Time to Dream

Hey everyone,

Technically I've been here for awhile but 90% of the time it was just to pick someone's brain on how to use RPGM.  Now that I'm a bit more experienced and running a legit business now I figured I'd introduce myself.

My name is Dakota, Dream3r if you prefer forum names.  I'm 19, not that it matters, and I'm the CEO/Founder of Living Dream Entertainment (which also doesn't matter until we finish our game)

I'm working with a very talented team of seven on a game called Legends of the Dragon Lords: A Shadow's Tale, though you can just call it A Shadow's Tale or AST for short.  The first part is for the series it could be based on the story that is laid out, though AST could very well be a stand alone game.

We're a moderate budget team.  I say moderate instead of low because the game's budget is near $40,000.  Which is still very low for the game industry but at the same time very high for a lot of Indies.

So in short, my name is Dakota, I'm out of my mind trying to make such a huge game as my first real game but I have all the right people to do so.  I can call a lot of Indie Devs my friends and I'd love to call YOU my friend too.  So introduce yourself, I won't bite.  Unless you really piss me off in which case I will just type very aggressive post :D

Keep dreaming everyone,

Dakota

Welcome to the group!

hey welcome to the forum :D

i think you are confused about something , introduction topic is about you introducing yourself to the forum people :p

if you feel you can do a big game at first try go ahead and do it :D

i think theres someone with forum name dakota here :p :p

Ha, yeah thanks sorry if I talked too much about the game and not me.  The game and the company have pretty much become my day and night lately so I don't have much else to talk about.

I know the feeling. For me it varies: book/stories or game? Depends on what I'm working on at the time. :p

I like that your first game is going to be a large project. It's brave and it shows a lot of initiative. If you've got a dream then dream big! 

Thanks, I made some "games" before but they were really just me learning how to use RPG Maker. They don't even exist anymore outside a trailer or two you might find on the internet somewhere XD

We'll see how it goes I'm focusing the team on a demo right now so we should have that done in about a month just to show off some mechanics of the game.  Story is too large to tackle right now, we'll create the full open world game later when we have the funding to do so.

Sounds good, I hope you're organized or it'll be very hard to get everything done on time. What is your creation process like?

Organized, when I can be.  Just wiped out a bunch of old files I've been holding onto for four months despite us no longer needing them.

Work process?  Well it's spread out amongst several different people.  I have folders for each artist, one for sprites, one for bust art, one for map art, social media art, and (soon to be) battle animation art.  For the most part I'm either emailing a team member the next project for them to do or taking the work they sent me and make it work in RPGM.

Outside of that I spend a lot of time on social media.

To keep things clean though I try to organize both my desktop files and my google drive files.  Google Drive is a bit of a mess at the moment but I'll fix it eventually.

It sounds like you've got a lot of things in order. Is it better to work in a team than on your own? I would imagine that it cost a lot of money to pay all those artist. 

Thousands upon thousands of dollars.  If you can afford it go for it, but you need to plan a LOT and make sure your money isn't wasted...at least not often I've probably wasted $2,000 of my $4,000 invested so far on bad relationships (artist that left and we had to throw out their work and such)

It's going to be worth it in the long run if I can make it without going major in debt

Oh my gosh, team members can just up and leave? I've never considered that. Is there anything else I should look out for ? I'm sorry I keep bothering you with questions, I've never gone into the indie game business before or any business for that matter.

They can when you don't have them bound to a contract. But usually if you're binding someone to a contract you have a reliable payment system in place.  Meaning they're steadily at work. You can't be as low budget as me and bind someone to a contract.  You'd have to have thousands in the bank ahead of time.

Okay, thank you for your help. I wish you good luck in your projects and that remember to have fun. 

You'll fit in just right fine here. Welcome.