Tonight I got a big chunk of work done on the Context and ContextManager, and I spent some time pulling apart the generic KranzkyEngine from the toy game that uses it (which is called HelloKranzky). Still a bit more to do until I can implement the click-through storyboard I mentioned, so looks like I’ll miss my deadline by a day or two (especially since a fortnight of birthday celebrations begins tomorrow).

Apart from that, we RocketHands folks have been debating the best way to involve a third-party in the development of one of our games. This was motivated because Postal Worker was conceived by me and two outsiders at GCAP in Melbourne last December, and one of those people (Pazu) will likely be doing the art for the game. RocketHands will publish the game, and I’m working in my role as a RocketHands team member, so what happens if the game does ballistic and pulls in a cool one million dollars?

Well, in that case, Pazu (who would happily work on a project such as this just for the fun of it) would be rightly annoyed. So how much of that $1m would he deserve to get? And what about the mysterious “third man” who helped us conceive this baby? Should he get anything? How much value can be placed on that brief conversation over coffees during a conference compared to actually designing and implementing a game? Really, my main motivation would be to funnel a substantial amount of that $1m into RocketHands, to allow us to set up the company as our primary concern, and to do what we love for a living.

We’re toying with a three-tiered model, which goes something like this:

• The first $X of revenue goes straight to RocketHands (to recoup costs associated with marketing and publishing).
• The next $Y of revenue is used to pay for work done, at a reasonable rate.
• After that, Z% goes to RocketHands, and (100 – Z%) goes to the development team. The development team decides how to split things up.

So, in our hypothetical “Postal Worker Makes One Million Dollars” thought experiment, we might do something like this:

• $1000 goes to RocketHands, to pay for mailing out all that fancy Postal Worker schwag to the games journalists, helping us get awesome revues.
• $9000 goes to Pazu and me. I get $6000 (100 hours at $60/hr) and he gets $3000 (50 hours at $60/hr).
• 70% of what’s left goes to RocketHands (that’s $693000 – we quit our jobs, lease an office and start working on our XBLA game).
• 30% of what’s left goes to Pazu and me (that’s $297000).  We give $25k to the mysterious “third man” to keep him quiet, and $2k to charity. I then get 2/3 of it (because I worked 100 hours and Pazu worked 50), which comes out to $180k. Pazu gets a measly $90k.

My question to you is this: who is getting ripped off here? Does it seem fair that RocketHands, which didn’t really do all that much, made a whopping amount of money? Especially when Pazu only ends up getting a bit less than 10% of the total earnings? Or, does $93k for a coffee in a hotel and a weeks worth of work seem like a good deal?

Pazu, your thoughts please…