I am making a souls game I can’t pay with anything but I can give u 100 credit for what you do but I need a 3d modeler and a coder

You'll be damn hard pressed to make a game like that. It isn't easy at all. Unity is a great game engine, but you need some real talent to rival Elden Ring, and...well, Elden Ring already did it, and they did it better than anyone's done it before. You'd better bring the same thing done just as well, or something new.

I wish you the best of luck, but I must say, this will be a huge undertaking, regardless of which engine you use. Elden Ring is popular for a reason; they poured an absolute ton of talent into making that game. If you want to rival it, you'll need a lot of fuckin' money, and even more skill.

I don't think "hiring" is the correct word when the OP admits up front they're not paying a dime. What's the correct jargon for profit sharing?

They said they were making a souls like game. They did not say they were intending to make a game that rivals the quality of Elden Ring. They were simply trying to describe the genre they have in mind.

Works in a genre exist at different price points. Without more info we don't know the feasibility of the venture. However I'd certainly advise anyone to approach the "offer" with a huge caveat emptor.

Forgot to put more information and ty for replying about that but games name is VileHeart and yes trying to make a game that is fun that looks good like Elden ring please put your discord name here I’ll add you and I will give u more information and send u the discord game will take a while to come out so be patient.

bvanevery wrote:

I don't think "hiring" is the correct word when the OP admits up front they're not paying a dime. What's the correct jargon for profit sharing?

They said they were making a souls like game. They did not say they were intending to make a game that rivals the quality of Elden Ring. They were simply trying to describe the genre they have in mind.

Works in a genre exist at different price points. Without more info we don't know the feasibility of the venture. However I'd certainly advise anyone to...

Haha, good point.

I suppose a half-assed Elden Ring could be on the table.
I would recommend caution to anyone who wants to get involved in this venture. Sounds a bit fishy.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

CaseyHardman wrote:

bvanevery wrote:

I don't think "hiring" is the correct word when the OP admits up front they're not paying a dime. What's the correct jargon for profit sharing?

They said they were making a souls like game. They did not say they were intending to make a game that rivals the quality of Elden Ring. They were simply trying to describe the genre they have in mind.

Works in a genre exist at different price points. Without more info we don't know the feasibility of the venture. However I'd certainl...

Yeah can’t lie for myself I sounds fishy but it’s always up to yall if yall wanna help or not so yeah and I will also try my best to make it the best I can!

Just a piece of advice: nobody with self-respect will DM you to get invited into a secret discord just to learn about the plans for an Elden Ring clone that they don't get paid to build.

Most first-time (and even after multiple attempts) indie game designers suck and have no taste. They confuse their enthusiasm and emotions with actual design quality. And then after 3-5 years, when they burn out and the delusions finally break away, they notice that they had no idea what they were doing, had no clear goal they wanted to achieve, and also had no understanding of why it was supposed to be fun, and who the target audience was supposed to be.

Making a 3D game with animations, props, and a handcrafted world is almost certainly not going to be realistic for a 1-man team. Especially at a high quality. Even just making a 2D game of moderate complexity and high quality will take you years of full-time work. Now, I know that 2D can actually take more work than 3D under certain conditions, but the general point still stands. You're expecting someone to offer work that is worth at least 2-3 full-time yearly salaries. So around 80k–270k. And you're asking that of multiple people. And people with the skills to take care of an entire field like textures, shaders, models, and level design are worth way more than just a 3d model artist. And the same goes for the programming side. Someone who can make the entire game's AI, engine-side code, optimisation, gameplay code, etc., is worth way more than just a generic programmer.

If you really want to get people who are this talented be interested in your project, you need to be the one who either brings money to the table, or you have to prove your worth up front — not expect them to go through hoops to beg you to get invited to some secret discord where you then share your probably naive game design idea.

Mostly agree RmbRT, but a counterpoint: Minecraft Alpha sucked, but Notch blew it up and got rich anyways. Flappy Bird, Deer Hunter, similar in some ways. The moral of such stories, is that abandoning well-entrenched industry expectations can be very very profitable. It's not easy to hit such brass rings though. A dev willing to ask, "What does a complete POS souls like really mean?" might have a chance.

