The problem is that I now have no money to make a game. Zero. Zilch. None of my previous prototypes worked out because I am not an artist. And I can't afford to pay an artist right at this moment.
No investor would fund me because I only have a track record in mods and I do not have traction in user growth or revenue. And I am stuck in the vicious cycle "I can't get funding because I have no traction because I can't get funding...". So this mod is my only chance of getting traction when I have no funds.
I did pay for the RPG system and dialogue system from the Unity Asset Store but that was grocery money I sacrificed. My family probably wouldn't forgive me for it.
And it doesn't help that my mother is breathing down my neck and urging me to get a kickstarter as soon as possible to get the ball rolling. There was going to be a million dollar sale for my mother's business, but it fell through at the last minute, and I hoped that I would have used the money for a demo of a different game.
1) Almost no one has Zero Money... else he would have starved a long time ago in todays society (given you live in a country developed enough to have moved over copletly to a money based economy)...
Now, how you spend the money you have is a different thing.
Is it wise to spend grocery money on assets from the assets store? Well, only if you still can eat healthy and do not ned to go hungry because of that.
Is it wise to spend the money on an RPG and Dialogue system that you might have developped yourself if you had any programming skills, when obviously you badly need better art? Probably not, given you have programming skills.
Get a budget, and spend the money smart. Even with little money you could achieve a lot if you make sure every penny counts.
Or, given you cannot spare any money at all, wake up to the fact that you are on your own. Period. No shady equity schema will lure in the talent you need, you either get skilled enough yourself to build the minimum viable product, you sacle down your project to make it easier to achieve, or you forget about it.
2) Make sure you understand this: without a proven track record, a studio with expierience, or an almost finished product you can show, you are a nobody to investors. What they tell you might sound like a "chicken-and-egg" dilemma, but its just the hard truth and actually a honest and well meant hint.
Would you invest money, be it only 4000$, into a nobody you just met that approaches you with a project of his that sounded pretty shady... like in, unfinished, no team or expireince to asure you the project might be completed someday, and so on....
Would you believe he will invest the money wisely and create something awesome, or would you rather think either he will waste the money and fail, or he would take the money and ran?
Most things in the business world are founded on mutual trust... if you don't trust somebody, you will not lend him money, hand over the plans for the goods they should produce for you, produce something in the good faith that the other party will be able to pay for it later.
Trust is something you have to earn, and it takes time and work to do that. If you want investors to believe in you, you have to show them something extraordinary... an extraordinary track record (doesn't sound like you have any), an extraordinary product (which you haven't develop far enough to really show), an extraordinary company (which again, you don't seem to have)...
The problem is lack of funding. And no team of artists would work with me, unless I pay them. All the investors who rejected me kept on telling me "to build a product and get paying customers", as if it was the easiest thing in the world.
If I had a decent amount of money from investors, I would have spent some money to make a demo for a simple 3D platformer and gotten a good chunk of money on Kickstarter to get the platformer done and branch the game off to a low cost mini-game for smartphones. But I don't - and I have done a lot of work on this mod, plus I have a lot of scrapped content that never saw the public's eyes.
The heightmap is done and 70% of the world is done, but it's in a different engine. Porting over assets is very easy to do and the same with level design. I guess it doesn't help that my mother is breathing down my neck and urging me to try my luck.
PS. I had hoped that the world could be automatically ported over, and then destroyed as the storyline has certain settlements destroyed by a volcano. But the more I think about it, the more I think that the world should be done from scratch. If I were to make the world from scratch in Unity, it would be the same as in the mod but it shouldn't be like that. Volcanic activity does change land significantly. And the graphics aren't retro - they are very good assets for 2005, at least. They can easily be ported over - just import into Blender, remove the bounding box and export it to .fbx, and put the textures in the right places.
The graphics are the same in both engines, so I had planned a tech demo just to showcase gameplay in one scene and the videos would be the old locations prior to the eruption.
And the game does not need a million dollars to make, as this game will be a minimum viable product and is much scaled down from my original idea. After gathering quotes (and multiplying it by 2), I need $300k-$400k max to make this minimum viable product.
