Sounds great, what is it
You might be slightly too cool for this cooperative, but uh welcome anyway!
We are going to organize the construction and sale of good videogames and maybe other stuff. Profits and management will be handled 100% democratically. We need to draft a charter.
I can read lines into a microphone
That’s it
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I can do the thing for the whatever, but not the other thing
i can provide interpretive dance
I can also read lines into a microphone but unlike Cuba I also know how to use a noise gate
I am also great at sleeping
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I am all for making good games. I’ve been learning C# the last couple weeks, which is going… fine-ish. It’d be going a lot better if C# was less weird, and I wasn’t stuck using Unity, which is Bad For 2D™
edit: also I may have misinterpreted the thread as “let’s start a commune” at first
One time I wrote an effects shader and I said
Yes that looks fine
And it only took hours
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I’m what you might call an idea guy.
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*sorry I meant to type, an ideal guy.
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Can settle vital disputes with clinical and decisive action
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I hate myself and have diabetes
Assembling a group for creative cooperation is hard.
I’m an “enthusiast” game-maker–one step below amateur, one step above aspiring. Much of my work was in community projects like Cragne Manor and a bunch of exquisite corpse Knytt Stories levels, several of which I organized myself (including the Select Button Knytt Stories level). I’ve been involved in at least three game or game-adjacent cooperatives that fell apart, one of which I was in charge of.
Projects can fall apart for many reasons, but those that succeeded had a few things in common:
- One very specific vision: “let’s make an exquisite corpse using this lock-and-key platforming level editor.” “Let’s make a cosmic horror tribute game.” It doesn’t work to have artists making character sprites when the programmers can’t decide whether you’re making a beat-em-up or a resource management sim.
- Concrete participation criteria: it was very clear from the very beginning what the lower bound and upper bound for contributions looked like for the majority of participants. “Build one room in either Inform 7, or in plain text + pseudocode if you’re not comfortable with Inform.” The coordinators and a small number of participants might take on additional responsibilities, or special accommodations might be made for a participant, but mostly folks should know exactly what they’re signing up for at the beginning.
- For lack of a better word, “star power”: it really helps to have names attached that people are excited by the idea of making games with, even if no direct cooperation is necessary to participate. Even a forum like ours has its cliques and subgroups; you need buy-in from folks who are sufficiently high-profile that it pushed people who are on the fence into wanting to contribute as well. If you hear “the Select Button game”, it’s exciting, but that excitement disappears if you don’t recognize any of the names because the only people interested are fringe users. Ideally this element isn’t necessary to design for, it comes about naturally as a result of points one and two, but when I look at the projects I’ve been a part of that actually succeeded, they all had heavy involvement from folks central to the communities in which those projects were occurring.
Sorry if this comes across too critically, but it really hurts to put effort into getting a group organized and start building resources only for the enthusiasm for the project to collapse. That happens enough on my solo projects as it is.
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If we’re talking serious creative collaboration among SButts then I’m good at writing (especially comedic writing), UX, and video editing.
instead of asking what skills people already have, you could ask what skills they want to get better at.
i don’t know if that’s a good idea or not.
I think both are important. Despite my openness to any interested parties, I would like us to take seriously the idea that the cooperative is a functional unit, interested in producing products rather than self development per se.
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I’m very interested but i wonder if i will actually be useful. I don’t really know much about cooperatives though, i suppose i should read up on them first.
(I used to be employed as a programmer but i don’t remember very much of it now.)
I’m excited about the selectbro enthusiasm. I am also wondering how serious this is? I’m interested in making something like sokpop but more/bigger/sharper teeth.
I’m 100% serious.
I was imagining a loose collective (perhaps with tighter subgroups) which would provide channels for collaboration and a standard set of practices for dealing with distributing profits.
I think most all of us are operating without funding, for instance, but we may want to collaborate in an ethical way anyway. I want to figure out what that looks like so that future collaboration is easier.
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