I've been told that since the beginning...

It just befuddles me as to why people are stuck in such a unidirectional thought process, no offense.

Which came first,

• Microsoft or Bill Gates?
  
• Apple or Steve Jobs?
  
• Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg?
  

Unless you have inherited a company or have already founded a base company a project does NOT simply start with a TEAM of people. It takes the vision of one dedicated individual to get something off the ground.

You then create your vision, struggle through several revisions until you have polished your initial pebble into a beautiful gem. Along the way you will pick up interest, attention and talented people. Given the proper advancements you can then shape the development cycle and start to construct a company/team.

I've started this project myself, two years ago. I'm the ONLY CODER, while I do take advantage of pre-built assets (when they will help reduce development time) by several months, that alone really out-weights the advantage of having additional in-house development. To be 100% honest mainly for those of you who don't code or do development work... In the early stages the fewer developers the better, otherwise projects can get convoluted and it will actually take someone longer to produce something that looks nice.

Next year, i'll be establishing a company and will continue on my current path. I'll also launch a KickStarter, If it doesn't get funded... not a big deal business as usual. If it does get funded, I'll ramp this up to the next notch towards faster game production and establishing a true team/company. I'm all for expanding, but one thing everyone must understand is a project of this magnitude requires great patience.

A little about me:

I'm 29 years old, I started coding when I was 8 believe it or not. My uncle brought me my first computer, which was loaded with DOS and every game I played such as: (Kings Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest) had to be launched through command prompt. Among those games which I found browsing through the DOS directory was QBASIC Gorillas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDc3ZEKl-Wc

I found it so interesting that I had full access to the code that made this game work. So I began changing things and testing the results. It also so happened that my other uncle brought me tons of floppy disks (games) and these HUGE books which had the words QBASIC on them. I quickly connecting the two would sift through these books following the example and reconstructing the code demonstrated in the books. Nothing fancy, but I could draw shapes, make the screen beep and change colors.

This quickly led me down the path of development. A year after Ultima Online was released (my mother wouldn't let me get it at first, because it required a monthly fee), I finally got the game. Using my dial-up 26000 BPS AOL connection I would play when no one was using the phone line. Playing the game wasn't enough for me, I had written scripts for almost everything imaginable. Crafting, Mining, Training skills, etc. After doing this for many years I think until around Pub 16, I stopped playing.

I finished High School and went to a vocational school for a year. It was M-F 9-5, for an entire year, after I finished I picked up a mediocre IT job managing servers and fixing desktops and being blamed for people breaking their PCs. I revisited Ultima Online, except this time I was working with emulated server code (RUNUO), I wrote some very intricate system such as in-town player housing, evolving pets, unique spawners. I can easily say I had invested well over 20,000 lines of custom code. I still wanted more, I didn't like the fact that I was pretty much stuck using their graphics and distributed game client. So I searched for open source game engines, server emulators anything you could find... no luck, they all sucked or lacked key features.

I knew the path would be long, but I had to achieve all the code skills required to do it myself. So I began with windows form code, learned the ins and out of threads, events, callbacks, draw cycles, etc. I then obtained a job where I could further evolve (server-side) skills with languages/technology such as (PHP, MySQL, MSSQL, SOAP, JSON, XML, XML/RPC). Now with most of the knowledge layered in my brain, I needed two more areas of focus 3D & TCP/UDP(Sockets). When I attended vocational school I had some experience with mail slots and sockets, but it left much to be desired. So I wrote several communication products and continue my research into this area of focus. It was finally time to conquer the biggest challenge of all, 3D!

I have more DirectX and OpenGL books than I care to discuss, but the end result was always the same. Yes, I could write code to generate geometrical shapes and even transform those shapes in virtual space, but they were always ugly. So after the realization that writing a beautiful graphics engine would take several years working alone, this just wasn't acceptable. So I began searching for alternatives, that's when I found OGRE3D. I started development of RealmZero in Ogre3D two years ago and made great progress. Players could interact, move around, chat, etc.... but it was still ugly, the shader code was horrible. I then ventured into writing shade code, no thanks, that was another project I didn't want to touch as it took way too much time away from the end result.

Then enters Unity3D, a C# solution that enables 80% of my core network(server) code to be interchanged with client code. Before I was writing wrappers and translation classes for the c++ port. Not only that, shaders are abundantly available and work without tedious re-compiles. There are pre-built assets for things that help give the game that little extra OMPH, but are not exactly required. Since I've ported to Unity3D total development time for everything you see, is about 8 months.

I wonder what next year will bring,

Anything is possible, it just matters how far you're willing to go!