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I contacted a few more companies for art outsourcing and got some replies. From talking to them, art outsourcing is usually done when you have concepts and know exactly what you want. It’s not usually done for what I need, which is art direction and iterative level design. So I probably won’t go with outside companies for art.

I’m trying to find some artist websites now where I can post free job offers. My real offer is going to be posting an expensive ($350) ad on Gamasutra. I’m going to post it tomorrow, as most people will not work that day so my ad can stay on top for a while.

It’s going to be a problem hiring someone good enough. I’m just going to go by the strength of their resumes and see how smart they sound on the phone. I’ll also go with the hourly pay thing, so I don’t have to worry about wasting money paying someone who isn’t working.

I contacted about 5 companies that posted ads on Gamasutra advertising art outsourcing. All 5 ignored me. I also contacted about 5 developers regarding licensing their models. 2 replied, one of which ignored me after I sent the NDA over to be signed.

I don’t understand why this is so difficult. Admittedly I’m not EA, but I am offering tens of thousands of dollars for what amounts to a very small amount of work. Why bother posting an ad only to ignore customer inquiries?

This is a good thing when I think about it. If a company treats a potential customer this way, imagine how they treat customers who have already paid, or have some investment at stake? Whoever I ultimately pay to do the artwork needs to have my game as the first priority and being ignored doesn’t indicate to me that is the case.

It might work out for the best if I just hire someone after Christmas. At least that way I control the ultimate quality. With a 3rd party developer, they don’t have my best interests at heart.

My game has reached the point now where I need to hire an artist, and two new programmers are starting full-time, for a total of 4 programmers, not including myself. Additionally, I need to get a full-time artist on board. So I’m finally at the point of serious risk, where I should either fully commit to the project or drop it.

Any point before now and all I would lose is a little bit of money. After this point, I stand to lose a lot of money since my monthly expenditures are so high. So when evaluating risk factors, there’s really three points of failure right now.

The first is that the game doesn’t scale, which is similar the risk that I release too soon. If too many people see the game before it is fully tested and just really polished, those are permanently lost customers. And as I said in a previous post, you never have a better time than release to take off. If you botch the release, you will either never recover or it will take a very long time. The way to avoid this risk is through extended alpha and beta testing, but that is expensive, so there’s definitely a balance to be kept.

The second is that I make a bad hire for the artist. I’m only going to hire one artist, and whoever I hire needs to be basically one of the best in the world. Fast, intelligent, able to do any kind of work, AAA quality, self-motivated, experienced, knowledgeable, and communicates. I’m talking director-level quality – someone who likely has their own company already. The reason for this is that I’m not an artist myself, so there is no recourse if the person I hire does not know how to do something, or does it incorrectly. In all probability I won’t even know what is done wrong, or at a poor level of quality, until it’s too late. The risk here is that since I’m hiring one of the best in the world, I am planning to pay an according amount of money, and that means if I mess up and pay the wrong guy even for one month it’s going to be a huge risk to the entire project. I don’t have a good solution to this right now. All I can really think of is to hire someone with a ton of real experience, and to check references.

The third is billing. If customers try to pay and cannot, or credit card numbers are exposed, or anything else goes wrong related to money it will likely take down the project with it, especially if it results in chargebacks. This is probably the least risky, because I know someone good who I think can do it, but it’s one of those things you never can plan for.

I sent a complaint to Hypernia. At first they argued with me that they didn’t do anything wrong. So I sent this email:

[NameRemoved],

Suppose you decide to strike out on your own and start your own MMOG hosting company. Blizzard hired you as a trial to run one of their World of Warcraft servers. You hire an admin, who sees the server has a problem, so he puts a new computer in its place, but doesn’t copy over or install the old harddrive or install anything except a couple of games. Obviously your customers cannot play and you are flooded with support requests, cancellations, refunds, etc. Of course you cannot give them refunds, since you don’t even know who your customers are without your customer list. You get complaints with the BBB, chargebacks, etc.

So you send an email marked “Critical” to your system admin to put the old harddrive back in, but he takes two days to do it, during which time your business is going down the tubes. At last, when you get your system back up, it doesn’t work, as it is misconfigured such that you cannot install any of your old applications on it.

Would Blizzard hire you again? Would you hire this admin again?

This is what happened to me, except for Blizzard it’s my own company and my own MMOG.

So please in the future, ask support to not take any action on the server without prior notification and authorization. The proper way to handle the situation would have been to call me and say “Hey your server is locked up, what would you like to do?”

Right now since this is just a development server I only really lost one day of work, my bug database, about $500, and 3 days of access, rather than my whole business. But to trust my MMOG with Hypernia, as I was planning to do, I really hope this does not happen again.

And the response to this

Hi,

I didn’t think of it that way… you have a very good point.

Just do me a favor and always have backups because machines are machines and they either run well or break.

I’ve credited your account.

So at least this has been resolved. Still no working server though.

