/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General★

Since you're in the position of an indie dev, I'm going to put this all into indie terms. And the first term you need to get straight is your use of the word "outsourcing." There's nothing about teaming up with other people or paying them to do things you can't which can be called outsourcing. It's not like you're hiring Indians to man your tech support lines. It's pretty disrespectful to refer to your team as "outsourced," so I would recommend against adopting that kind of mentality.

There is no secret to networking. The reason connections are so valuable is because there generally isn't a perfect database out there for people who are trying to find a particular other kind of person for some specified purpose. It's always been and always will be a pain in the ass to find whoever you're looking for, and the only real way to track down desired talent is to go to where they tend to congregate. If you're looking for illustrators, you'll probably want to search on art forums. If you're looking for programmers, you'll want to look into tech or programming forums. You might be able to find people in places like agdg or lemmasoft where the purpose of the community is to collaborate on projects, but do not expect to be able to find everything you're looking for in a one-stop-shop, especially when what you're looking for is people. You need to be prepared to have to go hunting for talent if you want to find it.

As far as commissions go, you should expect to have to get things done this way by default. While you might somehow manage to come across an extremely motivated person who is willing to do some work at no charge on a project directed by yourself, you cannot reasonably expect to rely on this kind of resource as the primary means of accomplishing your tasking. Thank your lucky stars when it happens, but otherwise, you better get a day job and start chowing down on ramen to save what you need to pay for the work you can't do on your own.

If you're commissioning - or directing - work for your project, then you are by necessity going to be the project lead, which means you are ultimately responsible for seeing that everything gets done. As a project lead, you should be capable of completing at least one major area of work needed for the project to succeed - if you can't write, program, illustrate, model, animate, compose, design, or do anything important, you better have a lot of money to throw at all the people you'll need to do all that crap, and even then, money alone won't buy the kind of trust from your team members that being able to roll up your sleeves and actually be productive will.

>>27281

If you are leading the project by providing commissions and directing the efforts of others, you will be expected to know exactly what it is that you want. While you are by necessity giving up a degree of creative control to others once you start adding other people to your team, you had better be able to instruct the people you're commissioning with a minimum of ambiguity. Talent generally doesn't like to direct itself, especially when a lack of direction leads to errors which have to be re-worked. Things go a lot smoother when you have your ducks in a row and your plans laid out before assets have to be produced.

As for how much you should pay, the answer is "as much as you are able and willing to afford." You should look for portfolios and offers posted publicly by people who perform commissions and compare multiple results to get a general feel for what's fair and in the realm of what you're looking for. You're never really going to have a perfect set market price to go off of, you're just going to have to feel out what's appropriate and take whatever deal you're willing to make. I don't recommend trying to haggle with the talent - generally someone providing a skill should be able to provide you with a pricing scheme which works for them, and it's up to you to either take it or leave it. You can try to clarify details if you need to be more specific, but if you're just looking for someone cheaper, you better go find someone cheaper.

You cannot perfectly protect yourself from "being ripped off" or simply wasting some time, effort, and money on work that doesn't make it in to the finished product. When it comes to in-game assets, my recommendation is that you commission for work, not for people. When you commission illustrations, do so for a particular style of art which can be replicated fairly consistently by many illustrators even if their skill level is not high. When commissioning a composer, aim for a genre of music rather than a specific artist's style. This way, you can commission your assets piece by piece, and if any asset creator falls through on you, you can replace them with relatively little difficulty and not lose the progress you had been making on asset production up to that point.

At a minimum, you will handle at least the game design if you are the project lead. Ideally, you should be able to handle the writing and perhaps even the programming on your own or without having to resort to commissioned work. With these things, you can have a playable game using placeholders for artistic assets, which you can always commission as your funding permits. The stuff that makes your game function at all should always be a higher priority than the stuff that makes your game look and sound good, though you should plan well for your assets in advance regardless, so that they can be incorporated smoothly when they are finally needed.