Where to go to find collaborative people?

Morning folks,

Now that the Non-Commercial Collaboration forum has ended, I was wondering we're you folks go to find people to collaborative with?

I've posted a job on unity connect but not 100% that's the way to go about it?

Cheers,
Tim

 

That's it. Just Unity Connect, if you're looking for something from Unity themselves.

Of course, there are plenty of other forums, subreddits, etc.

 

Thanks for that @wccrawford I never thought to look outside of the unity forums ! Any you may have used in the past that worked out ok?

 

I've only ever had 1 collab end up with anything playable, and I'm pretty sure that came from these forums.

But there's a subreddit for it at (IIRC) /r/gamedevclassifieds and TigSource's forums seems good, too. I'm sure there are more.

 

What are you looking for? I’ve generally found it better to use other forums/websites if you’re looking for anything besides a programmer.

 

Unity connect is probably the best place. You can also try Twitter and Linkedin.

 

Do these people even exist? My experience is its almost impossible to make a group of random internet collaborators stick together.

I have seen collaborations work where there is a preexisting bond. People that went to school together, family members, or childhood friends.

 

A non-trivial game is a pretty big commitment, so I wouldn't look to start that with a random I'd never met before. You have to rely on them, they have to rely on you, and neither of you have any idea if you can do that.

My suggestion is game jams and local dev meetups. Even if there's not a jam on, if there's someone you're interested in working with I'd start with a jam between you, because that's lower stress / commitment / overhead than a proper project and lets you test the waters of "getting stuff done" with each other before increasing the commitment.

That said, I have heard of at least one successful commercial game that came from an online collaboration between people who, to my knowledge, hadn't met before. So it can happen. It's just the exception rather than the rule.

 

Make a game solo.

 

I certainly exist. Though I admit I've quit more projects than I've completed with random internet people.

My number 1 reason for quitting is that I require *some* art assets up front to work with. They don't have to be good. I just need some placeholders. Most can't even be bothered to get me some artfully placed cubes and a crappy UI template.

 

I thought I'd just follow up with how we found our new audio guy. We've had a stable team with a good balance of level designer (Tim, the OP of this thread), modeler, audio engineer, and programmer, but our audio engineer unfortunately became unavailable due to a life circumstance. I had the chance to work with our new audio guy in person at a game jam, so I got to know him and his qualifications beforehand. As the lead programmer, I have to say that it's been a pleasure working with really top notch art assets and level design on this project.