To be clear, a collaboration is a type of working relationship where all parties agree to some kind of revenue split on a per-project basis. This has nothing to do with hiring employees, contractors or anything else. Anyway, here’s some of what I learned about finding good collaborators.

When I start to look for a collaborator, I go through a series of steps to get to the actual point of making the game. It’s my vetting process. But before that, I think it’s important to understand the nature of a collaboration. How it will work for you and the other person[s] and why.

Partners v. Collaborators

Usually, when someone thinks of making games they start with The Almighty Game Development Company. It’s how I started. But truthfully, that’s a whole other mess. Finding a partner is a serious commitment, like marrying someone. A collaborator is more of a girlfriend/boyfriend situation, and rarely includes living together! ;) Distinguishing the two is important for a number of reasons.

Short-term commitments

By eliminating the idea of a long-term, serious commitment to a partner you can afford to fail. That’s incredibly important because you will fail a lot in your search for the right collaborator. The trick though, is to fail in short bursts, wasting as little time as possible.

You’re allowed to be desperate

If you were to form up a partnership with someone that would presumably last for many years, you wouldn’t want to go in signing that contract with a shred of desperation. Would you? Put your feelers out, lay yourself out for everyone to see. Sure, the search for a partner/collaborator is very similar but the emotional impact of people abusing your investment is much, much less.

Know what you want

By talking to people with the intention of creating something with them you’ll figure out your own turn-ons and turn-offs and what you’re looking for in someone else. There is a lot of complexity within anyone’s personality so it’s up to you to find out what values are most important to you. For instance, perhaps you need someone that aligns with your style of brainstorming, or you can’t work with people who want to make RTSs [or any other certain kind of game].

I’ve been able to isolate a number of these traits that clash/mesh when working with someone closely on a creative project.

Work style

This is a tough one to pin down because you need to work together first to truly understand how the other works, but that shouldn’t stop you from asking. Ask about their hours, when they are most productive, what’s the usual? The thing about these questions is that they all infer that they work regularly. If they come off as sporadic or unorganized, that’s pretty telling that they haven’t developed a style at all. If that’s the case, I’d recommend moving on since it means they probably haven’t been doing this for long enough anyway.

If they do have a style, know what you can tolerate and what you can’t. Usually this isn’t a large problem if you can understand it early enough. That way you’ll know how to work best with that person. If they need false deadlines, set them. If they binge and do 90% of their work in the space of one manic day, don’t hound them the rest of the week.

Creative Process

Not everyone wants to be a game designer, but most do. Finding a common ground on how to come up with a game idea can definitely be a challenge on its own, let alone two strangers fumbling around trying to agree on one. I think, more than anything, this is what trips up most collaborations. Too often, one person has a really strong attachment to an idea [or type of game] they bring to the table and can’t let it go. It’s important to allow for wiggle room, be lenient and let the idea be owned by all people involved. Even if one person came up with a single area or story idea, that’s still an important contribution. Get excited about the idea and riff on it, don’t obsess about owning the seed, you’ll get nowhere fast.

Demeanor/Personality

This is something that’s often a chemistry issue. While it’s ideal that you meet someone in person to truly gauge whether your personalities blend well, I think with a healthy chat via Skype or something else you can get a good idea for how the person generally is. This is a gut thing, so any further explanation is a bit ridiculous. Just make sure you get that “good feeling” from the other person.

Mission/Goal

Make sure you are both doing this for similar reasons. If halfway through you realize that your collaborator is doing this purely for profit, disregarding any possible creative ideas you have about design or awesomeness for the sake of pandering to a canned audience, things will go South very quickly. Again, know who you are and why you’re doing this. If you’re in it for the money, find someone else who’s in it for the money.

I’ve been watching Dexter and there was a really good moment in a recent episode [season 1] where he asks a married couple a very interesting question.
Dexter

Why do you love each other?

Married Couple

Because we share the same dream.

Even though they were killing smuggled Cubans and dumping them in the Pacific, they still shared the same dream. I found that comforting. The dream isn’t important, what’s important is that you share it. There’s someone for everyone.

Conflict Resolution/Breaking Point

This may be one of the hardest things to vet out as nobody [sane] wants to initiate a conflict for the sake of finding out how eachother reacts to it. Though you can definitely understand how someone deals with mini-conflicts by criticizing their ideas/design. If a prospective collaborator were to fly off the handle after you mentioned something about your apprehension to including real-time weather patterns in your game, you might want to step away.

Conflict is a very real and necessary element to any kind of team effort. They will arise and they must be dealt with in one way or another. If they cannot be handled in a reasonable way, that can be a leading cause to a game’s death or some other terrible outcome. Definitely think ahead as much as possible to how someone might respond to adversity.

