Originally Posted by
ledow
What, precisely, are you bringing to the table for someone who fits your requirements? If someone can do all that, what do you offer that they can't find elsewhere or couldn't do themselves?
I've been through any number of game projects, since I was a teenager over 15 years ago, and without doubt the death of almost all of them was a lack of programming, not a lack of design, or artwork, or direction, or ideas. In fact, the projects that succeeded best used the art assets of existing games (e.g. game recreations of old classics) or didn't care about the artwork at all, followed designs of existing games or simple, obvious tweaks of such, and were pushed through by code, not by ideas. In fact, the abandonment of fantastical ideas was usually the key driver in actually getting the code out to the public.
Every single programmer in the world has a bucket of ideas of games that they could write. Every single games-playing teenager has at least one. The trick is in the execution, not the concept (although, it has to be said, a good concept can go far coupled with the right people - but the right people will make it go far even without some flashy new concept anyway). As such, the programmer you seek - why would they work on your project in particular rather than start up on their own, or hire their own artists / designers?
I'm in the middle of a personal game project now. It's been years of work. It's not approaching complete. The artwork is non-existent (despite hiring - with real cash - artists at various stages). The problem is not in the design, or the artwork, or the project management, or any of the other bits - it's in churning out code that works. All the pretty pictures and design documents in the world mean nothing until you have a working game, and when you have a working game you can basically just push out a content creator (level editor, mod API or whatever) and people will, in general, come.
Assume for a second that I was interested in this mystery project of yours. Assume that I can do EVERYTHING you mentioned above (even the "bonus" items like "network stuff"). What do you give me that I can't do myself? What's the USP of your idea? If it's all wrapped up in private conversations then, in my experience, those conversations will be void of content once they arrive anyway ("Yeah, well, we're going to write an RPG, right, but with really good AI that'll do X, Y, Z...").
The hardest thing in the world is knocking up a complete game of any substance. It can take years, whether for loners or a huge development team. The "superstars" of gaming tend to have got lucky, or have skills far beyond the average person you'd ever find with such a request and would be off making their millions elsewhere.
I *DO* have a game with 200,000 lines of C code, two years of coding time on it, 20 years of "thinking" time on the concept, and it'll be a few more years before it's finished. How would I have got to that stage differently following your vision rather than my own?
I think your request is a little naive and one I've heard thousands of times before. "I have a great game idea, I just need a programmer to do it." After years of being involved in similar projects (everything from a ZX Spectrum Chaos remake, to a Java RPG, to educational software), I just hear "I have a great science idea, I just need a scientist to make it work." It's like trying to say "If we could just have a ray-gun that we could fire through space, we could destroy other planets" and expecting someone else to work out the 'fine details' of exactly how we'd do that.
The question is: What's in it for the person you seek?
