"I Suck At Game Art... Should I Hire Someone?"

name where you from and what's your question yeah my name's Jameson I'm in uh Sacramento California I've been working on a prototype of my game for about 2 years now and uh I'm interested in trying to take things to a level where they more polished and I'm curious of your thoughts of H you cut out there how's the finish line for yep you cut out there you said I'm curious about hiring what was it curious about hiring a um and I saved up about $10,000 and I just wanted know if that's reasonable to to hire some professionals to help me get across the Finish Well there's two Finish Lines and I yeah that's a really really good question there's two Finish Lines and I'm you cut out there so I'm not sure if you're which Finish Line you're talking about but I'm just going to sort of go for both the first Finish Line is finishing the Prototype and then selling that prototype to either a crowdfunding audience or pitching it to a publisher or the third option is taking a demo and pitching it to Ste Ste and offering out

a demo during like next Fest and getting hopefully 100,000 wish lists from a steam demo this is just my personal preference there's no correct answer but my personal preference is to figure out your prototype alone do everything that you possibly can to make it beautiful when you're alone and then once you've ironed out all those Kinks and you figured out exactly how to make your prototype beautiful and it's super polished then then and only then you can build out a team and here's why the reason why is because it's really really difficult to manage a team when you haven't done the thing first right so building out your prototype involves coding it involves obviously planning and and project management and art and music and sound design and understanding Unity or unreal or gdau so you've got to understand all these systems and so it's really really difficult to pay a team and it's also very wasteful to pay a team when you don't even understand how

to do it yourself now you might say well I actually do understand everything myself I just don't want to build it all out completely for the Prototype the truth is even me and I'm on my fourth fourth commercial it's really my third the my third commercial release even on my third commercial release this is my third publisher I'm working with I still don't fully understand everything that we had to do uh for our prototype so I had to go in and pretty much understand every aspect of the Prototype granted for me I had a team when we were building our prototype so I'm not really following my own advice here but I did follow my advice for my first two games and I think that's the important part which is if you're just starting out and you're making games and this is your first prototype or your second prototype I highly recommend you actually doing all the work possible before hiring out a team so you may be thinking well I I'm not very good at artwork do your very best to get as much of it done as you can on your own and then once you have an understanding even an understanding like think about it you may not have the best character sprite for let's say a 2d platformer but if you go in and do it yourself and no matter how crappy it is

at least you understand the process so that when you're hiring somebody they can't number one cheat you they can't be lazy and you think they're working hard when in reality they're being lazy and you should know that because you can do it too so it gives you a really good understanding of what things cost and by the way if you're like me and you always dreamt of making an indie game as a full-time job I have a free webinar below that goes into exactly how to make six figures with just a demo I was just like you for years I thought I had to make a game in its entirety before getting a paycheck but there's actually three ways to make six figures before even finishing your game I've done this multiple times so check it out below if you do want to go full-time Indie and thanks for watching