The Vetting Process

Ok, so that’s some general things to look out for, now for the process itself. In step-by-step form!

STEP ONE: Put the feelers out

What you’re looking for is someone who is everything you’re not. Maybe it’s two people, maybe it’s five. Whatever it is, if you’re an artist, look for games with programmer/amateur art. If you’re a programmer, look for artists with game mockups, paintings and the like. You’re not necessarily looking for amazing games here. Those are games that already have the total package. You need to find half-baked games preferably mocked up or programmed by one person.

Alternatively, it’s important for you to put your best foot forward. If you’re an artist, provide a link to your portfolio that showcases your best and most relevant work. If you’ve made games before, point directly to them. If you’re a programmer, do the same. It’s not enough to simply be interested, you need to prove why you’re going to be awesome to work with. Make your intentions clear. More on that later.

This being the internet, there are loads of places to find people actively looking for collaborators. Though, because of that, things are pretty competitive. Here’s just a few. If you have any suggestions on other places let me know in a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

• TIGForums COLLABORATION THREAD
• Kong’s Collabs
• Kong Collab Forum
• Newgrounds Artists
• Newgrounds Programmers
• Pixelation Job Board
• FlashGameArt Artist List
• FlashGameLicense Collaboration Thread
• DeviantArt suggested by Colm

Now this list is focused around finding someone with experience in making Flash games. That’s where my experience lies, but surely there are other places, if you have one and you’re reading this please let me know so I can add it.

There are definitely other places to find collaborators. I met Andy Moore at the 2009 GDC in San Francisco. I found Jiggmin through his game Platform Racing 2. None of those happened based on a post from a forum, I found them by emailing with them directly.

STEP TWO: Set a course

Once you’ve got some prospective collaborators on the line, you’ve got to hook them. I’d encourage you to try and foster an environment that is as creatively open and fair as possible while also maintaining a very small scope for your first collaboration together. There are a few ways to do this.

1. Do not come in to a collaboration with a preconceived game idea. Seriously. Don’t.
2. Split any future profits equally among original collaborators [for the most part].
3. Define a basic timeline. eg. “Let’s make this game in two weeks.”
4. Go further and agree on a mini-milestone such as: “Game ideas by tomorrow.”
5. Chat with them at length. Ask about what games they like, how they got into it, etc.
6. Unearth both of your intentions for this project. What’s the qualifies as a success? Why are you here?>

All of these agreements will tell you a lot about the other person and definitely bring up a good many red flags if they exist. If someone misses the “game ideas by tomorrow” deadline, then that’s probably a red flag that they may not be as committed to this as you are. Alternatively, if they have Idea A that they really want to make and you’re just not into it, but they keep pushing, well that’s another red flag. The reason you’re setting a course is so that you both have to follow it.

Frankly, a large part of this is about your gut. If you get a good vibe from the other[s] then move forward. I’ve had a fair amount of collaborations never get past this stage due to a whole host of problems. Many of them are completely understandable. Most of the time, it simply doesn’t work out. It’s nobody’s fault, just a bad combo.

STEP THREE: Fast Prototype

Once you’ve decided on an idea it’s important to get something up and running ASAP. Don’t get entrenched in a series of game design documents and planning schedules. Those can be useful, but if you spent a month doing all that only to find out that when it actually comes to making the game it’s not going to work out, then that’s time wasted. The main idea here is to fast forward to the good part so you can find out if it’s really going to work or not.

STEP FOUR: Communicate and Develop

Decide on a chat program/account that you will both use to keep in touch daily. If you are going on vacation, let the other person know. Since most of these happen remotely this kind of feedback is really important for motivating the other member[s]. Sometimes simply not knowing what’s up with the other person will coerce you into slowly losing hope that the project will actually be completed. If you’re wondering, shoot them an email! If they go AWOL, they go AWOL and that sucks, but at least you know. Learn and move on.

It’s a bit ludicrous to reduce this stage [certainly the bulk of the time] to a couple paragraphs, but game development is its own animal all together. The best advice I can give is to communicate throughout the development process, even if it’s just saying “Hi” in the morning. It’s enough to let the other person know you care, which is a lot more important than most people think it is. Think of this as a relationship/friendship.

STEP FIVE: Profit

Once you’ve finished the game, regardless of the platform, there will certainly be a lot more work to do in order to distribute the game. Even if it’s a Flash game, you’ll probably want to find a sponsor, set up ads or even use some kind of microTX system. Whatever the case, the work continues and it’s important to realize that.

I hope my haphazard brain-dump helps a few folks out there, if you have comments or criticisms please post below. I’d be curious to hear other folk’s experiences with this practice.

