So, interesting question -- are there any wannabe game developers here at GoG? I know there are a few, but my question is more aimed at those who would like to start a kind of group project.

See, I have a few ideas for games I'd like to see done, but I don't have A) the math skills or B) the digital art skills to pull them off. Being more of a concept and ideas person can kinda suck like that.

Anyhow, I ask, because if there were a group of people on here who wanted to collaborate on making games, well, how cool would that be?

A few of the ideas I've had that I'd like to see (keep in mind that titles aren't exactly my strong suit:)

Mage's Tower: Battle For Power
Concept: A mixture between Scorched Earth, turn-based strategy, and tower defense games. Research new spells, create armies of undead or ogres or whatever, and upgrade your tower to withstand the onslaught from your opponent! All on a 2d side-scrolling plane with randomly generated terrain between.
Art style: SNES-style pixelated sprites, more than likely. Either that, or a ripped-up construction paper style thing going for it could be interesting too.

Paladin
Concept: Take the gameplay of TES games and drop it into a modern-day setting. Magic is just starting to return to the world, as the people are beginning to split into three broad factions. The end of life as we know it is coming, and it is up to the select few chosen to hold the powers of magic to decide what happens, all in a first person MMO with an actively changing storyline based on character decisions in the game.

Clutch
Concept: A post-apocalyptic racing game meant to be as over-the-top as possible. After the collapse of the American government, the corporations quickly gained control of all political power in the country. Now, as a way to keep the general population enthralled and to keep things interesting for them, they make all political decisions based on the outcome of CAR RACES. Choose a driver, and blast through fully-destructible worlds as you fight for the cause of your political backer. No weapons, no powerups, no mercy -- just lots of armor and big engines.

I've got more ideas, these are just a few of them. Heck, even if someone doesn't want to collaborate per se, but wants to make the games I'd be willing to talk about it! Contact me?

It would be cool. I'll join in (in the summer, way too busy right now with university and other stuff), if the "possible" game is done in XNA. :p

By the way, everybody has ideas. :D Making them a reality is the hard part. :p

UGH, I KNOW, right? Not all of us can be a Cliffy B, huh?

On the other hand, regardless of who the ideas come from, a good game is a good game.

XNA, huh? Sadly, I've never checked that out. I got too frustrated with Game Maker's limitations to really get into it (even if I was no good even with what it had) and most other programs that give the freedom I would want are pay-only, so this XNA thing sounds promising.

Summer, huh? We'll say you're a possible member of the team then :P

It's always been my life long dream to have some role in game development. Unfortunately, 24 years of living, practice, and unyielding devotion to the written word, and absolutely no skills at anything to show for it. Now I remember how bitter and depressed I can be. Bah.

I have all the time in the world and nothing to do with it. I'd gladly help you if I had any means to contribute whatsoever. You've got some fun ideas. I've had ideas too, but even if you try to make a simple game or make levels for an existing game, if you're like me, you'll find that you could live to be 100 and never get a grasp for level design, no matter how much you study and appreciate it. At least I can cheer you on. Best of luck to you, anyway. :)

Thanks!

So far the best luck I've had with game design were with RPG Maker 2000/2003 and the DoomBuilder map editor. Unfortunately, when it comes right down to it I usually get bored with the games I've produced in them long before I finish them, largely due to my limited ability to actually influence what's present in the games.

LATE EDIT: You said you're good with the written word? Well, laying out storyboards/dialogue/other stuff is always a possibility. I've got enough other projects of my own going with other sites I'm a member of to keep me from being able to do everything, even if I were asked to.

I've got to confess that I'm totally unaware on the current status/performance of Mono or any other solution to run XNA on a non Windows (.NET supporting) platform, but one word of advice... (or rather a sentence :p)
If you are planning on getting a server involved for your games, which seems to be the case with your second (Paladin) idea mentioning the magical MMO abbreviation, consider server cost in advance. Should you be forced to run a Windows server, you'll have to calculate on a massively higher fee, especially in the budget server segment (we're talking about roughly 50-75% higher cost here, including the resource hogging nature of Windows servers).
On a side note, try to avoid the errors Magicka struggled with (readable source code and very, very bad optimisation, partly due to XNA).

