You + BlitzMax + My money = Game?

Hey guys...

There are no plans to start work immediately on this, so don't get too excited, but I've been toying with the idea of outsourcing work on Ice Cream Showdown. I'm posting this to get an idea of who is available to do such work, what sort of experience they have, and how much they'll charge.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, then fire off an email to me with links to stuff you've done in BlitzMax, and give me an idea of how much you might charge, (indicate if you're willing to take part of your payment in royalties) and how long you think it might take to complete, based on prior experience. Also indicate if you're available now, or when you might be available to do the work.

I would provide my sprite system as well as other code I've developed such as font and sound loading/playback code to help speed the development process. I've developed a lot of support code for Space Beetles, so with much of that boring stuff done for you, work should progress more quickly.

Ice Cream Showdown was a project I was working on a while back which was never completed. It's a shoot-from-the-hip western-themed shareware game where the player runs an ice cream shop. Customers come in, place orders, and the player has to click on various items with the mouse to fill the orders as quickly as possible for maximum tips. Over time, the player's shop improves, and the orders the player must deal with become more complex, until eventually they win the game. Very simple gameplay, no physics or anything to worry about. Just timed animation which would all be handled by my sprite system easily.

Our going rate is about $150USD an hour - if we had any time at all to consider taking a job like this and weren't horribly understaffed at the moment. Good luck with it tho'.

I get about $12USD per hour in my day job, which is in fact horribly understaffed at the moment, too, funnily enough! Not sure if this helps at all.

Flameduck:
$150 an hour! Are you crazy? That's $24,000 a month! You do say "our" though, so maybe you're referring to a team of people. There better be at least six on that team!

Naw, I don't want hourly rates. I'm talking about fixed rate contract work. $150 an hour? Like THAT'LL encourage you to finish quickly! :-)


Blitzsupport:
That's a much more reasonable rate, but again, I don't want to pay anyone hourly. There's no way to tell how long stuff actually takes to do over the net, and there's a whole complex set of laws for hiring hourly employees vs hiring people for doing fixed rate contract work which is fairly straightforward.

I understand that the amount of work required is a bit of an unknown factor, but overall if you've developed this sort of game before you'd have a pretty good idea how much is involved. And if I feel like I'm requesting a excess amount of changes or stuff beyond the original scope I laid out, I've been known to throw a few extra bucks on the table. Last thing I want to do is alienate someone who's doing good work who I'll want to hire for future projects.

$150 an hour can hire a 20 members team in China, and they work hard with good quality, not joking.

That means you can make 4 games with same budget.. I've heard some studios hiring teams on those places.

its truthwhat Yoko said becouse Im doing that just right now, past 6 months..and results is outstanding..

..and in Phillipines you can get whole studio working for ya 1 year full time for that 24K

$40 an hour



Er... $240 an hour :S

Ha ha!

What have you got against my sprite system? I have 35 happy customers using it this very minute, and I haven't had a feature request or a request for support in more than a month.

You added some stuff to that Lego game after I finished it, didn't you? I'm sure the sprite system was the easiest part of that code to deal with. :-) The new sprite system is way better and more powerful than that old one was. All object oriented and stuff.

Also, you're too expensive. :-)

Oh and don't blame me for that Lego game's spaghetti code. It's hard to design code properly when you're doing it at the same time as you're making the game, and you don't have time to go back and make major changes. My systems are nothing like like that nightmare. I'm sorry you had to deal with that game's menuing and event systems. :-)

*Dabz faints*



*Dabz gets back up*

:D

Seriously though, I would consider a charge of $150 an hour, if there was two or more people on the project... There was an agreed timescale AND if there was penalty clauses within the contract if it went passed the deadline.

Reasonable

Dabz

150 an hour for contractors is not that unreasonable, and is sometimes common - where the programmers are good enough, everything is mission critical and if they are the only ones who know the system inside out they can charge what they like.

A friend of mine is a very experienced software engineer who's team's going rate is somewhere in the region of 50-300 POUNDS an hour depending on what the job is & who it is for. That has to pay 2-3 people though.

Its a bit steep for this type of job tho :)

I wouldnt mind getting involved but have no time at all just now :(

No. I'm turning down work left and right.

Well that depends on how many hours it takes, but yes four weeksa at 40 hours is 24K.

No. I was reffering to the company I work for. We charge at least $150USD an hour. Most companies charge way more than us tho' - we're about 30% cheaper than our immediate competitors.

Where are you hiring from? Because the guys we're hiring are incompetent, lazy, ignoramuses without even the most basic understanding of software architecture (or English for that matter).

