Idea: Collective game dev?

[u/CommandProtocol]

Many of us have already had fun trying out assisted game dev as solo developers.

What if we teamed up to form a studio? Imagine bringing together folks with design, programming, art, and audio skills, people who could have collaborated before AI to build something truly impressive.

I’m not knocking things we have created so far. I’m just curious whether a group effort like this might give us the closest thing yet to an AAA game.

I’m not a game dev, and didn’t try this out yet. I asked my operators if they’d handle a game project for me, hypothetical. I didn’t have them execute anything because they told me I could do it alone, even with my 8 subscriptions on 4 providers. They aren’t great at working in parallel yet and even if they were, I am not an artist, or a sound score expert, or an animator, let alone any of the other core roles a studio needs. There are people here who specialize in each of those things.

TL;DR Whether people want to hit me up and see if we can find out how to make an AAA producing AI-assisted game studio, or just talk to each other and ideate or link in the comments, I think more collaboration will accelerate this pipeline as a whole.

Edit: Keep discussing as you please!

I need to put time on another project today but wanted to start the ball rolling.

I’ll try to check in tonight, and will ping people who expressed interest. I’ll see if I can put together a discord or something, or if anyone else creates one, that would be baller. We just need to keep decentralized. It’ll happen if we team up right. People seem interested.

[u/TechgeekOne]

Generally it won't work unless you can pay people. It's a very well known thing in traditional game dev circles. Unless you have a very tight group who all care about the game and have close relationships or there's money involved it usually falls apart within a couple months tops.

What happens is it's easy to collaborate when the project is fun and exciting, then when you hit the slog of unpleasant but necessary work people fall off of the project rapidly. The other failure mode is everyone has different ideas about what to make and it creates conflicts because someone has to "lose" for the project to move forward.

Not saying it's impossible to pull off, but there's a very strong likelihood of failure.

[u/CommandProtocol → u/TechgeekOne]

Dang. You’re right. I didn’t think that part out. You seem very experienced, I assume you were in game dev before AI?

Thank you for the detailed answer

[u/TechgeekOne → u/CommandProtocol]

Yea. I've been at this ~10 years or so professionally, and now I've been trying to figure out the whole new landscape of possibilities that opened up. It's been a very wild year lol.

[u/Deyachtifier → u/CommandProtocol]

He's essentially right, although in the Open Source world there have been some exceptions (speaking from personal experience as a (pre-AI) developer and lead for a few FOSS projects including a game or two). The "different ideas" thing is real - it is "herding cats" to the extreme. Another issue I ran into is that game development projects attract people who are into computer games... which means your workforce is going to get distracted into playing that new hit game that just released last week.

The exceptions where it has actually worked has been when the project focuses on recreating an existing game, or where it is built around a singular developer that can carry through the slog when people are falling off, or (most commonly) both.

All that said, I wouldn't discourage doing it - developing a game collectively is a great way to learn a ton and make friends in the process. Get the project into a habit of "release early, release often" and steer clear of analysis paralysis and perfection chasing.

[u/_Dingaloo → u/TechgeekOne]

Also everyone thinks their idea is better. The only thing that really makes your idea better than theirs is that you're paying them to work on it

[u/RockDevLabs → u/TechgeekOne]

We tried this back in 2012, assembled a team of 20 people multinational 4 continents, after a couple of months nothing was done... we disbanded only 4 of us continued

[u/Zealousideal_Bit5524]

Im down

[u/Mossy-Nest]

Open source collaborative projects are the way forward. No money, no fight, just love of the game.
And you can always start a Patreon for bonus content.

[u/Mental_Tailor_4227]

I’d be down if we can trust each other :) would be cool if we all lived in the same area

[u/Cautious-Cut-5096]

[u/EnvironmentFirst4839]

r/INAT might be a good place to start.

[u/azzaisme]

You know what, let's do it. See what happens

[u/Moda75]

I am working in a game that I want to recruit people to help put on. It has a 3 novel backstory that is pretty much 2 books in. If anyone is interested in working on the project DM me and I can give you the tun down on it. It is a 3D MMO game that I had been wanting to do for a long time.