Notch of course did work solo, starting from Infiniminer as a design / proof-of-concept basis. He proved his value and didn't expect anyone to show up on a secret channel or mailing list to be "bestowed an honor". Directing group efforts is a major skill in and of itself, one that the majority of people have no clue about. I figure everyone is entitled to their own learning curve in that regard, i.e. the people who yet lack self-respect, as you put it RmbRT. I learned decades ago, that I get far more done, when I'm the only moving part in the machine.

Notch's 3D coding skills were a complete joke as far as us professionals at the time were concerned. His Java crud did get rewritten in C++ with proper 3D engine design. But he was smart or dumb enough, take your pick, to use Java at a time when it became barely good enough, that a solo dev could cough out a rudimentary 3D engine.

And that if you abandon other expectations about a game, like designing much of anything or ensuring any of it is worth bothering to play, you can make some serious headway. He just outsourced all that to social media, which in his day, was a new rising possibility. Minecraft was hardly the 1st "builder" game to come along, plenty in a previous generation had already done better production values. But nobody had coughed up an ugly rudimentary voxel block game "toy" before, so there you go. Ultimately worth $2+ billion once he sold out.

And he never made anything good again, because he was incapable in that regard.

Yeah, it seems to be often the case even that studios have one-hit wonders and then slowly die off over the next few games & sequels they release, because they don't understand what made their initial hit so great, and then they try to improve on it but only make it worse in the sequel. So it is true that even someone who isn't really talented in game design can still make something hugely successful, but they usually fail to ever again make anything good afterwards. Even a blind chicken occasionally pecks a seed.

If someone can prove to me that he actually has genuine insight into game design, I would be highly tempted to bet on that person and work on his game. But even then, so much can go wrong: coordinating the team, finding the right people, running out of budget (although that should already be a consideration from the start, a design you can't build within your means is a bad design), sickness and other things, etc..

I am currently working with a friend on a game design that I undestand. It's doing some novel / rare things, but I can fundamentally imagine what the gameplay & controls I envision will feel like, what fantasies/preferences and personalities it appeals to, what it will look like, roughly, the pacing, atmosphere, etc.. And I can roughly envision every step it will take to build it, so I can also roughly estimate the effort it will take. I did a lot of project planning and supervision and execution at my job, and I possess all the skills to make the game from start to finish, so I roughly know what I'm talking about.

How is someone who can't program, nor model, nor has any experience leading others, nor produced any indication that suggests he has a game design talent — how is he supposed to lead a multi-year project? He probably has no clue how much effort any part of it takes. He probably also has 0 clue what special expertise will be needed for his specific game. Someone with 0 understanding of those subjects cannot even properly lead the people who are capable of doing those things. And he's therefore also incapable of envisioning what he really wants to accomplish, or anything unique.

Necessarily what I ment about like Elden ring like as fun as it and a souls like game like saying Elden ring as an example because I know it’s hard to rival a game like Elden. Really hard.

What engine do you use? I could help if its something im familiar with like Unreal Engine or Godot

AvacadoDeveloper wrote:

because I know it’s hard to rival a game like Elden. Really hard.

Yes. Keep saying that - 'gamedev is hard', 'it costs 5 billions to do x', 'ideas are worth nothing'...

Keep saying it, and it will prevent the response you got, actually other hobby devs telling you 'how hard it is'.

But saying does not mean believing.

You can beat Elden Ring! \:D/

There's a big difference between hard designs and designs that require a lot of work / effort to pull off.

Hard designs might not be much effort necessarily, but require high skill. Designs that are a lot of work to pull off aren't necessarily hard, they just require a lot of time.

So if a design is too hard for you, assess whether you can get good enough to still pull it off, or whether you can find a design that avoids having you solve hard problems.

And if a design is too much work, see whether you can solve it smarter (such as via procedural generation) or whether you can scale down the design.

JoeJ said:
You can beat Elden Ring! \:D/

You can't beat Elden Ring at being Elden Ring, at least not as an indie. But you certainly have a real chance to make something that beats it in certain areas, but always with massive drawbacks. So you would need a design that can maximally leverage its strengths and make it so that its weaknesses don't have much of an impact.

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@khawk please add a feature that prompts you before leaving the site if you already had something typed in. I accidentally hit the mouse and it did a page reload and nuked my post.