At my first fulltime job in the game industry, I was earning $22K a YEAR. :-) And my second fulltime job paid only $30K.

I don't know what kind of software you write, but for shareware games $150 an hour would be totally out of the question unless you're able to pump out a game a week.

Heck, even for a commercial game that's crazy. I think commercial game programmers are paid between $55-$120K. You must be developing very expensive apps for large highly profitable corporations with more dollars than sense. :-)

He does not see those 150$, most of it goes to his employe, heck even I am making around 100 €uros (or more) for my employee per hour but I dont see much of that money..

FlameDuck is just boasting, he's probly working as IT consultant for some It company, he shouldnt even responded to your request, since they would never take job like yours, it's small potato for IT companies...

if you want to recieve better offers swift, you must specify what is done so far and what is left to do on that project.

And by the way I can't understand that someone talented like you can't finish one game? you have no problems taking on complicated systems, attacking math problems and solving them, but as soon as we talk about finishing even the simpliest of games you are stuck. What the heck is left to do in this game of yours that you can't fix over one weekend???

Get real swift :P

You forgot "waste a lot of time on forums"... ;)
I was about to say the same, since his post didn't have any particular relevance here, other than gloating. Think he's kinda taken over where Tracer left off...

Anyhoo...

Why don't you just write it yourself? You know this place is notorious for abandoned projects and masses of hot air. Just seems like a really odd place to ask for something like this.

Actually you'd be more likely to see it finished if you just got a thousand monkeys and a thousand copies of Blitz... ;)

I regret to say I cannot realistically take on another project at the moment, but I posted to say good luck. I've heard mention of this game before, and from the name alone I can tell it is something a little different :) So I hope you do find a way to finish it.

I think i'd be too expensive anyway. I dont charge per hour for my programming, and as we all know, that's the most expensive kind :). [which actually means I get nothing at all, but I like to think that makes me exclusive :)]

I make $32USD an hour in the military.

But, if you want me to make a mock-up so you can evaluate it. I would prefer royalties of a certain percent for life.

Me either. I'd quote for a project based on how many months it'd take. I've got bills to pay and I can't be bothered working out what my bills cost per hour, so a monthly breakdown is easier to produce a cashflow forecast for.

For any game, with the US Dollar as worthless as it currently is, I'd start the bidding at the equivalent of around $2,000 per month.

Sound like a lot? It's actually £6.12/$12.30 per hour - only a few dollars better than the UK minimum wage.

Flameduck probably makes business software. The company I used to run made stock control/accounting systems in Delphi and SQL and charged £80 per hour (so like $160 per hour) and I saw £30 of that and the company had the rest.

Good luck with this sswift. GfK knows the score, I could recommend him but I'm not entirely sure if he's offering or just talking...

I'd have to agree with GFK in this one.

I do contracted programming jobs for games that have me doing coding from start to finish (and debugging), and projects take quite some time to get completed (specially when your talking bug tracking and squashing). Lately it's been decent, but there are those that keep you coming back from time to time (like that un-reproducable bug that you keep making blind stabs at to kill).

Based on the basic description of the game you gave, the only other questions would be:
A. 3D or 2D
B. Is the art complete? Do you have all the needed assets?
C. Is there some sort of detailed Design Document with some mock up visuals to help?
D. Did you prototype it? Do you need a prototype?

Because making a monetary call on something without those questions answered is suicide for a contracted programmer (made that mistake in the past myself). In order to know how to charge you (not to screw you btw) one would need to know how much waiting around one will have to do for all the necessary assets, one would need to know if there is an outlined design (which doesn't leave openings for feature creep).

Based on your simple description, I would chalk it up to worse case meaning it would be about a year of development, meaning waiting for assets, making changes and submitting for your approval only to find that you changed your mind a few times since the last build and all the recent changes need to be modified yet again :-)

It gets overwhelming from a programmers standpoint when the designer doesn't have all his ducks in a row prior to the bid requests.

The original Ice Cream Showdown code was done in BlitzPlus, and very little progress was made on it. No code from the original version would be reused.

As I said however, I have a lot of skeleton code that may be utilized:

(This code is free for anyone to use.)

I have an application type:
http://www.raccoonrocket.com/blitz/app-010.bmx

One command creates an application which can be windowed or fullscreen and use polled input. Handles mouserecentering as well as needed. (It can be toggled.) Picks best bitdepth available if desired. Chooses windowed automatically if fullscreen is unavailable. Also overrides image loading commands to allow error messages to be displayed on missing images, and updates a load screen. Buffers images in video ram.