Play the game here at YoArcade.

There are no high scores tables as of yet, but feel free to post your best here in the comments. Mine is 800,250 points. We plan to start the high score competitions in earnest over at Kong when we release the game there sometime in early September.

Whenever we have an idea for a game, it usually starts out as a gameplay skeleton. “Hey wouldn’t it be cool to push hail up in the air to make it grow bigger and have it crash down onto buildings for points?” or “Have you played death worm? We should see if we could expand on it.” With Life Raft it started as “Hey, we want to make that [redacted] game eventually, maybe we should start with a simple platformer to get some of the tech worked out. Air buccaneers is awesome, let’s do something with grappling hooks and moving vehicles/platforms and etc.” The next phase of development for me is to figure out what the plot/look and all that stuff is going to actually be about. The opposite would be true if we were to come up with themes first and then try and wrap gameplay around them. I don’t think that’s a good way to go, but that’s another post entirely. Besides, working within restraints can breed incredible ideas. So… Life Raft. To begin this process I simply list out the criteria for ideation.

I start by setting up places moving vehicles would work within all the criteria. For this to work, the player needs to have a wide range of motion as well as the constant threat of death below them.

• Lava, Water [shark infested], High Sky, Acid, Event Horizon, etc…

I pick one from that list. Let’s go with water [because that's what I picked]. From water I went into further details with what the vehicles could be.

• Helicopter, Plane, Birds, Dolphins, Hoverboats, etc.

From this list nothing really interested me, so I started thinking about what if “falling” into the sky was the big risk. Like fish that would rise up into the sky [because they were too buoyant] and they’d constantly be fighting against that buoyancy. That struck a cord but I wanted the character to be human, simply because it’s been awhile since I’ve created a human player character for a game. The underwater thing wasn’t working out, but I wanted to preserve the interesting parts of the idea that sea creatures were floating to the surface of the sea. So that’s basically the A to B of Life Raft’s IP. Here’s the gist of it.

Many eons ago the world was flooded and the surviving humans found the rare patches of land to live on. Times were hard but they persevered. Later, strange creatures arose from the depths of the sea, evolved from consuming strange deposits at the planet’s core, they were now made too buoyant for survival underwater. All the people saw this as the species has overgrown in numbers, most of the sea’s surface was covered. Many used their carcasses as a resource to expand their tiny islands, another considered the bounty a blessing and feasted, feeding generations of their people. Many years passed and those that began building with the remains of the beasts prospered and grew large foundations. Back at the isolated island their community remained small, but faithful. Not many years ago, the villagers found a living beast floating in the sky willingly, perhaps fresh from the sea floor. It seemed to feel at home in their island sanctuary and soon found an attachment with a little girl with which befriended. The villagers found it strangely mystical and celebrated their companionship as the strange beast, now named Ekiuna [temporary?], often protected the little girl as she grew older. Now a young leader of her village, she is hailed as the finest hunter they have ever seen. With an innate knowledge of her environment and the agility of Ekiuna, they were a team unmatched. All the while, the village elders spoke in dark corners of the peculiar nature of this new arrival. Now, today, those suspicions are vindicated, an unlikely messenger brings ill-news from the open seas…

Ok, yea. So that’s what I’m thinking. As for the art style, that’s completely independent of the theme for this go around. I started out by painting some pixel art to get the ball rolling and I really liked how it turned out. I tried a few other things, but sometimes it’s best to use your heart and not your head. I guess if my heart isn’t telling me anything about which direction to go, I defer back to my head which is always useful. Hence the whole way I ended up with this Life Raft idea. Though I will admit that the original idea was much more generalized. Something to the tune of “Jellyfish from the sea floor rise up to the surface with gas in them and people run around on them.” Once I had that initial spark I took it further and really sunk my heart into the story, background and characters.

Oh and for this image, I have a bit of a tutorial going that I have in the works. I started writing it yesterday but it’s turning out to be too long so I’ll need to figure out how [or if] to boil it down.

Why do we want to be a movie?

As I pointed out earlier, gamers once thought the ultimate gaming experience was playing something so real, it was like playing a movie. Words like “cinematic gameplay” have become selling points on large titles beefing up their integrated cut-scene chops. But what does film [as an art form] really have in common with games?

• They both involve moving pictures. [film, animated frames etc.]
• Both attempt to deliver some kind of narrative.
• They are both linear. [A point of contention, but games are linear, because the player lives within a linear time-frame, i.e. Planet Earth. Even non-linear games can't erase the player's memory.]

Frankly, the comparison has much more to do with business/industry behind-the-scenes types of deals than it has anything to do with the process and expressive characteristics of the two mediums. Hollywood has acted as a model for large publishers/developers to produce games, and it may have been a good move for the industry, but not the art form.

