Hi,

I am currently looking for a good place to hire or contract out XNA programmers?  I am currently putting the final plans on a start-up company with a need for an XNA programmer.  I don't see much business going on in this forum in particular, mostly just the technical aspects and details.  Do some of you guys lurk on elance and guru and those other work for hire sites?

If anyone is just simply interested in what I'm trying to do, I'll give it a shot.  1 PC and 1 XBOX 360 XNA game will be required for the initial rollout of the company's products.  The 2 games will be music-based rhythm games with strong downloadable content components. If you guys know of any experienced programmers who would be willing to take on such a job or the best place to look for such talent, please let me know.  I thought it would be best to come here first before formally submitting something on elance or any of those other sites. 

I am choosing to do these games through XNA in order to build a strong foundation and make the move to official XBOX Live Arcade titles.  But, as a start-up, and because this is fully self-financed, we are not ready to fully invest in profession development kits.  This is going to be an exciting venture for myself and the people involved in the project.  I am a big fan of XBOX Live and music and this project is fusing the two into something that I feel will be special.  It's great that MS is giving programmers, and people like myself, who want to be designers and team leaders, an opportunity to jump into this without breaking the bank. 

Well we have a help wanted folder here that you are welcome to use as long as you are the hiring manager and you follow the posting guidelines. I think that's your best place to start.

I have perused elance and rentacoder in the past but there are not (m)any xna jobs and in general you get undercut by some offshore place that will work for less than I could earn flipping burgers. A quick look at elance right now shows no jobs and 5 'professionals' (I use that term loosely since only one of them has any portfolio and its mostly art work not even development) for XNA. Guru.com is no better with the XNA list full of web developers, art guys and those annoying overseas agencies who magically can do any and every technology for $10 an hour....

If you are offering to pay people then you are already ahead of 98% of the people who advertise in the folder here. Its mostly hobbyists looking for people to code their great ideas for free. I suspect they get few, or inexperienced responses. I certainly won't work for someone who offers me 'credit in their game'.

Hi peeps,

I started XNA today but i develop .net applications and websites for over 7,5 years (yes b4 it was official). prior and next to that i also develop professional software in Java and Delphi. i have over 12 years experiance in professional software development and 10 of those i worked as a contractor. I never made any games and i got 4 hours of XNA experiance it seems quite new.

I will show you my point of view about xbox arcade game development:

1. you can make professional games all you need is a computer with windows xp 1xbox and spend 160 euro on XNA and Xbox live. So with a decent computer with legal software / hardware the investment = 1500 euro i consider this free.

2. The Xbox arcade concept is awsome it allows temas of 2 people to create video games 1 guy makes the graphics the other guy is the programmer and microsoft will help you deploy these games and by using thier xbox arcade envoirement the game wil be sold.

Now ive read some of your posts and its kinda strange what you want/expect. most articles i read is about people that want some'"Programmer" to make a video game for them and when they earn money they give a bit to the person who made it. I dont want to flame but people who can make software arent interested in this, people who migth are unexperianced people or people not capable of doing this. I think if you really want a professional you gotta start rolling figures here you gotta offer people an X amount of money + a percentage if you dont they migth aswel make a game and upload it themselves. Its really easy to put some wild ideas on a paper for some game to be made you dont need to be a genius to do that ive been doing that stuf since i was 7 years old. Also it seems people here dont understand a really good programmer "requirement for professional software game or not" is not a graphic desinger, yes he can draw sprites and show pictures but mainly hes a master in math and understanding what someone wants and how to achieve it. on the other hand someone who can make very nice image, models etc. is an artist not a programmer sure he can make some lines of code but the code will be bugy and not robust simply becouse its not his job and he had no education and working experiance in it.

There are a few people who for some reason are really good at both but this is extreemly rare.

For me for example i am willing to do this but if my guaranteed pay inst even 50.000 euro i rather do it myself since i dont need to market and sell my game anyway.

Its jsut my 2 cents about this i dont think people wil work for a bank if the bank tells them they get payed when the bank make profits at the end of the year and people who offer to make professional software really cheap are always clowns. And students are students, even if they are really good they wont be good enough cus they stil need to finish thier education 5 years of working experiance and someome in the bussiness to show them how to apply theory in practise.