I have a sound type:
http://www.raccoonrocket.com/blitz/sound-015.bmx

Allows sounds and music to be loaded and played back. Will prevent identical sounds from being played back too quickly in succession which leads to a flanging effect. Allows the global adjustment of both music and sound effect volume as on a config screen.


Savegame system:
http://www.raccoonrocket.com/blitz/savegame-003.bmx

Simple system which loads player savegame file into ten slots. Currently active slot's score and level is updated and read with the provided functions as gameplay progresses, and then the data can be resaved back to the file when the game is over.


This is the font system I mentioned which works with my sprite system:
http://www.raccoonrocket.com/blitz/font-008.bmx

Loads bitmap fonts which are just images with one letter per animation frame, and creates sprites using the text you desire. The sprites are a pivot which you can use to position the text, with each letter being a child of the pivot. This allows you to make the pivot move, rotate, or fade out to make the text do the same, or you can attach animations like sine waves to the individual letters to get all sorts of interesting effects like those you see in many RPG's. Supports justification of the letter sprites relative to the pivot too.


This score system is still in progress:
http://www.raccoonrocket.com/blitz/score-002.bmx

Basically what this does is will allow you, using my sprite system, to display a score which animates. Say you have an end level screen, and you want the score to count down to zero. These functions will automatically update the type object to animate that as time passes. Or say you have points floating up to the score text at the top of your screen. With these functions, you update the player's real score immediately, then specify that you want 100 points to be added to the player's displayed score in 2 seconds. Then once two seconds has elapsed the points are added to the target score for the display, and the display counts up to that target over time.





We all have our little personality quirks. :-) I love solving hard little problems. I love game design. I hate coding the main application. I can code a sprite system, and be fairly confident I've done it "right", but the main application with all its state systems inevitably ends up being an incomprehensible mess, and that drives me nuts. Maybe once I figure out how to best do the application design it won't bug me so much. It's a much harder problem than designing a sprite system though.

Also, if I want to ever have a big company like PopCap, I'm going to have to start hiring employees EVENTUALLY. One guy can't build a multimillion dollar company alone. So I might as well start doing it now while I actually have the funding.

And, lets not forget, I'm busy on Space Beetles right now. I can't code two games at once. (Though by writing all these general use systems which can be reused form game to game, I'm certainly trying!)

I'm not looking to hire someone to do Ice Cream Showdown because I don't want to code it myself. If I didn't find someone, that would be my next project after Space Beetles is done. I'd love to be able to be able to tell people I wrote that game when it's done. But I'm looking because I want to eventually build a real company and have multiple games going at once, and that's the next project for which I have everyhting all figured out. It's much less risky, more profitable, and more efficient to do it that way. Plus it creates jobs which benefits people looking to get their start in the industry, so it's good all around. I wouldn't be develloping games in BlitzMax right now if someone didn't hire me to write a couple games for them.





There's a ton of stuff left to do. There's no way I could do it all in one weekend. Even with the support code mostly one, all the gameplay and menuing stuff still has to be coded.

A. It's just standard BlitzMax. So it's 2D rendered using 3D acceleration.

B. I have a bunch of old assetts from the BlitzPlus version of the game. All the art will need to be redone though, because the artist quit and it was never designed with antialising in mind. It's pretty standard for a game to be coded while the art is in progress of being completed, so this shouldn't be an issue, though I know it can make things easier.

C+D. There is a prototype I made in Blitzplus. It doesn't show the gameplay, but you can see how the shop looks and how the player and characters would be positioned. Yes, I have a a design doc, but it's not formally written out or anything.

The gameplay is very basic. People appear in front of the counter. A thought bubble appears over their head. The thought bubble shows whether they want a cone or a sundae or a float and what flavors of ice cream and what toppings they want on it. Player clicks on the items behind the counter in the correct order to build the ice cream creation. Customer gets progressively more upset with waiting. When the creation is complete player clicks on customer. Customer loses some of their anger level. Customer holds out money. Player takes it. Clciks on register to make change. Happy customer gives tip in tip jar as appropriate. Money flies from tip jar up to player's score at top. Round ends after a certain period of time, and player's score is tallied. If their score is high enough they progress to the next level and some overlays on their shop which make it look run down are removed, and others which make it look nicer like posters and new chairs are added. After player has completed all levels for the current shop and it is upgraded as much as possible they move into a bigger shop and begin the progression anew.

