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.

  • @[email protected]
    8•5 months ago

    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

    If you are serious about this, my advice to you:

    • Get a legal advisor in your jurisdiction who can help you draw up a company constitution that describes how your cooperative works, your organisational structure and how profit sharing is structured, and register the company.
    • Consider how workers will be compensated before you have any revenue. Are you going to look for private funding? How will equity be split between investors and worker shares?
    • If you aren’t taking private funding, are you expecting members to work for free up until you start to turn a profit?

    If you are still going to look for collaborators before registering the company with a written constitution, make it clear whether those collaborators will have equal rights as co-founders along with you and your existing members. Any ambiguity here is likely to cause serious problems down the road which could completely tank the effort (i.e. lawsuits). This is why I would advise you to start with a registered company constitution right off the bat.

    If you’re more inclined to work as a loose anarchist collective without a formally defined organisational structure, you need to lead with that. Don’t describe the project as aspiring to be a worker-owned coop. The best way to do this is to create an open source project and allow open contributions. However, if you want to keep your work closed and proprietary then you need to realize that as soon as you create something that has value, you will need to have an agreed way to share ownership of that value. This will require either a registered company or some kind of foundation.

    • @[email protected]OP
      2•5 months ago

      We are quite aware of the importance of incorporating. There are some open questions about the appropriate jurisdiction, since we have people from all over the world in our group. We are not looking for private funding. This is effectively a hobby project until it is able to make money.

      The initial plan is to make a game and probably give it away for free, for the purposes of getting our act together and proving that we can actually produce any kind of value at all. There’s no real point in spending the time/money/effort to incorporate if we can’t actually do anything.

      After we prove that the group can function (which will be evident probably before the first game is even finished), we can actually go through the process of incorporation. We can also make some decisions about our licensing and monetization strategies. This is ultimately a group that is looking to make games for the fun of it, with profit being only a secondary goal.