Collaboration in Unity

I have been working on some projects and have been prototyping for some experience. I have also seen many indie developers work on games on their own. Do people just like to make games by themselves or can you have someone else help you? I wouldn't mind doing a one man job but, having someone to help you in the process is much more efficient. Do I have to know the person in real life to have them work with me, or can I have someone from an online environment. If so, how do I get people to work with me in projects?

I am very sorry if this is the wrong forum or if this is an easy question.. I have only been working with Unity for 2 weeks, but I really do grasp the basic knowledge of building and coding small scripts.

Any help will be much appreciated!

 

You can work alone, but personally it's a lot more fun to work with a team. For remote (online) teams, there are always projects looking for people to volunteer their time. Skim Unity Connect and the Works In Progress forum, as well as other sites such as the TIGsource forum's Collaborations section.

Real life teams are great, too. Check meetup.com for local groups, and go to local game jams.

 

Thank you so much! I am already meeting so many great people that have some of my experience. I will still make projects by myself occasionally, but it is nice knowing that I have someone that can help me.

 

Honestly, in my journey, I started solo, I tried to make collabs but in general I get in the following hurdles with strangers:
1. They want to get paid now;
2. They don't want to do any other project than their own (bad ones at that);
3. They flake out;
4. They have little to no expertise, experience or will to learn;
5. They haven't touched a game in several years and their preferences are outdated.

The only team I work with are my close friends whom I trust. But otherwise, I will probably continue Solo.

When dealing with strangers make sure you can gauge their:
1. Motivation: money or making games is fine, anything else is a waste of time; I met people that literally just wanted to have friends...
2. Skills: Animation, modelling, programming, design and writing are all good but anything else is a waste of time.
3. Knowledge: have they actually played any great hits? I met a guy once that last played TRON and wanted to make a fantasy RPG... he had never heard of Skyrim, WoW or Dragon Age...

Make sure you aren't dealing with scammers or parasites. I met a couple that just want to deal with paperwork and legal stuff for a cut but they aren't actually doing anything and if you have a group, you can hire a notary or lawyer to do it for you at minimal costs.

Perhaps I have been unlucky but over the years there has been a growing trend of "anyone can be a game dev" and people with no interest in games try to associate with the groups. So beware.

 

Same deal, but "colleagues" rather than "friends". As groan worthy as it seems if you haven't done it before, it's important to do the right thing in regards to getting agreements down on paper in some form or another. So even if they happen to be friends, they're also colleagues, and that's the lens through which the collaboration is approached.

On the technical side, this depends a little on your team composition. Broadly, you want some kind of system in place that can share work (files) between team members.

If you can afford it, the easy solution for newbies would be Unity Collab. It's built right in and I think the workflow is as simplified as it can be. If you need a free solution, look at GitHub or Visual Studio Online. More complicated, but also industry standard.

 

There is an editor asset developed by GitHub that makes it easier to use their services with Unity.

https://unity.github.com/