As for feature creep, in all game design there is a certain level of adjustment which needs to be done to make the game fun. I'm willing to adjust compensation as needed if said changes are excessive. The artist I hired for Space Beetles was promised $500 up front, $500 upon completion, and $2500 in royalties at a rate of 25% of net sales. (This is no secret btw, the terms were outlined on a public graphic artists forum when I posted the job offer, because I didn't want to get tons of requests from people who cost way more than I was able to spend.) But I've ended up paying him $1500 so far, because I've been slow to request the art I need, and his work is so good. And all the art isn't done yet, so when all is said and done he'll probably have gotten $1000 extra out of me up front. So I'm fair when it comes to feature creep.

Wow, nicely put :-)

I'd make an offer however I've been out of blitzmax for so long now I'd hate to come back to it (since the documentation is..... you know how it goes...)

Best of luck to you swift :-)

Yes. That's pretty much the same conclusion I came to.

Boasting about what? Having a job? I guess for some people, that might be considered boasting.

We've taken smaller jobs. If you're willing to pay our rates, we could certainly take on the job. It's not the size of the potato that matters, it's how much profit you can get for selling it.

Gloating about what? I was simply quoting the price that you (in my experience) would have to pay to get the job done properly.

Thank you for reiterating my point.

How is that different, except you're tied up for a longer period of time (and so is your employer).

We don't discriminate. While most of our customers are businesses (solutions rather than standard products), if a good deal comes along for the later we'll take that as well, our vertical market segment being media companies and all. However being a small company, profit is most assuredly the main aspect taken into consideration when deciding on new customers. Since most people here are (at best) also small companies I would have thought my input appreciated.

Flameduck:
People are just reacting to the fact that the proce you quote would be absolutely absurd for a single programmer to request to develop a game. Tha amount you specified comes out to $288,000 a year. Nobody in the game industry except people on the business side of things makes that kind of money.

Of course, if you are talking about a team of say three to five people, who are able to get the work done much more quickly than an individual, then that price might be more reasonable. But at that rate, paid hourly, one would have to be damn sure of having all their ducks in a row (no pun intended) before they had you start work, because delays on the sound, art, and game design front would be very expensive!

I would never hire someone over the net who I paid hourly, because there's no way to verify the number of hours they actually worked, and no way to guess at what your final cost might be. You could of course fire them if they didn't work fast enough, but giving someone one week at $150 an hour to prove their worth could end up being a very costly mistake.

Flameduck is correct in the idea that it's the profit that matters not the outlay. The games I've spent the most making have made the most profit for sure. Problems arise if you don't have the capital for the outlay...

I've paid people hourly over the net to make a website (and people have paid me for similar work), but I've asked them to keep a log and basically the tasks they log and the hours looks reasonable, and it's quicker than I could do so I'm happy.

Having said that of course a fixed fee, or %, or bit of both is way simpler. Fee on completion of course to weed out the "non-finishers"

Oh and this would be a good thread to go in a INDIE FORUM!

If someone wants to be paid by the hour, I usually ask them to work out how many hours they expect it to take, add on contingency hours, and then give me that number of hours times the hourly rate as a flat fee.

There are valid reasons for not being able to do it, of couse, but I feel there are valid reasons for being concerned if they don't. If they can't do it, I'd be worried about their time management abilities. If they won't do it, I'd be worried about their honesty. My bottom line is that if people are forced to quote this way, they never underestimate the number of hours it will take in order to make them look more attractive than anyone else interested in the job, so I don't have anything to worry about.

I can honestly say that, of all the people I've worked with in any shape or form, I can think of only two I would give an open-ended hourly rate to, and neither of them has ever asked for it. Of course, it means I have a much narrower selection of people to work with because a lot of people ( quite justifiably, I admit ) don't like to work this way. But I only work on a flat fee basis too, so I can't be accused of hypocrisy.

Of course you can't really do this right now because you have a fairly open ended job. If you had the design doc much tighter, you might well be able to do that though. Anyway, just some ramblings in case any of it was useful in your thinking.

I know, and I agree. It's an absurdly high fee to to pay a single person for any job at all! Nobody is worth that amount of money. Never the less, if some companies are willing to pay such absurd amounts of money, they get first dibs on competent developers.

Which explains the rather poor crop of games in the recent years, wouldn't you say? With IBM, Google and Microsoft dishing out for all the good programmers, you only get the mediocre ones, willing to work 70 hour weeks, getting paid (effectively) below minimum wage, for a chance to "break in" to the industry. Yay!

Of course. Nobody in their right mind is going to give you a carte blanche to just use whatever hours you think is reasonable, and if they do, they won't be around for long. That's like a license to print money.

me+money=drunk
me+money+blitzmax=drunk + spew on keyboard

I just read that and have to say, FlameDuck is an ass, when are you people going to realize that, I stopped reading his posts months ago.