Okay reading that and others of your comments, I think you need to do some reality check... in addition to what I wrote above:
1) You will most probably not be able to assemble a Team without paying... you are on your own. Scale the first prototypes accordingly
2) You will most probably get no funding at all before creating an extraordinary prototype...
3) Result of both points above... in the end, you will have to do most of the work, if you don't manage to get funding.
Before anyone will be able to help your further, we need additional information:
1) what is your expierience with:
a) programming
b) art (3D, 2D)
c) Game and Level Design
d) Marketing, Storywriting, and other needed skillsets to be successfull as an Indie
2) What is your track record? Any finished games or mods? You keep talking of an unfinished mod that never got released, why wasn't it released?
3) What is your current job? Are you still a student? What do you study?
4) What are your long term plans? Are you doing this to get a foot in as an Indie? Do you plan to study CS, Art or Game Design and get into the Game dev industry? Are you trying to cash in on one lucky hit?
You need to realize, and maybe also make sure your mother realizes this:
Game Dev is hard.... creating not only a game, but one that pays off is even harder. about 10-20% of projects will ever pay off. The others either fail early or just fail in the market.
Your current project has a high chance of failing even if you get the funding and are able to complete it. There are valid reasons to still try to complete it, be it for expierience, fun, or just trying to get lucky. But if you cannot invest time and money into it that you can "throw away" (because you happen to have enough money and you like to spend time on the project), you better invest it somewhere else.
Depending on where you stand in your professional career, you might either
1) make sure to get a job that pays well but leaves you enough free time, so you can work on the project and save money to invest into it.
2) put your current project on ice and first develop the needed skills (programming, art, whatever) to have a chance of completing it, or at least build a prototype that can convince others.
3) Study CS or any other field that might net you a job in the industry, work in it for some years to get expierience and good contacts, save up money, and start-up your project anew once you are ready.
No matter how you look at it, it doesn't sound like you are ready to pursue your current project at the moment.
Well, I had already solved the programmer art issue entirely, by asking permission to use assets from an old project of mine. They're right for their atmosphere and very high quality but they would need a bit of a revamp in places.
It's just the game is likely to switch engines and I'm worried my potential backers aren't going to like that.
Good for you if that solves your art issues.... I take from that you have some expierience working with 3D art?
I think the engine switch is the least of your problems. If anything, gamers are always whining for devs to move to a newer engine. Game developers might know that this is a huge potential risks, gamers (which are mostly your backers on KS) will only dream about the potential pay off....
"Multi core support, so sexy"... yes, says the guy that has a dual core weak ass notebook that will not see much gain from multithreading anyway, because of no turboboosting anymore when all cores are under load, the CPU throttling under full load, GPU being too weak to really leave the CPU as a bottleneck, and so on.
1) Your Kickstarter audience are mostly consumers. Doesn't mean they have no idea, but they will see things differently. To them "Cryengine" means lots of visual glitz... not bad performance (that might be my prejudice now, as it seems to perform poorly even on powerful machines) and an ancient editor. Because they always will only see the consumer side of an engine, and only on their machine (which might be extremly powerful or weak leading to wrong assumptions about the performance of an engine).
2) Given that, a newer engine is mostly seen as a good thing. Throw out some keywords like multicore support, 64bit support, physically based shader support and sutff like that, and they will totally buy it (even though most of them have no idea what is really behind these keywords).
3) Given that you care about what people think of the engine, Unity might not be your best bet. Unity seemed to have gathered some bad press on Steam and other consumer forums, people seem to think of it as an inferior engine.
Doesn't mean that is really true, what most probably happened is because Unity has been free and available to hobbyists and amateurs for some time and easier to get into than UDK and UE4, a lot of subpar games have been produced with it. That will taint the name of an engine over time, like it did with Gamemaker.
You could either try to go under the radar by not mentioning the name of the engine, or you could go all out by not only mentioning Unity, but at the same time show what you can do now thanks to unity. People will quickly forget about an engines bad name if you show them the shiny...