Sorry I vanished for a while there. After the forum crash I found that I couldn't log into my account or register for the site. Schedule hit the fan after that and didn't take the time to sort things out.

Anyway, there's been a few developments that might affect the BOTE project, or the plans I submitted for it at least.

Long story short, even though I am a college student, I believe that would be termed University student for you Europeans, I have been working on a company start up. I am in the process of doing the legal research and hope to meet with a tax adviser some time this week to work more details out, and within a month I hope to get my very own game company started up.

This is the part where I am having the difficult part... Deciding what to do with the material I submitted for the project.

Before I come to a final decision on it, and to avoid getting people's hopes up, I would like to see what everyone thinks of the project and the plans I had for it.

I thought we had finally managed to get rid of you with those forum problems. Guess I was wrong. Oh well, back to the drawing board...

...

There's a huge pool of talent here as you know Fox. If you decided that you wanted to withdraw your creations then that is your decision and there is nothing we can do to stop you. It is yours afterall. We would just have to make something that filled the gaps. Still, it would be better if we didn't have to. Whatever your decision, the project will continue.

...

Congratulations on your company by the way. What sort of games are you looking at? PC? Console? Toys?

welcome back!

I think a company is a good idea when you already have a game in mind to sell since you will have running costs each months (staff needs to be paid, electric bills etc.) so it's important to have a game and also the right personnel to do the job. About the material submitted, since it was still incomplete, it hasn't yet gone into the project so it's still totally yours. No problems should be arising from that front .

Welcome back and good luck.

I currently have plans for 3 smaller games before a large project. The three smaller projects are largely to help bring in revenue to support the development of the fourth major project. All four of these projects are going to be online games that are ad and subscriber supported and the first three will have free portions. I am undecided whether the fourth one is going to have a free portion or not due to it's size and scope, its not that likely.

Delving into my plans a bit more, once this first company is established and is functioning as a revenue base I plan to start a second company whose focus it is to make home console and PC games. That said, this is the situation with my BOTE plans.

The way I see it, I have one of two options.

Either I can save the project for a development by that second company.

-OR-

I can organize things and I can recruit people to work on the project as independent contractors with the promise of payment and or notoriety depending on each individuals involvement in the scope of the project once the game goes on sale. The amount of payment would be decided upon the completion of the project and may not be that much at the start as I will be paying people out of my own pocket based on what I can afford at that particular time. Any further agreement on payment have to be decided at some course in the development of the project.

The hitch to all this is that the quality of the end product would be seeking is that of professional caliber to help insure maximum retail price. As such, working on the project may require greater amounts of time than a standard casual project. Another factor that would be involved in the project is time, as in overall development time. This enters in as a factor because if the game stays in development for far too long, reworking of the graphics may be required before its release to bring it closer to standards at the time of completion.

One final large hitch that I feel I should notify people of, is that it would have to be a complete stand alone project void of all things Star Trek for reasons of copyright; however, I am not at all opposed to a Star Trek Mod being developed for it once it's completed.

what are your bote plans then? I didn't get/understand that part .

If you're looking for some free advertising, get in contact with Zach at Hailing Frequency. He might be able to put in a plug for you or something in the Hailing Frequency podcasts...assuming the games are Trek/scifi oriented, of course.

Advertising might help you get people who are willing to come and work for your company too...

My plan is to not make the creation of BOTE a project of a company but of a group of associated individuals, us here on the forums, but have all the rights of the project held by a single entity, myself in this case, in order to make it easier to negotiate with a publisher. During the course of the project a running tally of everyone's contributions to the project will be kept. I will use this to determine who will get payment. If a person only did one model that made it into the game it won't be seen as enough to warrant payment for their part of the project but would be enough for a mention in the credits with their name next to the model of their ship. People that are likely to receive payment for their part are people that do things like create a major portion of the game engine that the game could not run without or a good number of ship models.

As these factors depend on the amount done by people in the final product and the eventual sale price of the game are undecided, no estimates can be given at the moment of possible payment in the form of gratuities from the money brought in by the game. This is the only plan that I can currently think of at the moment because even discussing payment in terms of percentages is impossible at this point due to the undetermined number of people that will work on the project.

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As for the idea of going to hailing frequency for help on the game, that sounds like a good idea Matress. I just might have to do that.

so I understand that right, that your 4th project, the large one, is BotE? well if so then I have to say, I'm 99,99% (let's make that a 100 ) sure that SirP won't allow that. For starters going commercial with that project ain't possible since the code uses FMOD, a sound engine that costs (a lot of) money if used for commercial projects. Also a whole lot of the current graphics (planet maps etc.) cannot be used commercially without high payments to their makers (one of them told me about 100-1000$ for each of his pics. now count the pics in total taking 550$ as an average value.. anyway I guess you need at least 2 or 3 skilled 2D graphic artists working a year to get the amount of graphics done, let alone mentioning all the 3D needs like models etc.), etcpp.

