Stash whatever crumbs they do pay you, and be on the lookout for designers that are both decent and disgruntled.
Maybe you ought to find two co-founders...one that hacks, one that designs. If you're doing a game, you need a lot of design...all of my previous comments, and Harj's comments, about the beauty of a designer that codes or vice versa, are irrelevant when you need a LOT of great design for a long period of time. In fact, you might ought to have two good designers and two good developers. Games are a lot of work. (OK, indie developers do more and more with better libraries and such...so maybe a one or two man show can pull something great together).
BTW-YC has never, to my knowledge, funded a straight game company (Matt Maroon has a fantasy sports gaming business...but it's effectively a US-legal gambling business, which is a whole world away from pure computer gaming).
SocialMoth. Hmmm...I guess it's kind of a game, like Truth or Dare (without the Dare). But it's more a social site.
But, nonetheless, you described a game. The sites you mention are more "fun, kinda like a game" rather than something that anyone would see and say "that's a game".
So, I repeat: YC has never funded a pure game company, to the best of my knowledge. pg has never said they wouldn't, but I've heard many conversations about games at YC events (it's one of those "fun" jobs that everybody in tech wants to do at least once...even us boring enterprise and systems developers...so people talk about building games quite frequently), and the consensus seems to be, "it's gotta be something novel and have real business potential on a small budget", which rules out a large class of games. Maybe mobile games, games tied to social networking (Scrabulous is a nice low-budget success story on Facebook), or marketing in the form of games.
Just some thoughts. Not trying to discourage you. There have been a few very big gaming success stories, and quite a lot of small team success stories in recent years. And with a great demo and presentation, the YC guys might bite.
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Impressive. Too bad I'm already involved in a startup, otherwise I'd be down.
Seems a bit over the top for y combinator. Hackers are usually very humble people (save bill gates / larry ellison types).
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can you help me thanks'
thankyou very much if you make me reply. mkm.dragons@yahoo.com