We are Ludo Ex Machina. We are a group of aspiring game developers with leftist political beliefs; we are mostly anarchists or anarchist-adjacent. Ultimately, we’d like to incorporate as a worker-owned cooperative.

Since forming, we’ve written a code of conduct and established some barebones internal moderation procedures. We’ve set up some services on one of our member’s personal servers for the group, and we could set up more/different services if we decide we need to. Currently, some of our members are putting together a single player space racing game in Godot.

While we already have a lot of relevant and complimentary skills in the group, we find that there are a few gaps that could stand to be filled.

  • We need 2D and 3D artists. We have one artist, but their time is split between this and another project, and they will have to disappear for a while after they are done with school.

  • We need at least one developer with project management/software development process experience. The one developer we have who currently has this experience in a collaborative context has been too busy to help us with this. We have one other developer who is familiar with software development process, but they have primarily done solo development work previously.

  • We would like to recruit a couple of developers who are comfortable with engine-level development, preferably in Rust. The game engine situation is kind of bad for indie devs right now. Unity and Unreal come with licensing agreements that large corporations can change whenever they want (and Unity has recently made clear that the enshittification has begun in earnest). Godot has technical problems all the way down to the core and a hostile contributor environment. Bevy is technically and culturally the right thing, but it is young and under-developed. Ultimately, we would like to invest in Bevy as our long-term engine pick for game development, but to do that effectively, we’d like to have a development team which is capable of working around the engine’s immaturity.

  • We could use an experienced creative writer. Although various members of our group do have some creative writing skills, none of us have experience working on any large creative writing projects. Some of us have expressed an interest in doing some sociological storytelling in our games, so experience with this style of writing would be a plus.

Feel free to comment if you have any additional questions. Anyone who is interested should send me a DM.

  • Zistack@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
    2·
    2 months ago

    I’m more curious about the choice for Rust-Bevy. I agree that Godot has a number of problems (am making a solo game there), but can you name some of those that got in the way more than they should? Also, with options like fyrox (rust), libgdx (java), monogame (c#), as well as more “full” engines like stride or armory, why exactly bevy?

    The #1 issue with Godot is probably that it effectively cannot do multiplayer games, because the physics engine cannot support lag compensation. You wouldn’t need this for something like a multiplayer card game, but for anything where precise timing or physics gets involved, you want lag compensation or your netcode is going to feel bad.

    The big issue with most other game engines (including Godot) is really one of performance - in particular, the way that they handle multi-threading. They basically don’t, and this is a problem if you want to do anything with significant simulation elements or or physics rollback (as in lag compensation). Godot attempts to do multi-threading a bit, but it does so very poorly - it’s clear that the devs don’t really know what they’re doing. Modern computers are multi-core machines and they have been for over a decade now. We gotta stop pretending that we can get away with single-threading for games.

    Bevy uses an async programming framework in its very core, so everything is multi-threaded if it can be. Combine this with a good ECS implementation and Bevy’s performance should absolutely shred compared to what pretty much any other engine can do (at least when it comes to CPU-bound things - they’re still working on the renderer, but it’s getting to be pretty good).

    I have to admit, I did not find Stride when I went looking for multi-threaded/async game engines. I’ll give it a close look.

    Regarding the art, what kind of 2D and 3D art is expected? UI, characters, backgrounds, sketches? Cutesy, post-apoc, some other style? Low, medium, high poly 3D objects? Rigging and animation?

    We need various art things in various styles, so basically everything you just said. The artist we currently have can do all those things, but they’re only one person. We don’t need every artist to be omni-capable, though. If someone only has a subset of those skills it’s fine.

    Lastly, I suppose this will be all work from home, how many hours a week would you expect people to have for this? How would foreign workers fit in, legally speaking? Adding to the latter, how would you deal with significant timezone differences in case of needed virtual meetings?

    We already have people from around the world. Most of us have either school or a job, so this is something we’re all just working on in our spare time. Legally, this is a hobby project until we can actually do enough to justify incorporation. When we incorporate, we’ll just be an entity that happens to have employees internationally. We won’t likely care to impose much in the way of hours requirements until we incorporate and start thinking about paying people, but having a few hours a week (around 10?) would be good to start with. Significant timezone differences haven’t been a huge issue for meetings? We are mostly in the US and Europe so far. Things would probably get tricky if someone from Asia joined, but we do have asynchronous methods of communication, and we can schedule meetings for subsets of the team if we need to.