The setup for this, which I probably should have told you guys before, was that this guy was acting egotistical and constantly berating a friend of mine, despite my friend raising valid concerns about his project. While he was shown various game design and programming articles, he would apparently keep saying "they're bullstuff, industry standards are stuff".
My friend sent him to me as soon as he mentioned that he wanted to hire me, since he didn't read my articles to understand that I'm a designer, not a programmer. My whole goal was to expose that this was a bad idea in order to prove my friend right. Soon after it become a battle to try and show him he could seriously damage his life if he goes through with this.
The problem with this is that the help was only offered because the one offering it wanted to confirm their negative suspicions, and to fairly aggressively kick the person while they're down in the end. This is not okay, regardless of who is participating.
Based on chatlogs from my friend, this guy is a massive richardhead, and only acts somewhat calm and reserved because he believes I have a lot more experience and power than I actually do. He's stubborn and refuses to understand why he's not capable of the things he wants to achieve, and ultimately I got tired and let him have it.
I want to first say that game design is a discipline, not a business. As it is a discipline, it is absolutely necessary to gain experience through practical application and pursuit of knowledge and practice in order to improve. To say that someone needs to be experienced before becoming experienced is very unfair to the person in question.
IIRC, at least one or two points in the conversation I tell him that he needs to go make games by himself before he tries anything professional. He wanted to treat games as a business and he wanted to act like an experienced individual right out of the gate. While it may not have translated as well, I was trying to prove to him that he's not ready to approach the commercial side of games, and that he needs to either stick to learning (which he doesn't seem capable of doing) or he needs to find something else which is easier for him.
One with little to no experience making a game will not have as much valuable insight into the process of making a game, nor will they have a fair amount of knowledge in its prerequisites, its commitments, and all manner of related things necessary for the creation of a significant end product.
He made several claims, saying that he was a professional storywriter for games, that he had made at least 3 games before and that he regularly hired art teams for his projects. He also stated quite clearly that he was working with an "experienced" audio designer.
This is not a discouragement or a reason to stop, this is an encouragement to improve and a reason to try new things. For anything, you have to be worse to get better. I would suggest you consider this for yourself: when you first became interested in game design, could you answer the questions you asked this person?
I was a little stuff, and I now appreciate the fact that people hit me over the head and tell me what and why I was going about the process wrong. I would have answered the questions in the same manner, not realising why I was going about it all wrong because I was arrogant and couldn't see straight.
The difference is that I didn't get the kick-in-the-arse until much later, so I had a lot of time to forget up and realise things for myself. He's not there yet. He has my attitude, but not my experience yet.
It's necessary to have failures. Failures mean you figure out what doesn't work, and you can discover where things need to be improved. Failures make you mature your outlook and execution. etc.
But it shouldn't be necessary for more than one person to experience a specific set of failures. If somebody experiences those failures, they should take on responsibility to teach others why they failed, so that the other people won't fail in the same way. Instead of having a lot of people failing at one thing, why not have people fail at many different things, so that way more people learn how to improve and we can gain a wider knowledgebase on how to improve our process as a species?
essentially, it's not necessary to discourage someone with the threat of failure, as it will never be eliminated. Having those failures means you're learning, and you can never know what needs to be improved unless those areas poke (and oftentimes stab) through.
I don't want anybody to fail if they have no reason to fail. This guy should be off, practising by himself and making games he can personally find fun, until such time as he's ready to go commercial. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the necessary level of competence yet to do what he wants to do.
But the thing you have to understand; it's not his level of game design experience that I'm complaining about. It's his management experience. He's trying to hire teams without any communication, no deadlines, and he's trying to pay them with real world money that HE needs. He said it himself; he's down on hard times. He shouldn't stressing himself financially to succeed at a goal that will hurt more people than it will help.
I'm not comfortable with somebody bringing bad fortune on themselves like this. He needs to be stopped before he seriously does damage to his life.