I am very displeased with my MMOG host Hypernia.net right now. One day out of the blue I get an email saying my server was locking up, so they replaced it. The server with all my development tools and code, which took me a day to install, to say nothing of the valuable information that was on it. Nobody asked me what was on the server, or gave me a chance to copy off my data, what the correct solution was.

After two days of frantic support requests they finally put the old harddrive back, on a different mount. Because it’s an emergency request, and they claim it’s a software problem, they charge me an undisclosed fee on top of that. To say that pisses me off is an understatement. Two days time is hardly an emergency response time. How do they know it was a software problem? Nobody did any investigation that I am aware of. And I’m paying $150 a month for this thing. Why should I pay more, when I never asked that my server be replaced. Unless it was frozen for good, just reboot the damn thing, tell me that it’s locked up, and let me copy off my data or fix the problem.

Not only have I now lost two days of development access, I’ve already lost half a day of work trying to unsuccessfully reinstall everything. My apps won’t install on the new server for some reason. I think they restricted my access rights so I can’t install new applications. Without asking me, they installed two games under the Hypernia admin account, which run in the background. They waste memory, slow down the server, waste harddrive space, and are a security hole. I can’t uninstall them either.

I’m going to call and bitch about this. I expect to be credited for two days of hosting, plus no charge for putting the harddrive back, or else I’m changing providers.

It’s now been about a month since I’ve hired people for my own game company and have been working on it truly full-time.

A few things I’ve discovered:

1. My initial time estimates were way off – not for myself so much as for others. I look back now at tasks I scheduled for 1 hour, and took a contractor 3 days. My time estimates were based on my own ability and knowledge, rather than that of those of the people I hired. This is not their fault though – there is always a loss of productivity with more junior programmers, as well as them not being able to read my mind as to what I want, and the master plan of the whole architecture.

2. I can’t really assign tasks according to their usefulness because of interdependencies. So some of what I assign, while not being busywork, is far less of a priority than other things that need to be done but can’t be done independently.

3. I didn’t account for dead-time, which is time lost because I spent a day setting up the server, or figuring out how to edit .mel scripts, or trying to figure out which physics engine to use and what tools I need to do so.

4. People tend to work better after they get used to your company and management style. It’s usually necessary to reinforce several times certain things, such as work hours, or no Hungarian notation, etc. After the initial period there’s no more problems.

5. You never really know how good someone is until you work with them because ‘good’ isn’t just a matter of being experienced. It’s also a matter of attitude, work ethic, attention to detail, and willingness to learn. Given the choice, I’d rather hire someone inexperienced but who will go out of their way to try to do a good job than someone experienced but who only does the bare minimum.

6. You really need to work with someone throughout the day to get the top quality results. Simply assigning a task and coming back 3 days later when it is checked in is a guaranteed way to just waste 3 days of paying someone and getting yourself annoyed. On the other end, talking to someone as they do something will not only give you both good ideas but builds up loyalty and ensures no time is wasted and problems are resolved quickly.

7. As a technical director, you really have to know pretty much how to do everything, even if you hire a specialist to do it for you. Otherwise there is no way to tell if something is done correctly or not.

8. Every day spent is more money spent. That causes a lot of stress.

9. It’s nice to think that if I do a great job on the game it will make a lot of money. I have no way to know if that is actually true, and if I’m just wasting a lot of time and money.

10. It’s very important to preemptively avoid distractions. Don’t buy / download games, keep your webbrowser closed, etc, or you won’t get any work done working from home.

I know how to use Maya now, on a very rudimentary level

I can’t find a VS 2005 to 2003 project converter. This is very annoying. I’m going to have to reinstall 2003 and redo all my project changes now.

While it’s a bit early, I went ahead with Hypernia.net and got a dedicated server for development. Mainly right now it will be for source control. The price is somewhat high, at $150 a month, but this means I no longer have the security and speed problems of using my own home computer. It also means certain kinds of work can be done more easily, such as writing the webpage and database stuff, since it can all be done on the server directly.

I briefly considered using Orcsweb for source control but god what a ripoff. They charge you full-price for a Vault license, when in practice the price goes down the more licenses you buy. Then they charge a per-developer montly ($40) and setup fee, ($20) when in fact there is no per-developer incremental cost to the host, aside from a trival amount of bandwidth. At 4 developers it’s already the same price as my dedicated server and all I’ve saved is the trouble of installing SQL Express and Vault. I’m not sure why anyone would use them.

Now I’m faced with trying to figure out how to setup all the web services, such as email, FTP, security, and web hosting. IIS isn’t that easy to figure out when combined with user security rights and database security rights. Hopefully I run across someone who already knows all this stuff.

Cosmic Strife.

No domain campers on the URL
Nothing else using it that I can see.
Matches my game
Easy on the ears.

Only potential problem is Sony has Cosmic Rift, which is a similar genre of game. But by the same token, Star Wars and Star Trek also differ only by one word, are both Sci-Fi movies, and there seems to be no problem there. Strife and Rift are totally different words as well so one couldn’t take that argument either.