make sure everyone saw the same simulation. In 2001.

Turns out, this isn't a good enough feature to make a product stick. Content and experience is king!

@jon1

jon1 said:

Gnollrunner said:
except for the rendering part

The there.com engine used double precision for coordinates, and just subtracted the camera position to render everything in floats. It did a full earth-sized planet, from space down to the ground. It also did physics in double precision, to make sure everyone saw the same simulation. In 2001.

Turns out, this isn't a good enough feature to make a product stick. Content and experience is king!

Yes this is common strategy. I do it myself. I have never been on there.com, however from googling it, it doesn't sound like an engine but rather a game and not even that, more like a virtual community. I suppose anything that's used to make a game can be considered an engine, but correct me if I'm wrong , the "engine" was and is not available to the public. The only real engines that do this that I know of are Unigen (used for Dual Universe, and high priced) and NeoAxis which is C# based. Unigen at least seems to be doing OK, but my impression is they it is mostly used for high dollar projects, most of them not being games.

jon1 said:
double precision for coordinates, and just subtracted the camera position to render everything in floats.

That's the same approach I chose in Esenthel Engine.

Gnollrunner said:
I have never been on there.com, however from googling it, it doesn't sound like an engine but rather a game and not even that, more like a virtual community.

It was absolutely an (in-house) engine, with an API to write addable objects (in C++) for selected developers.

High-performance scripting add-ins wasn't really a thing in 2001, although there existed a Lua integration used mainly for testing.

The engine supported many checkboxes for “modern” virtual worlds:

• Build big things from small “blocks” and get lots of instancing benefit
• Earth-sized world with ground-to-orbit navigation and simulation
• Dress-up avatars with body and facial shape variation and clothing conformance
• Lockstep based physics/networking engine that allowed late joiners, ran on a 56k modem at the time
• Divided zone simulation with “ghost replica" objects for distributed consistency, automatic geographic zone partitioning
• User driven marketplace for objects and clothing
• Virtual currency exchangeable with real currency
• Very early adoption of web tech for the services – in 2001, most other games/engines didn't do this
• Procedural terrain generation with artist-driven hints

The engine did not double down on graphical prowess, because the feeling was that a mass market product needs to run on integrated graphics. It also didn't have features like “a water renderer” for a long time …

On top of the engine, a virtual world was built, and inside the virtual world, a number of games were built. (Paintball arenas, racing tracks, etc.) However, what most users actually wanted to do, was hang out and chat. Some of the founders of there.com took that learning, and built IMVU, which had very little of the technical sizzle, but instead focused on the hanging-out aspect. Another branch of the engine adapted to mil/sim/training use cases, and eventually got bought by SAIC. Finally, the product-as-built kept operating for a long time by some early investors – it may still be up!

At the time, this was pretty cool tech. However, those features did not actually build a large business – it's not what people actually wanted. Roblox is much closer to something that people want; at least people in a certain (large) target age group. I think this works, because Roblox is much more about “this is the gaming experience we deliver” and much less about “this is a WORLD with HOMOGENOUS RULES" – the conclusion is that that bit is actually an anti-good, not a requirement at all.

hplus0603 said:

It was absolutely an (in-house) engine, with an API to write addable objects (in C++) for selected developers.

I'm not sure taking the lack of popularity one game built with an inhouse engine, is a good indicator of the usefulness of a 64 bit coordinates. A bad game can be written using Unreal Engine too, and in fact most hobby games using Unreal and or Unity have limited success if any. In any case comparing an game to an engine is like comparing a Mercedes to a Toyota UZ engine. They aren't the same thing.

Gnollrunner said:
I'm not sure taking the lack of popularity one game

That's not the argument I'm making. There exist many projects that try to do the “full world as a game/universe" thing, and the size just isn't a draw. A user cannot possibly experience the entire space anyway – it's too vast!

My point is: If “implements a really big world” was enough to make a game/experience compelling, then there exist many, many, projects that should have succeeded, and this is one of them.

My point is also, at the higher level: A technical laundry list tells me nothing about how successful your experience will be. People buy experiences, not technology.

My point is: If “implements a really big world” was enough to make a game/experience compelling, then there exist many, many, projects that should have succeeded, and this is one of them.

Nobody is claiming that it is “enough”. I think it' can be a desirable feature especially in online games, but the rest of the game has to be solid. Also it's useless if you can't populate a large world with interesting things. In any case if there is no good publicly available engine that easily supports it, it makes developing such games much harder. Finally I've seen quite a few threads on various sites asking for this. One of them is on Unreal Forum and they are apparently finally working on it. My current DirectX code supports it but I don't have anywhere near a full engine.

Gnollrunner said:
I've seen quite a few threads on various sites asking for this

People keep thinking it will solve some imagined problem, and everytime it's tried, it doesn't. The people who actually have the “whole world” problem, are more likely to be transitioning from ArgGIS, than they are to be transitioning from Fortnite.

It's a bit like the whole “metaverse” idea :-)