You are interested in creating a bigger game project & you finally came to conclusion that you can’t complete this alone. So you need to form a team.
It’s quite obvious drawback of making games single handedly is the amount of work & skills to make a good game.You’d have to create all the maps, do your own programming handle the art and modelling-basically you’d have to supply everything a game needs, on your own. That’s a lot for one person to work on. The team appoach works best when creating a game. Each person on the team has a speciality-Texture, art, programming, models, sound etc. responsibilities are doled out based on what each person can do.
Collaboration idependent of location
Your team doesn’t have to come together at a physical location. Most of the popular games we know were collabrative projects made entirely on the net communicating using IRC/IM. It might be hard to find enthusiastic & talented team members but hanging arround game forums/official game dev tool forums should get you acquainted with like minded people. It’s easy to get the word out that you’re forming a game team. Game forums have no problem with such team-plan/help notices for groups. Once you’ve formed your team then you’ve all set to create a masterpiece together.
Sharing & Communicating
So before you start working on project,decide how you’re going to share your files. Most of the time, files are larger than 10MB or so it can’t be sent via email. In such case you need hosting service which can host your files. You can consider many free hosts out there like 4shared/esnips/mihd etc. You can even use your own webhost and give your team username & password to upload/download files.
Communication is very important factor as you need to be in touch with your team members constantly to get all pieces together. You can choose Meebo/IM or IRC as medium to stay in constant touch with team members.
Getting team members & help
There are many game development forums out there, many mod-designers are also into small-game development. So if you’re looking for team member then you can even consider mod-designers as well. So question is that from where you can get in touch with such members?
Game developer forums like : Gamemaker community / Garage games Torque developer forums. There are plenty of other forums that i can list here. So to search for more option you can take help of google or ask for help on social forums. Most of these forums can get you good team members for your game.
Developing games as a team is very good experience and from this all participating members will definitely learn a lot of things. Fortunately, If you get in touch with experienced members then you’ll learn a thing or two or maybe you’ll even demonstrate others something useful as well.