Just like there are musicians who play with their friends and never make a $$ and actors who are happy to spend their evenings putting on amateur drama productions there will always be some developers and artists who will do it for fun because they love it.

In addition there are some people who will do it for free to build up a portfolio to get a job. In you banking example there are unpaid internships which many students take every year just for experience.

Your other points are well taken though - the help wanted folder here (and on other game dev sites) has a lot of people with great ideas who think that just having the idea is all the work that is required.... I suspect that unless those people get very lucky most of those games never get beyond the idea.

We're not even considering the fact that teams of random strangers with different goals and egos and life priorities do not always make for the greatest team when it comes to finishing things. Putting real $$$ in front of people can always help with that dynamic.

Exactly we got a dutch saying called each ship have 11 captains and 1 guy who does the job of rowing the ship.

Everybody has ideas and concepts thats fine i had them to when i was 7 and i drawed books full of rules and gameconcepts but fact stil remains you cant make ideas if you dont even know how to do it and if you want to do it you need to hire people who help you do it and listen. I honestly beleve most plans wil fail if people dont know what they talking about or dont want to put the money in it and take the risks. No money no girlfriend. I would like to help people out but nothing is for free i have a hourly/daily / mothly Rate if people dont want to pay they can do it themselves becouse i already know enough people who talk about making software and use the words simple easy fast alot and they never compiled a line of sourcecode.

Ill give you an example based upon my experaince as hired professional:

A big telecom company (worldwide) who works on a product with people in india who develop software for 10 bux an hour wanted a small and simple modification: 1 simple button wich does something this software already does but slightly diferent.

The manager comes up with this idea and i build it he pays 15.000 euro. he gets professional software and not a F$%kup some cheap hired for free labour force. He gets a solution wich saves him about 20 man hour a month @ 50 bux an hour in 3 years he earns 15.000 bux.

[Theory]

you want some game you thought of and sell it 100.000 times for 5 bux each and earn 500.000 bux. if you want professional software it wil probally gonna cost you 200.000 - 250.000 bux to let someone else build it. if you are sure your idea is so good that you wil earn 250.000 bux then pay the 250.000 bux and earn 500.000 bux. if you wanna earn 500.000 bux then make it yourself. And if you cant pay 250.000 bux becouse your not 100% sure you make 500.000 bux your idea sucks ^^

However if you got 1 programmer and 1 guy who makes awsome spritesheets it would work.

So if there are any sprite sheed artists out there gimme an email or pm ^^.

Neukworst:

So if there are any sprite sheed artists out there gimme an email or pm ^^.

and how much will you be paying them ;-)

I use guru and a couple of other contractors sites.

I have never had a bad client, touch wood.

If any of the guys here want to use their knowledge in the contracting world I would recommend guru, the escrow works well.

There is a lot of hard won knowledge represented in these boards, would be a pity if it was never used to produce finished product.

I am getting paid to do XNA work, but wierdly not games.

The biggest market at the moment is PHP/MySQL, yuck.

Maybe silverlight will create some change.

The path to market for XNA is a little wierd, but not as bad as some.

I did some work for a small games company who invested a lot of money in a title targeted at one of the big Japanese companies. They had to complete the game, then show the finished product to the japs. They refused to publish it. The company went bust.

The japs held the copyright on the cartridge, which meant the only path to market was through them.

I also had some run in's with SNK before they went bust, NOT a company to get on the wrong side of.

I started this xna thing 1 week ago and i am making my first games already the week b4 i tried to get into wii for my business case and i found out really fast that nintendo and co have thier own little so called elite aristocracy club you cant enter unless you are born a game programmer so to kill all aspirations guys you wont get in to it. And that in fact is a good thing becouse it made me realise how big of a bsh*t 16th century system they use and block out almost everyone to make games for them.

Id say stick to microsoft and XNA i trully and deeply beleve microsoft will push them off the market (with exception maybe of japan). this xbox arcade idea and how they market it and help you publish games will result in 100+ games being created a month (ok 90% wont make it :D) but it wil grow and grow and eventually microsoft will be nr1 console world wide. Its just a mather of timei look at this stuf and i still cant beleve i am playing my game with my own pictuires fotos and sound on tv with an xbox controller whilst i only looked and demo-d with this stuff for about 10 hours.