Hiring a dev to help with my game

[Draven]

Hello,

Since I want to be 100% transparent this post is going to have a lot of information about me and the game that you may, or may not, care about.

I am the owner of Land of Nevard, a small text-based game, and would like to hire a PHP developer (with knowledge of jQuery and WebSockets) to come in and help me out as I cannot invest as much time as I'd like to, and there is much to do. I'd this to be a long-term relationship so it's important that you are interested in the project.

I am 35 years old, have a wife, two kids, and make a good living as a full-time PHP Developer in Montreal, QC, Canada.

 

About Land of Nevard

History

I started Land of Nevard in 2004 and it has had a couple of periods of time where it was offline, the longest is for almost 2 years.

The codebase is 100% mine, and is mostly procedural. I have started to re-write the game with a PHP framework me and a friend created as the backbone but I am not sure if I will continue that since it will be such a huge task, and paying somebody would cost a fortune.

I did have a couple people helping me out in the early years and I allowed those people to do as they wanted, so there is much in the game that doesn't "fit" the game, broken, not implemented correctly, etc.

In 2014 somebody gained access to my server via FTP, downloaded the code, and distributed it. There was a few clones of the game but they are all gone as far as I can tell.

Income

The game works on donations. The higher the players accumulated donation, the more benefits the player gets. None of the benefits are game breaking, the game is not "pay to win" and never will be.

Since the game has re-opened in the beginning of 2015 I have received almost $3000 USD in donations.

 

What I am looking for

Each item will need to be discussed before it gets worked on but here is a list of things off the top of my head.

1. I am looking for somebody to come in and streamline the game. Remove the parts of the game that don't tie into anything (doesn't "fit" the games theme), that were just added for no reason.
   
2. Remove features from the game that are broken but will possibly be re-worked if it does fit the games theme.
   
3. Finish coding and designing the WebSocket chat I started.
   
4. Create better admin tools to manage the game and players.
   
5. Various other features I have in mind to be added to the game.
   
6. Convert from MySQLi connection to PDO (I started it). Since this is so time consuming I may just finish it myself.
   
7. So much more work to be done!
   

Budget

I'd rather pay by chunks (piece work), to make it easier. I have $1000 CAD sitting in PayPal right now and would like to stretch it as far as possible (obviously). But once that is gone I will pay out of my own pocket.

If I had to give an hourly budget I'd say $20 - $30.

Contact

If you have any questions post them here so everyone can see the answer. Otherwise, you can email me, [email protected]

Edited January 16, 2017 by Draven

[IllegalPigeon]

Your hourly budget is too little for me but I just wanted to comment to clarify something.

You said you started to re-write the site in your own Framework...is that something you've been doing on a development server or are you saying the existing game is partially on that framework?

And because it wouldn't be one of my posts unless I mentioned it, but if you want to use a framework, look at Laravel.

[Draven]

Something I've been working on my local machine, and I have a staging environment setup on the remote server that only I can access.

The existing game uses crappy procedural code :)

I have little experience with Laravel and I like it, a lot, but since my experience with it is so little it'd take a lot longer to recode to game using it. At least for at first.

Something to think about I guess, but I haven't decided if I will continue that project, at least not at this time.