@FD, dood, you really need to take a good hard long look at the way you talk here, your replies are often degrading to the opening poster, inflammatory to people posting to a thread or just down right rude.

PS. I know this post just fits some of those complaints as well but it needed to be said.

LOL :)

FlameDuck is quite egotistical...but we still love him! :)

..naaahhh..he just need one goood experianced woman...yahhh

Yeah? Too bad you didn't stop your pathetic, whiney replies as well.

That's so precious. You're the one who thinks disagreeing with you is an insult, yet I'm the one who's egotistical/degrading/inflammatory/rude? Priceless.

I'm sorry if I hurt your fragile self-image, but if what some guy from Denmark posts on the Internet is the worst thing you'll ever experience in your life, then you should just count yourself lucky you don't have to deal with the real world.

Have you actually tried hireing someone from this community? I have. $500 USD for a 2 day job. Wasn't even enough to get anyone here interested, much less actually get them to do something. So even $60 USD an hour is clearly not going to cut it. How far off do you think I am?

Or you could just bend over, and I'll send you home with a smile on your face.

Oh dear me.

Indeed.

>>Or you could just bend over, and I'll send you home with a smile on your face.<<

..heheh..oh you li'l smart, 'all in go', $500USD/2 days boy :) I love ya.. :)

FlameDuck is officially changing his name to Bubba...

Flame Duck, I don't really care what you say m8, to be honest when you post that many negative comments in so many different threads it makes your attitude plain to see for everyone.

And agree or not, Iv never had a problem with people not agreeing with me, thats life. I do have a problem with you and the way you put down anyone with an idea of their own.

@Swift, m8 your a good coder, Iv seen and used some of your stuff and I am sure that your going to find a coder with a realistic price that a one man indie developer can afford, and it sure as hell isn't going to be FlameDuck.

And Bubba?, I think Snob would be a more apt name for him.

BubbaDuck? o_O

woo, way to detail a thread everyone. Bring on the the INDIE FORUM and then sswift can post again in some kind of "help wanted" section. (Or alternatively go over to Indiegamer)

Yes, we need an indie forum.

The "go over to Indiegamer" solution is exactly why - not having an indie forum is driving people elsewhere.

Yeah I'd rather not have to send people there when we have a great forum here. Speculation but perhaps there still isn't one because a) BRL (or Simon) are too busy or b) they prefer to keep Blitz more "hobbyist" and don't approve of an Indie forum. Who knows?...

Certainly it's Indies like ourselves and Tim Fisher (and many other dedicated indies and hobbyists) who've tested BMax as a commercial programming language and found various holes that needed patching over the last 2 years. What am I trying to say? Obviously that the customers help to improve the product and when those customers need to use it for commercial purposes lots of things come out of the woodwork and the product gets much better/stable as a result.

They added a Blitz3D SDK forum quickly enough. I can't imagine it being more than a five minute job.

eek, going o/t now.

I can see both sides of this one.

Flame is quoting typical professional contractor price for a team. For us indies its different as some can afford to be cheaper from software sales, day jobs and a genuine passion for doing it. So we expect software and services in an indie place like this to be much much cheaper. Think the time you think it will take to finish a job in manhours plus some safety time. Compare it to the deadlines to see if its realistic. Then give that price of X number MHhours to the customer as a single price.


For example:
I did a RPG conversation engine for someone once (an indie) which interfaced with their inventory and event system and my fee was around 200 quid. This was reasonable for 16 manhours of work. I can afford this because i have a day job, have the odd sale from my software and enjoy doing it. They could afford it as it was in their budget.

But if it (custom programming/media) was my sole source of income it would obviously be a lot higher as i would have to make a profit and pay living cost bills, taxes etc. In addition contractors need to think about how much work they can actually get and realistically produce in time. Thats why it contractors, builders and plumbers (even the honest ones :) have to charge huge hourly bills.
Dont forget, when you are actually employed by a company for say $20 its in reality costing them a hell of a lot more than that in taxes, HR/admin, pensions, insurance, healthcare etc. Which if you work for yourself you need to pay all this yourself. Which is the kind of prices flameduck is quoting.

I agree. Although i don't see how it will stop these kind of arguments even if it had been posted in a help wanted section.

I dont know why this turned into a full-on flamewar anyway, flameduck put in his 2ps worth (way too steep 4 round here, but so what) if thats what his team charges, then fair enough.

But on the other hand offering corporate contract prices to indie programmers is just asking to be roasted :P

I'll code it for $2000 and have it finished by August 22. (That being because my tuition costs $2000 and my university starts August 23 if I have the money to go!)

I don't know why you guys think you can get indie developers to work for an order of magnitude less than everyone else. What makes you think developing games is more inexpensive than developing other software?