Also, the rights of the project as a whole will always(!) stay with SirP whereby the rights to each contribution stays with the ones contributing. Contributors can possibly combine their rights and select a chairman of their own but I'm pretty sure, SirP won't ever give up his rights to the project and without his consent no one can possibly negotiate with outside people/publishers about the project. So if anyone ever gets "chairman" of the project with regards to outside publisher, he is or he is to delegate that to another person.

Next problem will be to actually sort out good from bad artists or contributors in general. Coders should be the hardest part since you are an arts student, not a computer science graduate. So the probability some faker or underachiever will do a number on you during the hiring interview is relatively high. Problem again here is that although the project is already quite well-developed, it still needs at least as many dedicated new coders as it would need new artists (and you can't seriously pay serious coders only after they committed some however-valued work, they all want steady monthly payment). Reason for that is SirP's recent timeplan change. He does not nearly have as much time to further develop the game (which it needs if it ever wants to compete with other similar commercial games like GalCiv2 etc.) as he has had before. Same with the two other code contributors we have. Also, ask cdrwolfe how much work it is to develop a 3D engine and how little time he now has to do that since he's starting his PhD right now. You see, the coding front is almost empty right now (well, compared to the busy alpha-version churning one we had the last years ) and working on pilot flame. Not a good premise for a commercial attempt to organize contributions to it and later on commercialize the whole project.

The only thing SirP ever has considered was voluntary donation to some bank account that gets distributed afterwards to every contributor who wants a share. In no way SirP or I for that matter wants to be responsible for someone starting a company (or something alike. even an organizing company is a company ) and possibly amount some large debts in the end cause it all goes wrong unfortunately (you never know, it's all possible). So if BotE is indeed your 4th project, I strongly recommend you to rethink the whole act since this is a little too hot for us. Tbh I'd also recommend to first finish college before starting such a critical professional endeavour like a company. Companies are about money and everywhere where money is involved there is risk of losing it. Another thing and I'm also honest here is that simply disappearing without saying a word like you did half a year ago (a simple register on our german boards and a pm to sirp would have been enough) is a no-no if we were to be in a professional relationship. You can sure imagine what happens if you decide to leave it all and refocus on your studies and then pissed-off hired contributors are seeking damages from either you or us and probably bad-mouthing the whole project everywhere. You see, too many negative factors for us. I mean if you got an idea for a 4th (large) project other than bote, please go ahead. But I'm afraid BotE won't be at your nor anyone's disposal. It's nothing against you and I'm sorry if we disappoint you, it's just we won't take the risks included for a commercialized project that is actually only a spare-time one.

To nullify risks, the following things would have to be met:

1. Replacement of FMOD by another sound engine (OpenAL?)
2. Realistic time- and cost-table for replacing (nearly) all in-game graphics
3. At least 3 dedicated and hired coders working on 3D engine as well as general polishing and extension (new, planned features) of the game's architecture and on 1.
4. Enough money to cover at least 2 years of development (all payments included)
5. Market analysis for such a type of game including comparison with other games already in the market. How much market share would bote able to take away from the established commercial games
6. A good reason why we should do this since this whole game is intended and promised as a free game free to download

No, you misunderstood me there Mal. The then fourth, now fifth, project is going to be unrelated to BOTE entirely. What I was talking about was BOTE being done on the side.

As for right to the project, what I'm talking about would be something built completely from the ground up. For a project like that, 2 years would be an optimistic estimate.

I'm still a little confused though, cause what exactly should be done on the side for bote? In the end according to your plan, it should be sold I assume? Well, that would not be possible according to what I wrote above with all the hatches.

Complete rebuilding from the ground up sounds near-impossible to me. BotE itself has more than 45k code lines not counting the network engine and the sound engine. It took 4 years to get there and it's still not finished. I'm guessing only a big company can sustain quality coders that long to stay in development till the game is ready, no matter how much "side-money" is flowing in from other smaller projects (which have to last for at least that amount of time. I doubt every browser game easily outlives 3 or 4 years on the market before it becomes boring or outdated to players. only a handful do I guess.).

Hmm...

In that case I'll have some thinking to do...

My plan is to ultimately make the plot I came up with a series onto it's self. To do that might mean that I have new material to come up with developed more toward what is already in the project as opposed to remaking it or starting from scratch.