RmbRT wrote:

There's a big difference between hard designs and designs that require a lot of work / effort to pull off.

You mean, game design is hard too? /O:\
Omg, i was talking about programming - preventing objects from falling through the floor, or the hopeless task to make characters alive using animations, ... and such things.
But maybe you're right and figuring out exactly which game to make can as well be difficult, in some cases.

Though, to me the game design was never difficult or a lot of work at all. Because, when i was still making games, i never thought about game design, or did any game design. I did not even know this word exists, since it wasn't mentioned in the technical topics i did actually read about. I became aware about this profession only 10 years ago in discussion with other 'hobby devs'. Actually rather just 'wannabe devs', who never contributed to a game at all. Basically gamers, who became self appointed experts in 'game design'. I even got the impression that gamers are the worlds leading experts in game design, while those who do it professionally just mess everything up.

However, that's not the actual reason why i refuse to take 'game design' so dead serious, like you do for example.
The reason is that - imo - a game designer is needed only for large teams. If there are many cooks, you better have some plan so they don't spoil the booth due to a lack of given direction.
But we are no large teams, so we don't need a game design. We can afford to use something much better: Improvisation.
We can change our design every day if we want. Up to the point where it no longer makes much sense to even write it down.
Improvisation is essential to creativity, so we should use it.

What if we don't, but rather plan ahead, writing down a game design on paper before we even start the development?
You may argue that's still creative, just focusing all the creativity in the early planning phase, clearly divided from engineering and content creation.
But imo that's bad. Not only because we want to keep the whole process creative, but mostly because game design on paper does not work.
Games are complex interactive machines, and you can't predict how it feels to interact with them, without actually interacting with them for real, not in your imagination.
It's a feedback loop. You try something out, implement it, test it, tweak it, change your plans depending on the outcome.
So the game design is undefined during development, and can be extracted only afterwards, when the game is already finished.
Which is exactly what those gamers designing their dream game do.

And this is also the reason why professional game designers exist, i guess. They made so many games already, so they can predict how the machine feels. Maybe. Idk. I only know for sure that i can not, but i prefer to improvise anyway.

RmbRT wrote:

You can't beat Elden Ring at being Elden Ring, at least not as an indie.

Who knows? Maybe a single guy at the age of 14 could have made a better game, after some time, when he was already 30.

But sadly it did not happen.

Because when he came to a game dev forum asking for help, the seniors there only told him he's naive and game dev is too hard for him.

I did not really read all the responses in detail, but my quick impression was it's eventually not that motivating. And maybe we shouldn't be like that. I can imagine i'm not helpful either with telling beginners 'start with Pong'. I mean, it's 2026. : )

JoeJ wrote:

But we are no large teams, so we don't need a game design.

That's confusing game design, for game designing for a large team. The latter handles a lot of communication overhead and trying to get people to pay attention to the game design. What you need to do for a large team, a small team, or just one person is quite different, but there still needs to be some form of game design.

Winging it with few people who are not terribly invested in a specific game design vision and aren't trying to do anything particularly new, could work, because communication overhead will probably not swamp you. But if you get people with different artistic vision, or someone who's got vision and someone who doesn't / can't be arsed with visions, then production effort is likely to diverge. The endgame can be the partners going their separate ways, as what happens with many music bands.

bvanevery wrote:

That's confusing game design, for game designing for a large team.

I'm not confusing anything and i made my point clear.

You want to make a game? Jump in and do so. It's hard enough. No need to overthink how the game will end up. You will see when it's done.

bvanevery wrote:

The endgame can be the partners going their separate ways, as what happens with many music bands.

Yep, can happen. Bad luck, not a lack of a correct game design set in stone handed to anybody when he was hired.

Led Zeppelin never got a new drummer, Kurt Cobain killed himself, and the Beatles never reunited.

But one thing is clear: Ritchie did not write down the notation of the Smoke On The Water riff to paper, and then heard it's great when he played it.
It was the other way around: He did improvise on guitar, and in a moment of creation he came up with this riff by random coincidence.
Then he noted it down.
The rest of the song was put together later, over time.

You can not plan for a moment of magic. But you can prevent it from actually happening by setting things in stone too early.

You guys can ignore my advice. But you should know your way isn't the only one, or the correct one.