In all the years this forum has existed there has been at least a dozen or so semi-serious projects hiring people to do real work - none of which got any response.

Am I being negative? Am I being realistic? Am I being a dick? Prove me wrong.

I'm sorry. I wasn't aware that wishing someone good luck with their project is putting them down.

b'Cos most of us are skint :)
Selling services/apps to the indie games market vs commercial software market are kinda like this:
Imagine trying to sell military or nasa grade components to the model aircraft club.

That's a bad analogy. A better analogy is imagine having to chose between working for NASA or the model aircraft club, complete with suitable perks and paychecks. There simply isn't enough incentive to work for the model aircraft club.

I realize it's unlikely most people here are going to be able to afford to have their ideas developed professionally, that was the point I've been trying to make all along - which I assume is why most "indie" outfits develop their ideas themselves.

It is my understanding that people here who have time to commit to writing video games, prefer realizing their own ideas, rather than someone else's, that's certainly what I would do. This conveniently explains why "help wanted" ads usually fall on deaf ears.

I dont think so, not at all.
And you are being realistic... just not for here.

I dunno, i would quite like the model aircraft club, i could design and fly my own crappy wooden planes '
instead of designing small insignificant widgets for someone elses spaceship :P

So maybe Curtastic's $2K USD (which boils down to roughly $12USD an hour) is a good deal? Too bad you can't base a proper business model around students desperate for tuition money.

Except it would be someone else's crappy wooden plane.

Flameduck:
Hey, $12 an hour is pretty good for a young person with no debt. Most of the hourly wage jobs I've taken in the past have paid $7-$9 an hour. Let's see... work at Burger King, or code a shareware game at home at your leisure for more money? :-)

Also, I'm just being cautious with the first game I'm doing like this. I'm not getting a million dollars. I could burn through this money fast and have nothing to show for it if I'm not careful. If I work with someone and the game does well enough, they'll get paid much better on the next title if we continue to work together. May not be the most ideal arrangement, but it's better than nothing.


Curtastic:
That's a good deal, but I'm not sure I could get everything together (art, music) that quickly and have the money for you by then. I don't want to be hasty in choosing an artist and musician, and I have to wait for a house sale to complete before I can start paying people. I'll probably have the money somewhere between mid of August and the end of September. And I'll probably be shooting for the game to get done sometime in November.

Hmm, timeframe. Money by end of Sept (worst case), leaves Oct + part of Nov to make a game. It's not long enough unless the game is going to short on contect/polish...you gotta need about 3 full-time months these days...so like 400+ hours of code.

I guess at this point the serious players bow out gracefully.

Grey:
The timeframe is flexible. I was just making an estimate.

The game is pretty simple though from a code standpoint. There aren't 10 different powerups to implement, or a bunch of different types of enemy AI. There's no collisions or physics. Nothing moving along paths...

OK so maybe it'll take a bit less time. Probably a good idea to start with a simpler game if it's the first one produced with your money. But then again, will it hold up against the other current titles with limited spend. That's the real issue now for Indies which is why the one man band is becoming less viable :-(

The flashiest games (no pun intended) are not always the most popular. Case in point: There are a ton of hugely popular flash games which have looked terrible. Line Rider for example.

Not every game needs to be Peggle.

agreed but we know that polish sells. So does good gameplay. Combine the two...

hmmm, I'll bite. The game doesn't sound overly complex, and with the start and end dates being a bit off it gives me a bit of time to complete other projects. However my only hesitation is working with blitzmax again :-(

Email sent.

My! That was a fun-packed chuckle!

You either take the risk and rewards or you don't. You can't have it both ways - you want to hire someone who is willing to work for dirt cheap so you don't risk your money, and yet you want to get the rewards if the game is a success. If you find anyone crazy enough to agree to that, then it won't turn out well.

Flameduck's rate is reasonable, if on the low side, for a pimped out contractor with an excellent skill set. There are a huge number of overheads to being a contractor, the most expensive one being time - depending on a number of factors, the generally accepted billing hour count is about 1000 a year (or 20 hours a week). Hours spent on personal skillset development and marketing aren't billable. Add in a few layers of pimps and billing out at $150 an hour is both common and not exceptionally lucrative.

Why he mentioned it here, though, I have no idea. It's not something particularly impressive, so I don't think he was trying to show off, and he'd be crazy to consider taking this deal, so...

Who said I want people to work dirt cheap?

