When I hire someone

Eventually, I'm going to hire someone.

I can only get so far by myself. I am about three years off going into fulltime game development (unless something big happens either way) and even with all 24 hours of a day devoted to it, progress will be slow. So I'm going to eventually bring someone on board.

But I don't want just anyone. In fact, I want a very specific person. And it's kind of counter-intuitive.

My Guy

I'm a fan of untapped potential. I want to work with people who are self taught, and are still self teaching. This isn't out of some belief that they are better or have more passion, clearly someone who decided to go to uni for his passion is pretty damn committed, but it's because I don't want to employ a baked cake.

You see, I'm not a fan of tertiarily educated prowess. It might be because of a slight inferiority complex, but I don't want to employ someone who has been through a great education system. That guy's got a job with or without me. He'll make games all he wants because he has the tickets.

I want the guy who has been on mod teams that went nowhere. I want the jaded, frustrated guy who is ready to go the next step. I want the guy who sharpened his teeth on the ideas man grindstone. I want the guy who learned his skills through hours of pointless submissions to failing teams. I want the guy who knows his skills are at a level where anything is creatable, the missing ingredient is time.

I want to give that guy a state of the art PC, a 42 hour week and a fat paycheck.

"Employment", and what it entails

When I am employing someone, it won't be to make a game. Or a program. Not even a model. When I employ someone I want to have no idea what they are going to make. I want the person who has a heap of half made projects, ideas floating around in their head, weeks of unslept nights because an idea made their heart race and wouldn't let them rest until it gained creation. Ideas that they didn't have the skills for, but they learned in order to create.

I want to capitalize on these ideas by allowing this guy to capitalize on mine. I want to collaborate with this guy to see his visions through to release. I want him to share in my creations in the same way.

I often wonder just how companies like valve encourage their employees to innovate so much. If someone were to make something truly inspiring and, well, profitable, aren't they entitled to it? I want to employ people to develop their own ideas, but for the good of the environment they have been introduced to. I want to work with someone on absolutely everything they have, and I want to make sure that our time spent working on these things is ensuring the continuation of our awesome lifestyle. How do you balance out being nice and claiming profit from someone elses baby?

I guess working in a team you would both be the parents of the baby. The attitude of contributing back to the awesomeness that is 'doing what you want all day err day' is something that I would hope comes with the territory. I want to employ someone so I can leech on their great ideas, and I want them to equally leech on mine.

I was thinking that perhaps this would be done by sharing the IP. Whoever created the thing would own 51%, and the company would own 49. Essentially the company would be bankrolling the creator, as well as giving him team mates, to create the thing in exchange for a share of the success or failure.

What does a company like that "do"?

I am calling it a "development firm". We would develop things. All kinds of things, Free things, paid things, digital things, real things. Things marketed to a niche culture and things that are universally applicable. Websites, games, electronic toys, bio-dynamic interfaces. We would have an IP that we work on when we can but there's no rush. We would create freelance works to get cash here and there. We would make quick little indie games and sell them where we could. We would make free mini mods for indie games. We would make websites that just help people out in exchange for "real net cred".

We would tap into the creative mind and pull amazing stuff right out of our asses. We would take time off from profitable work to learn things we probably don't really need to know. We would take time off from profitable work to go play paintball and swim in the river. We would make shit all, fucking, day. We would ride on rainbows shat from unicorns assholes and eat what dreams are made of.

And that, sir, is what is going to happen when I hire someone.