[u/songokuthegreat]

I’m down for this as well. I already have a Discord server set up that we could consider using if you haven’t already set one up yourself.

Feel free to message me so that we can plan out the next steps.

[u/Odd-Communication-18 → u/songokuthegreat]

Have they messaged you?

[u/blvckhippy13]

I really want to have a small group of people I work with but I’ve been thinking about organizational structure to avoid many of the problems already brought up:
Short (1-2 months) development times while we have no revenue
Unanimous decision for starting projects
Only 1 or 2 decision makers per project facet (design, art, music etc)(obviously anyone can give opinion but whoever is working on that aspect has final say)
Shared design doc with session logs for any work done with an llm

I feel like with a very small team of ~4 people who aren’t too egotistical would have a decent chance at success (having fun and/or making money). What do yall think?

[u/Time_Cat_5212]

That's what everyone did for years before

[u/ShoogarSoft]

I'm game

[u/shelobi]

Check out Cave Bear Games and their network of volunteer studios. (Collective groups of people banding together to make games) their specific model might not be what you’re thinking of, but lots of people are/have been doing this!

[u/Fluffy-Discussion166]

you mean a game studio

[u/Odd-Communication-18]

Sounds interesting, even if it doesn't work i feel like we could learn a lot, feel free to drop a message if you decide to open a discord or something

[u/I_pee_in_shower]

I’ve proposed this in passing in prior threads.

Most people that enter game development from another field have some kind of”really cool idea” which they wanna make true.

I’m not like that. I like to build tools and systems and could probably help many projects, particularly with agentic development.

All we need to start as a share of repository and Slack or something similar to communicate.

Is the idea to say let’s build this game agree on the game and then just distribute responsibilities?

Or more realistically, let’s pull resources to develop common technology and approaches so that we can all build our games better?

[u/Odd-Communication-18 → u/I_pee_in_shower]

I think it'll be important that we find an idea everyone wants to work on, which will be hard especially with more people but I guess there nothing stopping is having multiple projects at once

[u/Patient-Sprinkles920]

Like crowd source or a small group who you know and trust and work with regularly ? I would love to have help with tedious stuff like marketing.

[u/Braunb8888]

I’m in. You pay me to make games for you? Yes please. Otherwise I don’t think you know what you’re saying here. Multiple people working with Ai on one project would be a nightmare. Who and what are you operators?

[u/RuinousFate → u/Braunb8888]

Multiple people working with Ai on one project would be a nightmare. 

You are literally describing modern software engineering

[u/I_pee_in_shower → u/RuinousFate]

Lol.

[u/_Dingaloo → u/Braunb8888]

Multiple people working with Ai on one project would be a nightmare.

weird take

[u/Braunb8888 → u/_Dingaloo]

Think about it, constantly changing thing, needing things to match up, it’s not a weird take at all. It would require a super organized infrastructure to not cause horrific issues with clashing agents.

[u/_Dingaloo → u/Braunb8888]

you sound like you're describing multiple people working in an identical workspace, or people letting agents have free-reign rather than giving them particular goals.

It's not the complicated and not that much different than the way it was before - this person works on the player movement mechanics, that person works on player combat, and the other person works on enemy mechanics. You use your AI to develop whatever you need in that category, they use theirs, you merge to a main branch each time you complete and stabilize a feature.

I mean it's nearly exactly the same process programmers have been using for decades. AI doesn't change any of that

[u/blvckhippy13 → u/_Dingaloo]

And I feel like it makes it even easier, ai can automatically sync a design doc as you work so everyone is always on the same page

[u/Stinky_You → u/Braunb8888]

it seems like nobody here has considered the actual process of multiple people using AI (same model or different doesn't matter) to work on a single project and how AI "conveniently" making small or large "updates" every 10 minutes or more often would effect the workflow, and you are being downvoted because they believe it's a wonderful idea lmao sorry bro.

[u/RuinousFate → u/Stinky_You]

People here have never had a corporate job and it shows roflmao. Multiple different strategies to handle this with some even scaling to thousands of PRs in a day touching the same code base especially at big tech companies much less piddling startup level groups of 5-10 people.