My first job as a C programmer paid me $7 an hour. I was bringing home about $1200 a month.
My first job as a level designer paid me $22K a year. That's about $10.50 an hour, or $1833 a month.
My second job as a level designer paid me $30K a year. That's $2500 a month.
I've also coded a few shareware games for around $5K each. That's about $2000-$2500 a month if you're doing it fulltime.

Those are about the rates which I'm willing to pay someone to code the game. Perfectly reasonable. I'd hardly call $2500 a month no reward. And I'd hardly say I'm taking no risk. When you consider how much I have to spend on the other aspects of the game, that comes to something like $10,000 I'm investing in code, art and music.

As for Flammeduck's rate, if you think that's on the low side, you're absolutely insane. It would take EVEN FLAMEDUCK, GOD CODER THAT HE IS, a month to write a shareware game. That $24,000 just for the code.

You do know you're lucky if you make $30K a year from a shareware game, don't you? Oh you might hit the lottery and get in the top 10 on RealArcade and hang around there for a month and make a total of $60K that first year, but let's be realistic shall we?

hehe if only you knew ;-) the big casual game companies are paying out megabucks for good programmers to make their games.

Yeah well big is the keyword here.

I don't know what PopCap pays their star coders, but they're an abberation.

PopCap makes what, $5 million a year? They've got a ton of games out there already, they've got their own portal which repreat customers visit all the time, they've got their games on all the other portals, they've got their games in stores, and they've got a billion affiliates sites selling their stuff for a 30% cut. They've got great artists working fulltime, and they're accuiring smaller developers left and right.

They're a totally different beast than a smaller developer with three to six titles under their belt, which makes up the majority of shareware houses.

Oh and let's not forget that most shareware games from big shareware houses are written in C and Flash and such, not Blitz. If you're gonna code the game in a language which can't be ported to Flash or consoles easily, then you should expect to be paid less, since the work needs to be redone to do those ports which bring in the additional revenue that those C coders get a portion of.

Popcap, Realarcade, BFG et al are bastardizing the casual market. IMHO. Its becoming increasingly controlled by bigger and bigger companies. Before long the smaller developers won't be able to get a look-in.

I just visited PopCap's website. Found this tidbit:




Oh and I just remembered, I read in an interview that Popcap has 50 employees and makes 50 million dollars a year. So of course they could afford to pay FlameDuck's salary. :-)

GFK:

I was one chatting with a wise man high atop a mountain. I asked him:

"Oh wise man! I have no faith! How could my games sell at all with the thousands of free flash games available out there? Why bother? I can't possibly make any money at it! Yet you do! Please give me enlightenment!"

The wise man replied:

"My son! If people like a game, they buy it! It doesn't matter if there are 50 other games out there just like it. If they're playing your game and they enjoy it, they're not going to go looking for other games like that which are free, they shall pull out their credit card, and they shall order thine game post haste!"

I contemplated upon this bit of wisdom and realised it must be true, for there are many many developers out there making money doing this, even though you can find pretty much any kind of game you'd like to play out there for free or use, people are more than happy to part with their money on a whim. If I'm playing an episode of Sam and Max and I'm having fun with it, I'm not gonna look for another free advanture game. And I'm not even gonna head to ebay to find the original game to play that for cheap. I'm gonna buy the next episode right there and then.

So it doesn't matter how big PopCap gets or how many games they make. There are a zillion games out there already. A few dozen more each year isn't gonna put a dent in that.

To give Mr. Swift an idea of the magnitude of programmer salaries.

I suppose that's what you get for working in a non-unionized industry. I don't know - maybe salaries (and the cost of living) is just really low in the US. In Denmark an entry-level programmer would get at least twice that.

A month? No way, only if I had to write it all from scratch. If all the basic stuff is there (sprite library, framework, etc.) it wouldn't take much more than a week, judging from your (somewhat ambiguous) description above.

Nah, an entry level programmer would get $45K-$55K in Denmark in the games industry.

But Flameducks rate is very reasonable for contract work.

"So it doesn't matter how big PopCap gets or how many games they make. There are a zillion games out there already. A few dozen more each year isn't gonna put a dent in that."

Plus now days, it's more about marketing than anything else. The best game out there, with zero marketing will sell less than a sub par game with great marketing. The days of "code it and then will come" are long gone.

true marketing is VERY important but it's nice that people will still buy our games. I've sold two Easter Bonuses on my site this month. There's quite a few "better" match-3s out there but people liked it enough to pay and that's cool.

Flameduck: Have you ever programmed a full game before (using a framework or not) and did it take 1 week or 1 month? I must be VERY slow by comparison because even with a framework my games still take months...

How are you folks from Denmark coming to this $50K figure for an entry level programmer? Are you converting to US dollars from whatever currency you use, using current exchange rates?

