Looking for a developer?

[ViolentSilence]

I've been working on a word game that in the prototype form uses a set of scrabble tiles for each player. I'm not convinced the game will be economical to pitch to mass market publishers (going up against an established rival, with about 4 times the production cost if the game limits at 4 players), but I figured it might be worth being developed on here to give people looking for a game of that type an option. However, I have near zero programming and graphic design skills, and would barely trust myself with a spreadsheet.

What is the best way to find a developer who might be interested in working on a game like this?

[Ciffy]

How have you been working on a prototype with zero technical skill?

[ViolentSilence]

How have you been working on a prototype with zero technical skill?

Cardboard - the essential components are a grid, and the letter tiles. To get the flow of the game, it only needed a few cards per player, generic letter tiles, and the blank grid to place tiles on. Even the player screens were just crude shapes made of the cardboard leftovers. You don't need to get fancy when working on the basic rules and structure of the game (one of my annoyances with TTS and TableTopia is that they both have lack a function to make really crude prototypes). I tried it a few times at two players (leading to a change of the starting position), but then COVID hit before getting to try the new structure with up to 4 players.

It's in terms of being able to work on a digital adaptation I have no skills in (and very little graphic design experience in general)

[BrianLovesMarvel]

Hi,

My friends and I developed a board game from prototype. Eventually we got it polished enough we wanted real cards, etc. At that point I found TheGameCrafter and started seriously working on the graphics. Once uploaded, you can get a nice, high quality prototype to work with. It isn't scalable to production but it is a nice milestone.

We next took it to GenCon's First Exposure room for playtesting with others, and it got a good response. We were happy! Another nice milestone.

The next step was to approach some game manufacturers. The reception was not chilly, exactly, but not really all that welcoming. We got some good feedback but it was more along the lines of "not really for us, thanks" or "we don't like that much chance in our games".

A local game store offered to stock our game on commission, that is, we would have to buy 2,000 units from a Chinese manufacturing company at 20% of retail, and they would sell it for us if they could, keeping like 60% of retail. At no point would they buy the stock from us until a sale was made. If it didn't sell, we get to keep it. That would have been a $10,000 investment, to which end we were recommended to go the Kickstarter route. That's where we got stuck.

Along came boardgamearena and the BGA studio. I realized my coding skills and the BGA studio framework were almost a 100% match. I've been coding our game, hoping to expose more people to it without having to get into the game manufacturing investment kickstarter soup, just like you.

What I've learned is this: even with the right skills, coding a game for BGA takes a lot of patience and a lot of time. I'm at about the 150 hour mark now and although this is my first game and some of that time is learning the framework, it is still a significant effort to code a game. I'll probably be at 500 hours by the time I get it finished. I'm having fun, but in real dollars, say $50/hour, that's $25,000 worth of my time.

So when I see people looking for a coder for their games, wondering what it might cost, or asking if maybe someone could do it for free, I really have to say that doing this is a labor of love for me.

Best wishes, Brian

[Tisaac]

Hi,

My friends and I developed a board game from prototype. Eventually we got it polished enough we wanted real cards, etc. At that point I found TheGameCrafter and started seriously working on the graphics. Once uploaded, you can get a nice, high quality prototype to work with. It isn't scalable to production but it is a nice milestone.

We next took it to GenCon's First Exposure room for playtesting with others, and it got a good response. We were happy! Another nice milestone.

The next step was to approach some game manufacturers. The reception was not chilly, exactly, but not really all that welcoming. We got some good feedback but it was more along the lines of "not really for us, thanks" or "we don't like that much chance in our games".

A local game store offered to stock our game on commission, that is, we would have to buy 2,000 units from a Chinese manufacturing company at 20% of retail, and they would sell it for us if they could, keeping like 60% of retail. At no point would they buy the stock from us until a sale was made. If it didn't sell, we get to keep it. That would have been a $10,000 investment, to which end we were recommended to go the Kickstarter route. That's where we got stuck.

Along came boardgamearena and the BGA studio. I realized my coding skills and the BGA studio framework were almost a 100% match. I've been coding our game, hoping to expose more people to it without having to get into the game manufacturing investment kickstarter soup, just like you.

What I've learned is this: even with the right skills, coding a game for BGA takes a lot of patience and a lot of time. I'm at about the 150 hour mark now and although this is my first game and some of that time is learning the framework, it is still a significant effort to code a game. I'll probably be at 500 hours by the time I get it finished. I'm having fun, but in real dollars, say $50/hour, that's $25,000 worth of my time.

So when I see people looking for a coder for their games, wondering what it might cost, or asking if maybe someone could do it for free, I really have to say that doing this is a labor of love for me.

Best wishes, Brian

The thing is it's all about compromises : you may find a interested dev that will do this as volonteer, but it could take some times to find it, and you don't have any guarantee that he will finish it, or you could hire a dev with a fixed deadline at full price (which would probably be less than that). So it really depends how fast you want the game to be added.