[Revshare] Looking for a multiplayer programmer, character modeller/animator, and a concept artist.

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1

Hi! We’re a team of three people getting together to make a novel concept of a competitive survival game (no it’s not like RUST/DAYZ/Ark/Don’t Starve/etc, far from it), more akin to a mix of STALKER and Death Stranding with a pinch of RTS/Battlerite.

It’s a rather small scoped proof of concept that we wanted to participate in Finally Finish Something jam for the fun of it, and then develop it further if we see it working out.

The team currently consists of a gameplay programmer with a couple years of experience, a low poly artist and level/game designer (released some games and done few jams, and a composer.

Although we considered scaling down the concept even further, we would really like to aim for a more complete first version and now looking complete the team with three more people:

**Multiplayer programmer **

Someone to be in charge of implementing the multiplayer aspect of the game in Unreal Engine and Blueprints/C++. It is limited to a handful of people (like 1v1, maybe 3v3) and will probably be locally hosted to begin with to save us time and reduce scope. Of course you’re welcome to participate in developing other parts of the game too if you’re interested, but since multiplayer is challenging enough of its own we wanted to find someone to fully focus on that part to begin with.

Character modeller/animator

Someone who would be responsible for modelling, animating, and preferably importing/setting up in unreal our couple characters for the game, very similar to The Wild Eight in style and complexity. The role isn’t strictly limited to characters alone, but we don’t want to stretch too thin here same as with programming.

Concept artist

It would be awesome if anyone is interested in contributing with simpler/abstract environment sketches to help us establish general mood and creative direction.

Expectations

We’re by no means veterans or experts, and we don’t expect you to be either. But we have few years of experience in our fields and know the ropes, so we count on you knowing your way around the basics and delivering within resonable time since we’re participating in a jam.

We use Discord for our communications, and we’re all responsive and don’t go randomly MIA. Since we’re all from EU, we would prefer to stick to the somewhat close timezones. And of course, we’re doing this in our free time and while we’re serious about it, we also want a relaxed atmosphere and try our best to keep it up.

If you are interest, please PM some info about yourself and stuff you’ve done before, or if you have any questions!

2

Hi @Araklaj I’m a Blueprints Scripter with some Networking experience developing this Survival Game solo. I favor Revshare/Royalty projects. As such, I’m aware that multiplayer is a huge task even supporting 2 concurrent players. My first question is how do you intend to monetize the game?

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Hey @TechLord, we’d like to develop and test a proof of concept before planning specific monetization strategy, but depending on multiplayer implementation it will likely simply be paid with ability to invite a friend for free. It’s not exactly league of Legends caliber monetization concept so to say. If you have any other questions feel free to PM me!

6

Shucks, I reckoned I’ll wait till your team is in commercial production. There is no incentive to put in hard work on a proof-of-concept not developed with intention to generate revenue. This is technically an unpaid endeavor and will present a challenge in your recruitment effort. If combat, inventory/pickup/drops, communication, dialogue, ecosystem {hunting, fishing, mining, farming}, building & customization, etc are to be experienced in multiplayer, replication is required in all those areas of gameplay. You already have a Gameplay Programmer onboard, I highly recommend learning UE4 replication. Below are resources I use

Videos
Networking in Unreal
Animation Replication
Basic Event Replication
Replicated Vehicles

Documents
UnrealEngine Online Documentation on Networking
The Network Compendium
HeadlessStudios.com Blueprints Network Patterns

There are over 500 Free assets in the marketplace to develop your proof-of-concept, many with replication support. You could even start building on top of the Collab Viewer Template. You may have to make investments into Marketplace assets to save time. Synty Studios provides awesome assets similar to the art style you mentioned (or import some DAZ3D or CC3 models into Blenderand use the decimate modifier:slight_smile:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/core/image/gif;base64
​](Decimate Modifier — Blender Manual)​ ).

I personally don’t waste time on proof-of-concept as production development requires significant pre-visualization, prototyping, experimenting, testing, and tweaking in itself. Concept Artist are extremely difficult to find for Rev-share/Royalty. If you havent heard of NO SPEC WORK, read this? I learned the hard way. Recommend grabbing some images of the net to reference. I’m a highly visual person, thus use lots of imagery around me. I’ve use AI Generators like ArtBreeder to crank out some interesting imagery. I incorporate various procedural generation in my game design, workflows, and development.

I sincerely wish the best on your Game Dev Journey.

7

Sorry if I was unclear, the intention is absolutely there, but it is a bit early to lay out the exact plan for the revenue model before the concept is more thoroughly tested as the exact monetization strategy will depend on the end results, there’s lots of things which can be discovered during the development that may affect the outcome :slight_smile: Monetization is of course one of the most important aspects of such a project, but at this stage it feels like putting cart before the horse.

Regardless, thank you for the insights and the links, we’ll check them out! Artbreeder seems really neat, haven’t heard of it.

9

I’ve joined several Rev-share projects. Unfortunately, they all met a slow and painful death. Its the worst feeling. The best I could do was salvage my contributions and take away lessons learned. One of those lessons learned was…Don’t join a Rev-share project without a something unique and a plan to generate Revenue. Simply put, a good game Idea is not enough to keep one motivated.

You don’t need an *exact *plan to generate Revenue, but you do need some-form-of-plan. How you monetize will directly impact your game’s design and redesign. I’m implementing multiple monetization strategies in my game and designing it accordingly. There is simply too much competition to depend on a single strategy. For a Rev-share project and devs like myself, monetization is not the cart, it is the horse…

I’m done beating a dead horse (pun intended), lets chat more about the game.

I’m still intrigued by the mix of “STALKER and Death Stranding with a pinch of RTS/Battlerite with a art style and complexity of The Wild Eight.” I can see how game mechanics of STALKER and Death Stranding could blend well, however, a big question mark hovers above my head on RTS elements. The only RTS I’ve played in my lifetime was Battlezone 1998. Would like to know more about that for your game.

With STALKER being First-Person and Death Stranding, Battlerite, and Wild Eight being Third-Person, have you considered implementing a First-To-Third Person Camera System? The perspectives are not specified in top post. I’m personally going away from a single 3D perspective in favor of a multi-perspective 3D camera system.

All the games you mentioned contain Monsters, thus I assume your game will have them as well. I love Monsters and was inspired by Spore Creature Creator to develop the HyperBasher to assemble many types of Monsters. This is also an area I would like to get more information on.

Perhaps if you provide your Discord info in the post we chat more in-depth on the subjects of interest. If not, you can always find me on HeadlessStudios.com Discord Server.