Hi, I am the developer of Emu War! and a founder of Hermit Mode.
Today I am taking a break from my usual schedule of development to get some thoughts off my chest, so as to provide a warning for anyone looking to break into indie development of games. There are a lot of pitfalls that one can fall into if you are naive or trusting enough as an indie.
I started the process of working with Unity in 2011. Since then, I have had numerous experiences working with freelancers through the Unity Forum and freelancing websites such as the defunct “Elancer”. Originally my intention was to act more as a designer of games, utilising both existing assets and hired freelancers to do the gritty work needed to tie those elements together around my ideas.
At first this seemed to be working well. We were able to find and hire a talented 3D artist to model a bunch of animals and items for us. We gathered enough and purchased the rest from 3d / asset websites to construct a concept video for our shelved (for the time being) title “Huntsmen”. In 2012 we created a Kickstarter video to try and get funding for this. Quite stupidly, we detailed game mechanics and even wrote a Game Design Document, sending it to established developers to ask for quotes on how much it would cost to make it. A lot of features that otherwise would have been quite novel in their approach to the genre are now common features seen in released titles, even the name “Huntsmen” is now in use across different mediums.
The kickstarter video is where the trouble started.
Our hired freelancer, who had set his own price and been paid for every model given to us, caught wind of our crowd sourcing attempt and presumably got annoyed at the idea he was not going to be getting money allocated for development, marketing, animation, skinning, every aspect of development beyond modelling. He stopped talking to us and left us in limbo while waiting for some commissioned models.
We had one person that “donated” $5k to the crowdsource attempt, asking us for a skype call interview to further probe us on ideas for the game. After learning all he could, he refunded his donation.
We then hired a programmer sourced through the Unity Forums.
He agreed to a price, agreed to what was being asked (a slice prototype that he seemed capable of given his advertised abilities and past projects) and set off working on it, promising daily updates.
He did not give daily updates, and after a few weeks could only show an entirely unrelated feature he had been working on, a game launcher he intended to sell himself. At this point we were naive enough to have paid him some money already, and when we sought arbitration through PayPal, they found in favour of him allowing him to keep the money while having not developed anything we had asked for.
This soured us to the prospect of hiring a freelance developer. Despite this, we were still not in a position to do much but design game mechanics and scenarios. So we found and hired an animator that was selling assets on the Unity Asset Store. He agreed to animate our characters, agreed on a price, and set out to do it.
This went well for a few weeks. Feeling we could trust him, we asked him to do some light programming for us, which he also agreed to with a raise in his agreed upon price.
We ended up sending him some of our commissioned 3d works, which he animated and started to develop into user controlled players. He then started to talk about stealing work, joking that if you just modify an existing 3D mesh or animation, you could claim it was solely your own work and sell it. This obviously worried us but he reassured us that it was all good. Being a naive and trusting idiot, I kept him on to continue to animate things and start to build AI systems according to logic charts I had created.
He quit shortly after this.
To cut a long story short, today I have found on the Asset Store items that are 1:1 copies of this commissioned work. It seems that he either created a new ID to sell these items, or sold them off to someone who is now selling them.
After all these experiences I realised the only way that I was going to get a game up and running was if I did it myself. I taught myself how to animate in 3D, how to rig and skin a model, how to model items and texture them simplistically, and eventually how to program in C#.
I am now the animator, modeller, programmer, designer, even creating music and SFX when I cant find what we need from existing assets.
If you are a person looking to break into indie development, and have heard tall tales about being able to just hire people out to do the dirty work, please reconsider. It is very hard to enforce an NDA or copyright infringement as an indie that has no established basis. People can and will take advantage of your trusting or good nature.
It was all for the best however as I am now much more qualified than I would have been – for instance with exception of integrated API and some systems, I have programmed the entirety of Emu War! myself. The AI and animations left to us by those hired out for them were sub par and extremely inefficient, and were replaced years ago.
I will leave you with concept art commissioned for the title “Huntsmen” around 2011-2012, a title that is still very much on the cards after Emu War! is released properly. The concept artist we hired had a distinct style that he infused into this, and was somewhat difficult to work with, refusing to add elements we wanted. Nevertheless, extremely talented.
Thank you if you have read this in its entirety. If you are looking to become a self funded indie developer I hope that it has motivated you to raise your own skills rather than seeking to outsource everything.
-Alex
Co Founder and Developer at Hermit Mode
