How to Hire Help?

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Guidman64
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How to Hire Help?

#1 Post by Guidman64 »

So I will want to be hiring out for translators and I will be hiring out for some animation work (I am using 3d rendered scenes and characters), and may need help with some programming. I have a couple of small universities near me to post for help, but I was wondering:

1. What I needed to do on my end so that no one steals my work and takes credit for it?
a. Is there a way to copyright the novel?
b. Do you send it out like piece work?
2. For animation do I need to give them my characters or can they make a generic base (gen8) animation?
3. How would that work if I wanted help from a programmer?
4. How have you handled proofreaders and/or translators not stealing story?

I guess my main concern is property theft.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Mutive
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Re: How to Hire Help?

#2 Post by Mutive »

1. It's highly unlikely someone's going to steal your work. There are no guarantees, but stealing someone's half-finished VN is generally not a super profitable thing to do.

2. In theory, yes, you can apply for a copyright. It's almost certainly Not Worth It, though. From what I can recall (note that I'm not a lawyer), copyright resides with the creator of the intellectual property automatically. (Unless it is sold or whatnot.) If you're concerned about theft (again, unlikely), just keep records of what you've done, sent, etc. In the off chance someone tries to steal your script, you can produce the emails that show that you created it.

3. I've piecemealed everything. It works pretty well for me and (I'd assume) for everyone else. The artist probably didn't want to read through a bunch of game scripts. The editors don't care about game code and are only vaguely interested in art.

4. With a programmer, you'd want to specify precisely what you'd like done. Renpy is a fairly simple language to do basic coding in, so it might be worth only hiring the programmer for fancier stuff (a point and click interface or unlockable image gallery or mini game or whatever vs. putting in all of the text). Again, I'd be very specific with what you want and expect it to potentially be fairly costly. (Programmers at my actual job-job are billed at about $150/hr. I've seen some in the $300/hour range. You almost certainly can (and will) find someone cheaper, but the more you can specify "I want one Match game" vs. "program the whole game for me!" the cheaper it's going to be. Basic programming can also eat up a LOT of time, too, so you want to only pay for the stuff that you need a programmer for, vs. "can you space out my words properly so that Python knows they all fall under the same dialogue box". Because, woah, if you're trying to get the second, it's going to cost a fortune.)

Computers are also very simple things. They can only do what they're explicitly told to do. So the clearer your instructions, the better. (i.e. "I want image A to unlock when dialogue choice B is clicked")

Also, while you can program animations with place holder art, it'll need to be adjusted after the final artwork is in to look good (at least in my experience, others may say otherwise, but I always find that something cuts weirdly as I didn't quite anticipate the sizing/spacing/whatever), so if you're after animation programming, I'd almost certainly get the art done FIRST and provide it to the programmer so that he/she can properly test it.

5. Again, it's highly unlikely that a proofreader's going to steal your game. See 1 and 2 above.
Enjoy Eidolon, my free to play game at: https://mutive.itch.io/eidolon, Minion! at: https://mutive.itch.io/minion or Epilogue at: https://mutive.itch.io/epilogue

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