Putting a Team Together

It's been a strange couple of weeks. I finished my final exams from the first quarter of my MBA classes, and then I sent an email to the dean announcing that I was withdrawing from the MBA program. As I progressed through that first quarter, it struck me that I was putting the cart before the horse.

My goal is to make games. But not just by myself; I want to be a part of the industry, working on big projects. In order to successfully do that, I need a much more honed set of skills. I need to become familiar with more programming languages, understand the tools of the trade, and learn about what it takes to make a game as a part of a larger team. If I get my MBA now, I'll graduate in 1.5 years, degree in hand, without any more game development knowledge than I started with. And what good is an MBA in the game development world if I don't know how to make games on a professional level?

So I withdrew from the program; it's time to resume my own self-education process. I'm now spending my days working through learning C# and learning to craft games within the Unity3D engine. Progress is slow because these things are so alien to me, but it's still progress. In the meantime, I am putting a team together for the next big project. Until now, I have been running solo on all aspects of game development except for the music side. But I have some big ideas, and I know that I wouldn't be able to do them justice if I attempted to run solo forever. So it's time to build up a talented crew to make it happen.

The big project I'm building a team for will play like a top-down dungeon crawler, set in a Sci-Fi theme, with heavy emphasis on co-op and versus multiplayer gameplay. At its core will be a robust crafting system which will produce all of the items in the game. I'm still banging out all the details of how everything fits together, but it is taking shape very quickly.

If you want to join the project, I'm looking for:

• Unity3D Programmer (C#, Java, or Boo)
• Visual Effects Designer
• 2D Artist/Texture Artist
• 3D Modeler
• 3D Animator

This will be a commercial game, so there will be monetary rewards for successfully completing it. I'm not overly concerned with how much experience you have in making games; all that matters at this point is your talent in your specialty and your passion for making games. The rest will fall into place, and our team will learn and grow together as we build our game.

If you are interested in one of the above positions and have the chops to crank out high-quality work in that position, shoot me an email:

seth.coster@stozstudios.com