No offence or argument on XNA intended, it certainly has it's use in game development, but I felt that if the OP is not into programming, s/he might want to know some possible drawbacks.

Clutch is already the name of a Carmageddon inspired racer. Although it's getting a new name for its release in the west. But it goes by that name on Steam.

About all I could contribute to this is some concept art and possibly some textures.

...Huh. Oh, well. It's a good name for a racing game, so I kinda expected it to already be taken.

And if this project were to take off, a texture artist would be exceedingly useful, so keep in there!

Fujek: Thanks for the info on XNA. I figure Paladin would be a much later-produced game, after said group had already proven itself on a few simpler ones (like the mage tower one) and already established at least a little income and fanbase, so yeah, the server costs would at that point HOPEfully be taken care of.

Paladin would be a difficult one anyhow simply because of the sheer size of it. I would be looking for a 1:1 scale city at smallest to start with, maybe New Orleans or somewhere similar, and then expand the game from there. That and the detail I would want in the systems mean it would be by far the least possible of the ideas I've got, which like I said, these are by no means the grand total of.

I've always thought of trying to sort out adventure game studio and make a game.

That requires effort though.

Here is another wannabe game developer.

This is my old dream:
It is a shot-n-up game where every player is a fairy with six degree of freedom in its movement. Fairies do not feel gravity at all.
The fairies attack each other with spells, but their ability to respawn is granted by their own castle.
There is one resource: the mana. The mana can be obtained killing or converting the AI controlled creatures that live in the level. To incentive the player to make an army instead of just killing and take the mana; a living faithful creature grants more mana to the fairy than the simple mana itself.
Fairly have aggressive direct spells, but their main strength should be invocations or control of the creatures. So that a direct assault to an adversary castle should be very hard.

Have you seen Bloodline Champions?

Also, how can C#'s syntax be an unreadable code? :/ Don't worry about costs, story, graphics, audio, whatever else.

Code the engine first!

You guys should definitely do this. It would bring some mad publicity to Gog.

Making a classic point-and-click adventure game wouldn't be very hard. Even if you don't know a single bit of code, most of it is available for free, online. You'll just have to merge different code together, and most likely the engine will be functional.

When making a PnC adventure game, most of the work goes on designing how the story evolves, and the look of the game.

Audio shouldn't be hard either, since the game is scripted and no unexpected things are supposed to happen (looking from dev side).
Hahha, no offense, but if one's doing an indie game, the last thing he'll want to do with it, is promote a DD service where the game won't even be released, unless a meteor hits earth.
By the way, guys (and girls :p), we (me and two friends from university) are making a platformer game in XNA.

Active development will begin in June, when this semester ends. We still have to decide whether the game will be a level-by-level based, or a sidescroller.

Hey, I'm another wanna be developer (trying to get into the games industry). In fact, I'm currently working on a demo (so I have something to show with my CV :P). Like you I don't really have much skill, but I do know a bit of C and have been playing around with SDL (I'm a Linux user).

My demo is going to be a very simple (probably text for the first version) detective adventure game, but I'm using it as a way to explore some ideas from my experience of playing adventure games.

However, a community made game sounds really cool, and is much more likely to get off the ground then just one person doing it in isolation. I don't have too much time at the moment as I have my final exams coming up, but if you do decide to go ahead I hope I will be able to get involved in some way.

As another idea, do you think creating a mod rather than a game from scratch would be a easier way to start? Though I'm afraid I don't have any experience in that department, either.

Can I make a suggestion? Switch to XNA, you have everything you need to make a game in there. No need to have a hard time figuring out which libraries to use, how to connect them, and other similar stuff.. Visual C# 2010 Express is free.