Hey, devs are the new rockstars!

As much as I’d like this to be true, it’s simply not going to happen. The process of creating games is not an act of performance. Their memes and humor can be translated into a culture of sorts, but that’s about it. And besides, watching people develop games is boring. Trust me.

Music runs an interesting parallel to games insofar as that it relies on technical excellence [muscianship] but it ends there. Music is moving because of its rhythm, exploring the pace of the human heart and elaborating on that in order to control our emotions. That’s a gross oversimplification, but I think it works here. Music can only go so far until it is performed live. It’s then that the connection is made personal between the author and our ears joined with “the moment.” When, all at once, everyone is engaged simultaneously in both the creation, execution and retention of the musical expression at hand. When done right, it is an awe-some experience, and often a religious one for me. But without those elements of the musicians playing their piece, the collective audience receiving it and the overwhelming fact that we all know it’s “all happening now,” that is lost.

What’s the most interactive ancient media?

Books. Words are the most abstract representation of an idea we’ve ever had, and somehow we manage to communicate using their tiny minutiae everyday. This doesn’t exclude speaking either. Speech is the most ancient form of communication, but still, the word “tree” has absolutely nothing to do with a real tree. It’s just an abstract piece of data used to represent something explicit to a certain group of people. But I’m going to leave speech, since that’s performance art. But in books, this is where the interactivity comes in. It takes a brain to translate all that crazy language into workable imagery that can be understood, moved around and formulated into a world. The simple nature of words and representational glyphs generate an environment for the reader to imagine their own world, in their own way, whether it be separate from the author’s intention or not.

Games are the same way, not just video games. The rules of the game provide a world of bounds for the players to interact. Even if the game is sound and proven, players may choose to play it in a way that they think is fun, and perhaps outside the intention of the author. Say for instance, team-killing in co-op Halo to prevent any progress. While Bungie may not mind, their original intention for the co-op experience probably had more to do with the pacing of the action and drama of each mission than accounting for 50 master chief corpses blown sky-high with a pile of frag grenades after hours of assassination TKs.

But that’s what ’s great about our video games, isn’t it? Expanding the bounds of the worlds we love to inhabit. In great books, the worlds will travel with me. They’ll follow me into my sleep and iterate inside my dreams. The reality of that world, that impossible “science fiction,” becomes real in my head and all those books had were some ink on a book of paper. I’ll cut it short, but here’s a few more about books and games.

Also, from a business perspective. Books are bought and consumed in private. They are not to be spoken aloud, played or shared. You purchase games in the exact same way. There are no video game premiers [Cliffy B aside], and no awards for best performance [screw the VGAs, it's an adapter not an award], and you can’t go see it with a date. You possess it, and consume it on your own time however you want. Sometimes you don’t play your game for weeks and then come back to it, to that… bookmark.

Nonetheless, the artform of writing still has little to do with designing games themselves. It is much more useful to think of the experience of reading in regards to playing video games, than applying the process of writing to game development.

Playing games in the car.

There’s really no prior medium to inform us on the nature of interactivity. Well except one. But it’s one that was here all along. Life. I know. I’m really deep. But seriously, one of the most interesting quips about game development I’ve ever heard is the little story from Miyamoto on how he got the idea for Mario.

I got the idea for Mario while riding a train. I had a window seat and found tracing the trees and clouds with my finger to be pretty entertaining.

~ Miyamoto, not the quote, but paraphrased by me

I thought this was genius, and immediately thought back to all the games I would play with my brother when riding in the backseat of our station wagon. We’d come up with some stupid stuff to pass the time. One game was shooting all the birds with our “laser” [a recessed cap that covered a screw on the door handle] while calling out “got one!” to one another. Perhaps more promising, I would pick out a speck of bug guts on the windshield and focus on it. By moving my head around, I would dodge the oncoming terrain, weave between the dotted lines of the interstate, and jump around in the clouds. To this day, this is probably why I play with an inverted mouse/joystick.

There is nothing more interactive than life itself. And often, a single life has no real cumulative meaning. Even those with great purpose, such as MLK, Ghandi or Bill Gates [wait, what?] have meaning as icons to the greater society. Unto themselves, their lives were [and are] probably much more fragmented than we would care to know. Our lives are filled with short bits of meaning when the pieces come together at the right time to create something greater than the sum of their parts. My life is chaotic, imbalanced, unfair and mostly dull, but it is the most important thing in the world because I am doing it!

Comparing games to other media again!?

Maybe I’m late to the party, or just hung around too long to be kicked out onto the patio with road-beer in hand. This is just my thought-vomit over the last few days of driving around the barren Midwest.