If you are really serious about this, you have to be committed. I see a lot of people with a good idea, waving it around at other people, expecting them to commit more money, time and soul, than they are themselves.
I was one of those people, always talking up my latest idea. Then one day I just saw how stupid that was. I quit my job and told my family and in laws that I was going to make this thing happen (picture shouting matches). Turned my prototype into a product, spent my own money flying around the country trying to market it and to find partners. And the result was that people saw how committed I was to the idea, and wanted to get on board. I did get investors and partners. (Later it all bombed, but that is another story.)
If you think about the reverse situation. Somebody who has so little committment to their idea that they want to sell it outright. Nobody wants to throw money at that person. Most people want to join forces with a winner.
So if you are serious. Borrow money, hire programmers, form a company and get going. If the risk is too great for you, it will certainly be too great for VCs, investors etc.
The open source projects that I have contributed to, have all been projects that I needed to use, but lacked some feature I needed. So I wrote some code and posted it back. Some projects though were just too hard to get started on for what I needed to do. Simple information about what is needed to get the dev. environment setup (libraries , versions, IDE) etc as well as decent user and developer documentation is really important. The idea previously posted about having a plugins framework, or at least a tutorial on how to add a simple feature, is relevant.
My guess here is that the number of people who will join your project is in direct proportion to the number of users who are developers X the quality and quantity of your project documentation.
If you are serious about getting developers, I would ease off the coding, and get stuck into documentation/diagrams, putting up a wiki and a forum.
I'll admit I ordered games from Britain, copied them and sold them to my mates and people I hardly knew. I was only 13. Attic Attack was a big seller. Happily my life of crime finished there, and my life of programming took off.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are really serious about this, you have to be committed. I see a lot of people with a good idea, waving it around at other people, expecting them to commit more money, time and soul, than they are themselves. I was one of those people, always talking up my latest idea. Then one day I just saw how stupid that was. I quit my job and told my family and in laws that I was going to make this thing happen (picture shouting matches). Turned my prototype into a product, spent my own money flying around the country trying to market it and to find partners. And the result was that people saw how committed I was to the idea, and wanted to get on board. I did get investors and partners. (Later it all bombed, but that is another story.) If you think about the reverse situation. Somebody who has so little committment to their idea that they want to sell it outright. Nobody wants to throw money at that person. Most people want to join forces with a winner. So if you are serious. Borrow money, hire programmers, form a company and get going. If the risk is too great for you, it will certainly be too great for VCs, investors etc.
The open source projects that I have contributed to, have all been projects that I needed to use, but lacked some feature I needed. So I wrote some code and posted it back. Some projects though were just too hard to get started on for what I needed to do. Simple information about what is needed to get the dev. environment setup (libraries , versions, IDE) etc as well as decent user and developer documentation is really important. The idea previously posted about having a plugins framework, or at least a tutorial on how to add a simple feature, is relevant.
My guess here is that the number of people who will join your project is in direct proportion to
the number of users who are developers X the quality and quantity of your project documentation.
If you are serious about getting developers, I would ease off the coding, and get stuck into documentation/diagrams, putting up a wiki and a forum.
Thats my 2c worth
I'll admit I ordered games from Britain, copied them and sold them to my mates and people I hardly knew. I was only 13. Attic Attack was a big seller. Happily my life of crime finished there, and my life of programming took off.