The Shining Source

First of all, you must have the vague idea for the game. Keep it as vague as possible, because once you start going into details people can rip off your ideas, and you wouldn't like that. Your basic idea would be - a Shining game where you can play as all the previous Forces. That's a good start.

The second thing you need is a name for the game. As we'll see later on, names are very important when it comes to developing games, so it would help if you have a name in your head before you start taking people on, to give them an idea of the game's flavour. Here are some good examples:

Shining Force IV (of course)
Shining Horizon
Shining Gust
Shining Diamond

Anything which sounds epic will likely make a good name, and therefore a good game. Subtitles and suffixes such as "Shining Destiny: the Last Son" or "Shining Path - 1000-year War" sound even better, and by the same logic make even better games.

Now, you obviously can't make this game all on your own, so next up you'll need to assemble a team of coders, artists, musicians and so forth. They're the ones who'll be doing all the real work, while you play God and boss them all about to do what you say. That's because it's your idea, so you're superior. There are no specific numbers for how many of each worker you need, but work on the basis that no amount of cooks can ever spoil the broth.

In order to get people, you need one very important thing - a sign-up sheet. This is essentially a list of numbers where people can put their names, like so:

1.
2.
3.

And so forth. When the sheet is filled, generally at 25 or 30 (no team can function with 27 members), there's only one thing left to do.

Think up a team name. You can't possibly develop a game without a team name. These are generally formed by putting together the word "Team" with a word or name related to the game. Here are some good names for your Shining fangame development team:

Team Shining
Shining Team
Shiny Teamy
Team Shiny
Force Team
Team Force

And so on. Remember - the cooler the team name, the better your game will be, and the better everyone will work. FACT. Also, don't forget that you're the boss, so feel free to take control of this part of the development process.

After that, make sure you get yourself one or all of these things:

A free website (don't worry about adverts)
A messageboard - essential.
A chatroom.

I also highly recommend regular meetings on MSN, AIM or your messaging program of choice. It's highly important you keep in touch with everyone to make sure they're working on their own, without much direction from you. Giving orders sometimes means hindering people's creativity, but you should feel perfectly comfortable bossing people about when they're not doing what you want - you're the boss. Be tyrannous.

That's all for now. I hope you've found it enlightening.

I wonder why this never made it to the articles department .

Probably the spelling mistake

I don't know - the same reason none of my other articles are up there?

Maybe you forgot one other important ressource: time

Taking Zylokh's idea into account, I add the following:

One thing you must remember is that creating a game, even with a large team, can take years.  So, if you are not retired or under the age of school attendence, you may have to free up an assload of time in order to complete your goal.  If not, make sure you set up a plan in which all of your free time is used solely for the purpose of creating your game!  If you can't do that either, make everyone else do it!  You'll be muchly rewarded in the end!

The End.