Hmm...

http://www.citymayors.com/features/cost_survey.html

Ah ha! You live in the sixth most costly city in the world!


That explains it.

You see New York there down at number TEN? The least expensive 1br apartments (according to rent.net) are $2K a month. The median price is $3200 a month.

Here in Manchester where I live, the least expensive 1br apartments listed here are $800 a month, and the median is about $1000.

I pay $625, so this site doesn't exactly have the cheapest accomodations listed, but it's close enough.


I'm gonna wager a guess that you pay about $3-4K a month for your least expensive 1br apartments in Denmark. That's at least 3x what I'm paying. Your other costs of living are going to be similarly inflated.

So that explains how an entry level programmer would earn that much. If you lived out here in NY or California, then you might get paid that much entry level, only because that's what they have to pay in order for people to be able to afford to live in those places.

The places I've worked, like Indianapolis and Boston, are fairly cheap places to live.


So you see, you're really not making a fair comparison here. What you see as totally unreasonable may be totally unreasonable for YOU, but is totally reasonable for the majority of people who don't live in the most expensive cities in the world. :-)


Oh and Flameduck, there's no way in hell you can code a game in a week. Even when I was in high school at my prime, I couldn't do that. Unless you're thinking about adding no polish whatsoever and not doing any tweaking of gameplay.

I suppose if you had a design document which told you exactly what needed to be done, down to the last detail like how every menu should slide onto the screen, you MIGHT be able to do it, if you didn't sleep. But you're not gonna find a game developer out there who can give you a document like that. If you saw how vague the System Shock 2 design document was (and it was still like 100 pages) compared to how the final game turned out, you'd probably have a conniption fit.

No, around $800-1K for a cheapish one. The big difference is we pay between 40 and 70% tax :) + 25% Value Added Tax on all products. + 300% Tax on cars etc.

Curse you Cost_Survey! You have failed me for the last time!

No, you're insane if you think that the cost of hiring a programmer will magically reduce if they're working on a project that won't make you much money. If you're not willing to pay that much, there are a hell of a lot of corporate clients that are, and you'll get whatever is left over.

I'm sure you'll find someone for dirt cheap, but you'll get what you paid for.

What's your point? I never claimed to be able to hire John Carmack. The only claim I made was that the price I was offering was fair and that I'd be able to find someone capable who was willing to work for that much.





I'm not looking for someone who can code the next Doom engine. I'm looking for someone who can code a game where you click on some hotspots and play precalculated animations using an animation system I wrote.

It's a job I bet even you could do! :-)

Like I said, dealing with your 'helpful' 'well designed' libraries, $240 an hour.

:-)

..I think you are surrounded by extraordinary coders with tons of game experiance, so Swift you will do it by yourself far as i can see...and you know what? I think that will be best thing you can make, regarding simplicity of project you mentioning about and knowing your abilities to produce quite nice piece of code..

I agree with sswift.

As for me I got a job starting tomorrow coding PHP for $20 and hour :)

It took ages. About 8 months if memory serves. However it was coded from scratch, and was at least an order of magnitude more complex than what Mr. Swift is proposing.

No. I was going to leave that to you, or someone else you can pay significantly less, to manipulate the underlying data structures the game relies on. There's no point in paying $150 USD for me to change arbitrary numbers around. You can get some school kid to do that (or leave it to the "modding community" whichever takes your fancy).

Common sense, as in, get the junior to do all the donkey work! Works like that in every occupation I imagine.

Take plastering (My trade), I can earn up to £18-£22.50 an hour putting plaster on walls. And if someone asked me, to say, do a little bit patching (Around sockets/rad pipes etc)... I'd still want the same rate.

Not a chance though, as a patchers rate is probably £10-£13 an hour (What a company charges... the actual patcher gets about £8) and obviously apprentices less.

But if I had a patcher (£8 an hour) or young'un on a Youth Training Scheme (£35 a week I think) I would still charge the £10-13 an hour for them!

Which is way more cheaper than actually getting me to do it. And companies usually go for that, as the vast majority of Construction companys are penny pinchers!

Well, they alway's plead poverty when I bang an invoice in! :D

Dabz

Don't sell yourself short! Hold out for $200! ;-)

All i'd say is do it yourself, simple as that, if it's a good game it should be timeless and still be good in 6,10 even 20 years when you finally finish it on your own, thats what i reckon.

Thats what I do and am sticking too it.

Don't consider myself a professional game maker, more a passionate hobbyist.

;)

Good Luck

Hm... I've always considered you more of a Gollum...


...


...sorry thought you said Hobbit. :p

lol.....you still up