I kinda agree with kev. I worked on a projekt for school and had the feeling doing almost everthing alone. And my partner had the guts to say I’m doing it wrong. I really like whenn people -who know what there doing- telling me what I’m doing wrong, but games are something I’m pretty decent -far from good of super- but decent.
The result of this that I think when it comes to code. There should be a hard cut in who does what. Teams are the most effecient when each is coding alone (maybe 2 MAYBE) and have could interfaces to work with.
Team work is really huge motivation booster. It’s also only way to get feedback fast enough.
You really need a good structure to make a good team. A bad structure can boost you motivation in the wrong direction too. (but I kinda love to work in a team when int comes to projects for work, there you have people you understand what you’r doing and contribute stuff)
Kev’s dead right. Provided everyone working on a project brings a completely different skillset to the table no-one is going to tread on anyone else’s toes*. Ideally you want just one coder and one artist and one sound and music person. Any more than that and you probably should be questioning the scope of your indie project. Any more than that and you stand a high chance of failure.
Chaz has just gone away for a month 
Alack! I am undone.
Cas 
- Adam Martin had a good way to deal with this sort of squabbly conflict resolution when it does occur : “if you do it first, then you are right.”
I have worked on my current project for 2 years alone, then immediately upped my team to 5, consisting of 3 programmers (which includes me), 2 artist and audio tasks are shared. I also do all the writing and scripting myself and since I’ve worked alone for a long time, I also do graphics, sounds, music, basically everything.
I haven’t looked back, in fact, we will soon be looking for more people.
But in my case the scope is very different because this board tends to consists of people doing casual games; and my co-members are all college people, and we meet twice a week.
So I have yet to experience how it is with online-people.
Getting partners like that, sound guy, art guy, to work a game that you will try to sell means you have to decide on the split, especially if the game makes a lot of money. You don’t want lawsuits. Imagine if Minecraft used some textures from some guy, and Markus didn’t fully negotiate the split with him, he might be entitled to half of Minecraft’s revenue, or all? Who knows. Just look at Facebook, lots of lawsuits from some guys who claim it was their idea, or claim to own half of Facebook.
Inviting someone to your project, that does miniscule work, can be risky, because what happens if you decide to throw his ass out after he’s put in some work but you’re not happy with him because he’s not active enough or skilled enough? You can’t really throw everything out that he’s put in, he may claim this and that gameplay was “his idea”, even if you remove all his artwork out of the game.
And who would want to join a project where the lead can throw you out anytime no matter what and own whatever you’ve done?
Partnering up is … complicated
Partnering up with someone in real life, that you can meet up with, is probably best. That brings a much more “seriousness” and commitment to the partnership.
But I would refrain from partnering, unless I see a tremendous benefit.
This is mainly to address the lack of people to bounce ideas off of. However I would agree that it isn’t much of a long term solution.
Getting partners like that, sound guy, art guy, to work a game that you will try to sell means you have to decide on the split, especially if the game makes a lot of money. You don't want lawsuits.
If real money is being made, expect lawsuits.(?) I just finished “Cryptonomicon” about a month ago (Neil Stephenson) and that was one of the bigger themes.
Dealing with compensation IS tricky, and not entirely rational, especially for DIY. I think there could be ways to make agreements that would make things easier to swallow, like capping the compensation from the royalty stream. If one “hires” a collaborator, I’d consider an arrangement where the value of the service is first figured out at a normal market rate. Then, the more risk (the longer the period before getting paid) the collaborator takes on, the more the value is increased. But cap it. So for example, if someone does some work that would be compensated at $500, and defers all the pay to a percentage of future sales revenue, perhaps they would receive 10% of the income derived until the amount of $1000 is reached, or 50% of the income until $750 is reached or some such formula.
Would something like that work? I’ve seen musical bands finance CD production by promising a high percentage of the first sales to the investors, but retaining full ownership once the agreed return has been covered.
Also, in the case of audio/soundtrack, there can be an agreement that the composer/sound designer can make and sell .mp3 of the music used, and that there be cross-promotion. I’ve seen that sort of thing. Or the libretto/composer split in opera or musicals–that can work out to be pretty clean.
But perhaps kind of ideal is finding a partner where you can just say everything is 50%-50% and forget about it after that. These are rare, but the results can be awesome, e.g., Lennon-McCartney.
A general principal: it’s a good thing to have (the right) people actively have an interest in your becoming a success, yes?