JoeJ said:
You want to make a game? Jump in and do so. It's hard enough. No need to overthink how the game will end up. You will see when it's done.

No, you really are confusing multiple things, including what I tried to get at in my post.

There are designs / ideas for games which are, even after all designing is done, are hard to build. For example, there hasn't yet been a strategy game which didn't have to resort to having its AI cheat, either by not being constrained to the fog of war, or by generating resources out of thin air, or by producing units without paying for them, etc.. Same with racing games: all racing games I heard of use rubber banding to some degree, to give a boost to the poorly performing AI. If your game design intends to have a good AI that doesn't cheat, that's a hard design, because it actually requires you to solve a hard problem during the AI programming. That's irrespective of whether designing the concept was hard or not.

Game design, when taken seriously, can be very hard. Usually, the more ambitious and novel the idea, the harder it is to polish the design: mechanics, flow, content, style, atmosphere, etc., so that they form a satisfying and enjoyable, coherent whole. That doesn't just mean balancing, but also setting the right incentive structures, and coming up with exactly the look and feel that you eventually try to pull off.

I also want to make it clear that I am not endorsing formal game design theory. Everything that comes out of academia is IMO useless, incomplete, and often misleading and detached from reality. Beauty and fun simply have fundamental rules of nature that you can explore with your intuition, and when you come up with your plan for your game, not thinking about those, and not being aware of those, will basically reduce your game to being a random gamble.

JoeJ said:
But one thing is clear: Ritchie did not write down the notation of the Smoke On The Water riff to paper, and then heard it's great when he played it.

I think you are conflating game design with endless design documents and theory crafting. Just like a composer doesn't have to compose a piece on paper, he also doesn't have to compose it in a jam session. And he doesn't even have to be aware of musical theory, as long as he has good taste and intuition. The theory was developed out of the findings of tasteful and talented people who first created great works even without theory. A composer is still a composer even if he didn't theory-craft his way to the song he composed. Analoguosly, it's still game design, even if you don't use formal processes. But if you spend no thought on designing the game, and how it would feel to play it, you're most likely just wearing rose-tinted glasses and end up burning out after a few years, after you realise your game has no focus, like in all those failed indie game post-mortem videos.

bvanevery said:
That's confusing game design, for game designing for a large team. The latter handles a lot of communication overhead and trying to get people to pay attention to the game design. What you need to do for a large team, a small team, or just one person is quite different, but there still needs to be some form of game design.

Yes. One is designing the game and also assigning work & considering the logistical side of things, and for a small team or solo project, game design basically only consists of the actual game's design, not really of the process of how to get it done, because it's much more straightforward in a solo project. But even then, you want to be aware of what steps it would take to realise your idea, and how much effort that roughly is, and what the implications between separate decisions are, such as in my current project, I want certain lighting effects that follow the style of a painter, which requires that my assets contain lighting-relevant information and I even had to come up with a proper colour space within which I can apply a painter's thinking when handling light. This requires me to make my own image editor, so that I can edit an image that contains the lighting & surface information that I need for my systems. If I didn't aim for having that painterly lighting system, then I wouldn't need to make my own editor. So decisions like that directly affect multiple parts of the project and puts additional requirements on them, and changes the amount of work I need to do to get it done.

JoeJ said:
You can not plan for a moment of magic. But you can prevent it from actually happening by setting things in stone too early.

At other points in the past, I have mentioned on this forum that there are two types of games: games that are experimental, where you start with a rough idea and then iterate on playable prototypes until you find something that is actually worthy of being a game. That's valid, but just because the initial idea seems nice doesn't mean that you necessarily end up with a good design down the road. The other kind is where the thing you are planning to do is kind of well-known already, like a platformer, where you do not need to make a playable prototype to somewhat accurately imagine what it feels and plays like, what the controls are, the pacing is, etc.. You can refine such a game's design in your head quite trivially, and then enter the prototyping phase to actually polish and fine-tune all the mechanics, etc.. This means, you can iterate on the design much quicker than if you had to make every idea by hand first in a playable prototype. How far you can go before you need to start iterating with actual prototypes depends on the designer's capability to imagine how his idea would play and feel. Also, for large teams, prototypes are a good way of communicating the exact design intent. In a solo project, there is no lossy communication of ideas.

