Solo or company?

[Gear]

I don't prefer to work solo, but I don't have money to hire people to do anything, really. I'm lucky to have the artist I've got, though we've never discussed anything about "Polygonal Interactive" going anywhere, or him even joining it. (And that 'group' is nothing more than an extension of my photography 'company' I started two years ago.)

If I had the capability (read: money) to put a group together, you can bet I would. However, I don't. I'm creating an absurdly long game for free, using two free artists (one of whom has dropped out at least temporarily due to time constraints), and doing the sprite art, coding, and writing myself while using Kevin MacLeod and TAM music for music, and freesound for sound FX, and you fine people for help when I hit a coding roadblock.

[Marcelo_Orlando]

That's too bad Gear, and I know the feeling. A group would be more productive than just hiring people. Sadly I don't know of anyone online or who lives near me that are interested in VN making. It's strange not one of my friends are into this type of hobby, I had one friend to try it out but he gave up on it after a few weeks.

[Auro-Cyanide]

I would like to add it would be very very unlikely for me to ever NOT work in a group because there are simply things I can't do. I can't code, I can't formulate an entire plot, my spelling is terrible and my grammer is instinctual at best. So I'll probably forever be working with other people. Plus I do think you can a higher quality in a shorter amount of time if you pool resources.

[DaFool]

Well there are a couple of people I might like working with... but only because it might be a good experience working with them based on their track record and attitude. I don't hold any expectations other than seeing their projects to completion with the best of our abilities.

I would eventually want to have a capstone solo project where I put extreme level of craftmanship into the writing, the art, and the custom music. It was originally going to be my current RPG project but discovered the project is all the better because of the comparative advantage other skilled people are able to contribute, especially in character design, writing, programming and background art. So I suppose I'll be saving my capstone solo project for a really personal type of work with no commercial potential.

Also, another thing to think about: In a free game, your copyrights are split since each asset retains the copyright of its contributor. In a commercial game, the copyrights go to the Producer, since assets are considered "work-for-hire". Thus it's easier to shop the game to various platforms without having to sign-off every decision with each member of the team.

[Marcelo_Orlando]

I also have a project that I'm going to take on solo. There's much that is still undecided about it and I may do a bit of last minute changes that wouldn't go over well in a group setting. Plus I'm not even sure if anyone would want to help out with it because the story is rather odd...or maybe that's because it's incomplete? Either way I'll save that one for later.

[Camille]

Personally, all I'm capable of, art-wise, is a couple of stick figures. Even my stick figures look ugly and crooked! So it's impossible for me to do a VN on my own without using stock art or taking the next 9 years to figure out how to draw decently. I don't like to limit my writing to fitting what goes with stock art and those 9 years could be spent learning to write better, so those are no-go paths for me.

It's a little hard for me to work in groups because I'm kind of an uber perfectionist, but I'm as hard on myself as I am on other team members, so I think that's fair. Auro seems to put up with me pretty well, so maybe it's not as bad as I think. XD It's just more fun to be able to bounce ideas off of people and to keep each other motivated. I feel like if I didn't have my duo mates (as I have yet to work in a team larger than 2), it'd be really easy for me to just drop what I'm working on.

I think there's quite a few groups running around LSF, maybe we just don't all advertise it a lot.

[Crocosquirrel]

Polymorphic is made up almost entirely of Lemmas. Certainly, this is where Shiranai and I go to track down new talent as needed. We've had a little bit of movement back and forth, but in general, once people become members they tend to stay that way. We have two big releases coming up, and then a scattering of projects after that. We've been in operation more than a year now, and it's been a lot of fun

[Marcelo_Orlando]

That's pretty awesome to see such groups still up and active here. I wonder why they are so small though, more groups seem to have between 2-3 people. Although I could be wrong on that guess.

[Mink]

'Too many cooks ruin the soup' and all that.

As for me, on one hand, working solo means me Retaining Control, which is very important to me because I'm an anal retentive control freak. On the other hand, working with other people can be fun and it can balance the workload out.

[Marcelo_Orlando]

'Too many cooks ruin the soup' and all that.

Love that line.