And finally, prototypes also serve the role of validating a design, not just refining or communicating it. It again depends on the designer's skill to accurately imagine the game he is designing, determining how much validation or stress testing he can do in his head already, before the first prototype is built. Most people are probably not good at it, and that's fine, but most people also aren't suited for the role of game designer. Being able to detect fundamental flaws in the design early is invaluable and lets you rule out an idea before you even build a prototype. But there are always parts that are missed during the designing phase, and then you do need the flexibility of adjusting the design when those flaws become apparent later on during the prototyping / iteration phase.

RmbRT wrote:

No, you really are confusing multiple things, including what I tried to get at in my post.

I don't.

RmbRT wrote:

For example, there hasn't yet been a strategy game which didn't have to resort to having its AI cheat, either by not being constrained to the fog of war, or by generating resources out of thin air, or by producing units without paying for them, etc..

And you think such 'cheating' is bad design, and could have been avoided with a better design?

Maybe, but not necessarily. Cheating may work better in many cases and is in the game designers toolbox.

It's you here who is confusing personal ideals with 'good' game design.

RmbRT wrote:

If your game design intends to have a good AI that doesn't cheat, that's a hard design, because it actually requires you to solve a hard problem during the AI programming.

But AI programming is not part of game design.
Doing the design is indeed as easy as writing down 'Enemy AI has the same limitations as the player regarding visibility. Fog of war applies, and it only sees a rectangle at the size of the screen'.
That's not hard at all to write.

But personally i don't do even that. I don't need to. I just remember preventing cheating is something i want, i implement the AI with trial and error until i have something which works well, and depending on this feedback i decide what should be the next step.
I repeat until i have something which works and is fun to play.
Then you come in, analyze the game, and you detect some brilliant game design in planning all this complexity. And you conclude game design is hard and requires forethought, and... blah
But there was no plan at all beyond a vague vision, and the game did not even end up that way in the end.

RmbRT wrote:

will basically reduce your game to being a random gamble.

No, because i already expect my final outcome to be currently unknown.

It's you, who will be surprised in the end your game is not your initial design, so you will perceive it as 'random', and you may lack a plan to deal with it.

RmbRT wrote:

Just like a composer doesn't have to compose a piece on paper, he also doesn't have to compose it in a jam session.

Which is what i try to say with 'your way isn't the only one'. So no, i'm not conflating anything. While you often sound like dictating a certain way of how game design must be done precisely, or hellfire will spill over earth.

RmbRT wrote:

The theory was developed out of the findings of tasteful and talented people who first created great works even without theory.

No, that's not the case. It's a chicken and egg problem, and both talent and theory developed at the same time affecting but not dominating each other.

Kurt Cobain actually said 'music theory is useless', and he wrote absolute killer songs, just from talent.
But that was very simple rock music. You can't do the same in Classic, Jazz, or progressive rock. You will not get there without at least some basic knowledge about theory.

And i think we could say the same about programming. I would not have figured out 3D rotations, BSP trees, shortest paths, and all this other stuff just from my talent, even if i would be a genius.

But i do not think we can say the same about 'game design'. I don't require some theory to figure out which moves a pawn or a queen should be able to do, to give me a interesting game of chess. I can just trial and error.
I mean, you can make a science out of everything, if you want. And that's especially easy to do in retrospect.
But eventually you waste your time, just as much as those going to the game design university.

RmbRT wrote:

and end up burning out after a few years

I'm still here. I've lost some excitement, but i did not burn out.

You do not prevent a burn out from taking things too seriously right from the start.
You prevent a burnout by not taking things serious at all!

JoeJ wrote:

But AI programming is not part of game design.

It is if you're doing a somewhat complex strategic game and you want the AI to actually have a chance of doing a good job at it. When a "game designer" or other production person, often an artist, just adds another bell or whistle to the game rules, that increases the surface area of what the AI has to deal with. Too much of that and it'll never get done. All those bells and whistles just become ways for a human player to cheese the AI, because the AI has no clue about the new rule. That's the opposite of making a competent AI, that's making a sand castle for a cheesy human player to kick over whenever they want. Not an opponent, but a toy.

Lack of design integration is a general problem in many industries. It's why the iMac and iPhone were able to conquer once upon a time; previous to that, Apple was on its way out.